Barriers to Birth Control Remain 43 Years After Griswold

On June 7, 1965, the Supreme Court ruled in Griswold v. Connecticut that married women have a constitutional right of privacy to use birth control. Incredibly, forty-three years later, we are still fighting for access to birth control, and in many cases we are losing this battle. The Bush administration put the nation's largest federal family planning program in the hands of the anti-family planning activist, Dr. Susan Orr. Her appointment symbolizes the Bush Administration's ideological warfare against providing accurate contraceptive education and publicly funded family planning programs. Dr. Orr once equated a mandate for contraception insurance coverage to forcing private employers "to make a choice between serving God and serving...government." While she resigned in May, her policies endure.

It defies logic, science, and public opinion that more than four decades after Griswold, access to contraception for married and unmarried women is still elusive. Only 41 percent of women who depend on publicly funded family planning clinics get the assistance they need from these clinics. And the need for publicly funded family planning services among the nation's poorest women continues to grow. To address this enormous need, the National Council of Jewish Women launched Plan A: NCJW's Campaign for Contraceptive Access on the 2007 anniversary of the Griswold decision. Our Plan A seeks to educate and empower individuals to advocate for women's universal access to contraceptive information and health services. Now, one year later, is a good time to take stock of just how far we all have yet to go in making birth control accessible to all American women.

Fifty percent of all pregnancies are still unintended, as are a staggering 82 percent of teenage pregnancies. Title X, Dr. Orr's program, is the only hope for 17 million women in need of publicly funded family planning services - a figure that rises with the number of uninsured women. Yet in real dollars, Title X funding is 63 percent lower than in 1980. Now at $300 million, it would need $759 million annually to keep pace with need and inflation.

Middle class women are more likely to have access one way or another to contraception, but it's not as easy or affordable as it should be. Even those with health insurance find their health plans still often fail to pay for birth control. Only 27 states require inclusion of the full range of FDA-approved contraceptive drugs and devices if an insurer otherwise covers prescription drugs. Of these, 19 states allow some employers to opt out of such coverage, mostly for religious reasons. Religion won't get you off the hook for paying for workers' compensation or unemployment insurance, but it can exempt you from treating contraception equally with, say, sports injuries.

For young women, women outside major metropolitan areas, and lower income women, it's even more difficult. More than one-third of teenaged girls become pregnant at least once before they turn 20. Poor women are four times more likely to have an unwanted pregnancy, five times as likely to bear a child they didn't intend to have, and more than four times as likely to have an abortion compared to other women. And the situation is not improving. Since 1994, unwanted pregnancies among low-income women have increased by nearly one-third, while rates among higher-income women have decreased by 20 percent.

Access to the full range of contraceptive options is essential to women achieving social, political, and economic equality, to say nothing of its importance to the well-being of children and families. And Americans get it. In fact, 89 percent of voters support government funding for birth control programs. The critical role contraception plays in public health has been widely accepted for the 43 years since Griswold proclaimed that birth control is a constitutionally protected right, yet the federal government has been acting as if they are no more than debatable tenets.

It's time once again to base our nation's family planning policy on the broad consensus Americans have developed and stop imposing an ideological agenda unsupported by facts. Plan A seeks increased funding of Title X for fiscal year 2009 as an important first step, along with federal, state, and local policies that expand access to birth control, not restrict it. Our government's hostility to birth control must end before another Griswold anniversary comes and goes.