This is choice, too
Ne hundred years and a handful of days ago, activists came to Albany to discuss a proposal that was quite radical at the time: to allow doctors to provide women with information on birth control.
OThe effort, led by figures like Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, was couched in conditions intended to try to defuse moral objections. They included a requirement that the women given such information be ill or poor and so, presumably, in need of help in avoiding an unplanned pregnancy.
Albany Mayor William Hackett ordered the Jan. 23, 1923, meeting of the New York State Birth Control Association at the Hotel Ten Eyck closed to the general public in the interests of “public decency and public welfare.”
Quaint as this may seem a century later, the battle over birth control continues to this day, even in an ostensibly progressive state like New York. The particulars may have changed, but the stakes are no less high in a state in which more than 63,000 abortions were performed in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Regardless of your view on abortion, both sides, we would think, would agree on the value of reducing the need for them.
Yet here we are, in 2023, still dealing with limited access to birth control in New York. In one of the latest incarnations of this debate, the question is who is allowed to prescribe it.
A bill in the state Legislature would expand the list to include pharmacists, which would dramatically increase the number of professionals legally able to prescribe certain forms of Fda-approved contraceptives. As the Times Union’s Rachel Silberstein reports, the proposed measure — similar to laws in 20 other states — would add 13,000 pharmacists to the current 16,000 health care professionals now able to prescribe birth control. That’s a substantial expansion in a state in which an estimated 1.2 million people lack ample access to health centers that prescribe and distribute contraceptives to those who qualify for public health assistance. Those areas include many rural parts of upstate and western New York.
The lack of health centers is just one dimension of the challenge people face in obtaining contraceptives. Another is the increasing control of hospitals and medical practices under entities connected to the Catholic Church, such as the St. Peter’s Health Partners network in this region, which restrict doctors from performing elective birth control procedures or providing contraception. As St. Peter’s Health Partners expands — it may soon be the only hospital provider in Schenectady and Troy — access to abortion is also shrinking, making the need for better access to birth control all the more urgent.
Reproductive choice is not just about abortion rights. It’s about the ability of women and men to decide if and when they want to have a child. The more access to contraception, and information about it, the more they will be able to make that choice as they see fit.