After learning that a record number of anti-choice laws were passed in the first half of 2011, we were ready for some good news.
Now, thanks to an independent committee of medical and health experts charged with recommending how health care reform should consider women’s preventive health, we have something to cheer. If the Department of Health and Human Services accepts the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) findings, released last Wednesday, women may soon have far greater access to family planning and a range of services intended to help keep women—and their families and communities—healthy.
Among the most groundbreaking—and contentious—of the committee’s evidence-based suggestions is that insurance companies eliminate co-pays and deductibles for contraception, paving the way for millions of women to access the complete range of FDA-approved methods. Once law, this would mark an enormous milestone in the women’s reproductive health movement, which has long sought to remove the barrier of cost to family planning.
