Birth control is not controversial: 99 percent of sexually active women use it at some point in their lives.1
People use birth control for all sorts of reasons, including to avoid getting pregnant before they are ready. Making birth control accessible and affordable is the quickest way to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies.
At NARAL Pro-Choice South Dakota, we’re fighting to make sure everyone has access to affordable birth control that is right for them—no matter where they live, where they work or how much money they make—so they can control they own future.
Laws promoting insurance coverage of contraception are crucial to ensuring comprehensive reproductive healthcare. The Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive-coverage policy ensured that the full range of birth control options would be covered with no copay. Although this policy is in danger at the federal level, some states also have passed laws ensuring this benefit. Other states have passed laws requiring that insurers cover a year’s supply of contraception dispensed at once.
Unfortunately, anti-choice extremists who are opposed to birth control for ideological reasons have worked to restrict access to contraception. Employers who want to deny their employees coverage of contraception won at the Supreme Court in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. Some states have enacted laws allowing some individuals and companies to refuse to provide or cover contraception.
And at the federal and state levels, anti-choice legislators have supported “personhood measures” that would not only make abortion illegal but also ban many forms of birth control, as well as in vitro fertilization.
Policies that restrict access to contraception make birth control less effective and can lead to unplanned pregnancies.
Ensuring Birth Control Access
Find out how we’re working toward a future where everyone who needs affordable contraception can get it.
1 Guttmacher Institute, Contraceptive Use in the United States