AOC wants birth control to be over-the-counter; now she just needs to get her own party on board

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has a great, if not novel idea.

The reasons to make oral contraceptives over-the-counter are many and bipartisan. That’s why Republicans have supported it in recent years. Unfortunately, Democrats have not.

For starters, it would likely slash the list cost of the drug, making it more accessible to uninsured women. It would remove the barrier to access posited by requiring women to make a doctor’s appointment and pay a copay to obtain a prescription. For another thing, easing access to birth control is directly correlated with reduced abortion rates, something Americans on both sides of the political aisle surely want.

Republicans have a bill in the Senate that would not only allow women to purchase oral contraceptives without a prescription, but it would also let them use their tax-free health savings accounts to pay for it. If only AOC could get her party to stop obstructing it!

Republicans began to back moving oral contraceptives to over-the-counter status nearly a decade ago. Former Louisiana governor and GOP presidential candidate Bobby Jindal endorsed the proposal in 2012, and a year later, then-Virginia GOP congressional candidate Barbara Comstock attempted to appeal to President Barack Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services to move contraceptives to OTC status. Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo. — who co-sponsored the aforementioned bill — endorsed making birth control OTC as he ran for office in 2014, igniting a wave of fellow Republicans to back the push. Since then, Republicans have repeatedly pushed bills which would expedite the FDA’s review to make the drug over-the-counter, a move endorsed by the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the American Medical Association.

But Democrats have continued to oppose it. Why? Because of Planned Parenthood. The Planned Parenthood Action Fund’s first ad buy of 2014 specifically targeted Republicans for endorsing over-the-counter birth control, and then Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards claimed Republican proposals on the issue would “push women back to the 1950s.”

Why this ridiculous rhetoric? At heart, it’s just about greed. If women (especially uninsured and low-income women) are suddenly able to obtain cheap birth control on demand from their local CVS, they won’t have to rely on Planned Parenthood, whose annual $60 million in Title X funding could hang in the balance. It wouldn’t be good for the group’s foot traffic, either.

Planned Parenthood would also lose the statistical basis for maintaining its disingenuous claim that that abortions are a vanishingly small (just 3%!) part of what the organization does.

It doesn’t have to be like this. AOC managed to get more than a hundred Democrats in Congress to co-sponsor the Green New Deal, including six senators running for president. So she has power. And I mean it in earnest when I say that I hope AOC uses those powers for good and brings Democrats around to voting Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, and Gardner’s bill into law.