Give women improved access to birth control

By Maria Leal

For the past decade, I have been a nurse at Planned Parenthood health centers in Mountain View and East San Jose, where I have seen up close the utter impracticality and sometimes heartbreaking consequences of women being forced by their health insurance plans to get only one package of birth control pills each month rather than a longtime supply.

If that sounds like an exaggeration, consider these typical stories from young women and working mothers who have come through our health centers over the years: A 30-year-old mother with a day job, a night job and limited transportation was not always able to fit in a monthly trip to the pharmacy to pick up her single package of birth control pills. It was an accident waiting to happen.

A mother of disabled children had difficulty making her pill pickup because her children needed special attention, she had no outside child care and she had no time.

A 20-year-old student, whose insurance covered only one pack of pills per 25 days, lost the purse where she kept her pills just five days after she had gotten her prescription filled. She couldn’t afford to pay for another pack without insurance coverage.

The result for two of these women was an unintended pregnancy. I won’t say which ones because it could have been any of them. Missing even just one pill can result in pregnancy, let alone missing three or four.

Even though California justifi- ably prides itself on having much greater access to birth control than many other states, clear evidence has shown that unfair insurance coverage policies for women’s contraception contributes significantly to the rate of unintended pregnancies here.

A bill in the Legislature, SB 999, being sponsored by Sen. Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills, would require private insurers to let women get up to a 12-month advance supply of hormonal birth control, including the pill, the ring and the patch. It’s about time. A report by the California Health Benefits Review Program (CHBRB) estimates that this would decrease the number of unintended pregnancies in California by 15,000, which includes fewer births, fewer miscarriages and 7,000 fewer abortions.

Allowing women to pick up one year’s worth of hormonal birth control at once would also result in a savings of more than $42 million, according to the CHBRB report, because of fewer costs related to unintended pregnancies and long-term negative health outcomes for mothers and children that are associated with unintended pregnancies.

Still, many in the insurance industry object to allowing women to obtain a one-time long-term supply of hormonal birth control for reasons that only they seem to understand.

For women who live in remote areas with limited transportation, or are trying to balance work days with complicated child-care situations, or are taking classes during the day while working at night, it is a genuine hardship to make that monthly run to the pharmacy.

Removing this onerous restriction from health insurance plans would mean more women could have the control to plan their families, enabling them to more easily complete their education or advance in their careers and have more earning power to support themselves and their families in years to come.

I urge the Legislature to pass this bill on behalf of all the women who have come through our health centers and for thousands more like them.