The Coming Fight Over Paying for the Pill

Just when you thought we were finally done with the right-wing
freakout masquerading as a national healthcare debate, we may be in for
another culture war. This time, the "controversy" would be less about
whether your tax dollars will be lavished on evil abortion doctors, but, remarkably, whether helping women prevent unwanted pregnancy is a good thing.

For half a century, one little pill has given women unprecedented
power over their reproductive destinies, and in turn reshaped their
economic and educational opportunities. Not surprisingly, that doesn't
sit well with policymakers who long for simpler times, when baby-making
was the only full-time job that mattered for half the population. Now,
advocates for reproductive rights are bracing for a battle with social conservatives as they push to make health insurers offer contraceptives for free.

Currently, many plans don't provide comprehensive coverage
for the pill or other forms of contraception, forcing women to pay as
much as $50 per month in order to avoid unintended pregnancy. Not only
does this undermine the goals of family planning and preventive
health--which, as Monica Potts points out, even abortion foes should support--it marginalizes the health needs of women and exacerbates the economic gender gap.

Yet one thread that hasn't been highlighted in the feminist blogosphere is that safe contraception, like abortion, is an especially fraught issue for women of color, whose choices are often further limited by racial and economic barriers. Indeed, the reproductive justice movement evolved out of a long struggle to develop a race-conscious feminist analysis of gender, family, community and motherhood.

As activist and academic Dorothy Roberts wrote in 2000,
the pill was a watershed for all women, but Black women in particular
came to see it as a tool for strengthening their power of choice:

For nearly a century, black women have found themselves at
the center of controversies about birth control's role in the struggle
for racial and sexual equality. They have battled not only men--white
and black--who discounted the importance of women's bodily autonomy,
but also white women who discounted the significance of racism. The
dominant women's movement has focused myopically on abortion rights at
the expense of other aspects of reproductive freedom, including the
right to bear children, and has misunderstood criticism of coercive
birth control policies. Attending to black women's perspective on the
pill and other contraceptives can help to transform the movement for
reproductive freedom. It can help us understand that there is nothing
contradictory about advocating women's freedom to use birth control
while opposing abusive birth control practices. Social justice requires
both equal access to safe, user-controlled contraceptives and an end to
the use of birth control as a means of population control.

At a time when Black women were regularly shamed and dehumanized by
racist stereotypes about so-called welfare mothers and Black fertility,
a medical innovation that could liberate sex from procreation was a
major step toward realizing the full spectrum of human rights. The
fight for health sovereignty continues today, and women of color have
more at stake than ever in protecting the reproductive freedom they
helped define.