CVS Pharmacy found itself at the center of the Left’s ire this week when it announced its plans to cut reimbursement rates for customers who order prescriptions, including contraceptives such as birth control, through mail delivery.
Prescriptions and contraceptives would still be available to those who subscribe to mail delivery, but at a higher cost. Ilyse Hogue, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, said these higher costs will limit access and put medication “potentially out of reach for tens of thousands of women who for many reasons cannot get to the pharmacy every month.”
Thread: Learned this morning that CVS Caremark is cutting reimbursement rates for mail order birth control pills, making it more expensive and potentially out of reach for tens of thousands of women who for many reasons cannot get to the pharmacy every month. #CVSDeniesCare
— ilyse hogue (@ilyseh) August 15, 2019
There is a solution out there and believe it or not, the religious Right isn’t blocking the effort. Pro-choice Democrats are.
Republicans reintroduced a bill earlier this year that would fast-track the approval process to list hormonal birth control as an over the counter drug rather than a prescription, only to face opposition from … Planned Parenthood. The abortion giant opposes easy access to contraceptives. Democrats were all too eager to fall in line.
How is this? The reasoning is pretty cynical. Pro-choice organizations don’t lose anything by speaking out against this Handmaid’s Tale scenario that they describe, but they would suffer heavy financial losses if their rhetoric became actual legislation. Think about it: Planned Parenthood brings in about $1.7 billion in revenue every year, including grants to distribute contraception. Contraception makes up about 27% of the services it provides, according to its latest financial report. And every woman who takes her business directly to CVS or other over-the-counter pharmacies is one less potential client coming through the doors at Planned Parenthood.
So CVS gets this slap on the wrist from the abortion industry essentially asking, “How could you?” But it’s coming from the same pro-choice movement that lobbies against the very thing it claims to support.
I understand that some religious pro-lifers oppose contraceptives for unrelated reasons, even if they’re not abortifacients. But there are abundant reasons for pro-lifers to support them. The fewer unwanted pregnancies, the fewer abortions. One study that the Washington Examiner‘s Tiana Lowe cites is by the University of California, San Francisco’s Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health, which found that over the counter access to oral, hormonal contraceptives could decrease the nation’s unintended pregnancy rate by anywhere from 7% to 25%. And according to a 2017 Kaiser Family Foundation survey, three-quarters of women across the political spectrum support over-the-counter access to birth control. This is an easy, necessary step that pro-lifers should be eager to support.
Of course, over-the-counter contraception is not a permanent fix. No amount of contraceptives will fix a culture that doesn’t value family, love, or life. But it could be a short term solution that helps reduce the number of innocent lives lost. And in this debate, it gives pro-lifers an opportunity to prove that perhaps the pro-choice movement isn’t about preserving the right to choose after all.
