Even after 8 decades, old arguments about family planning persist

While combing through the archives recently, I came across some handwritten notes from the annual meeting of the Minnesota Birth Control League, the forerunner of Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota.

The notes read: "The time is fast approaching when B.C. [birth control] will no longer be considered a controversial subject."

The year was 1933. In the nearly eight decades since the state's pioneers in women's health expressed their certainty of "better and happier human living," everything has changed and nothing has changed.

The women (including Dorothy Atkinson, Eleanor Lawler Pillsbury, Elizabeth Heffelfinger and others) would be happy to see that in 2010, emergency contraception is available to rape and incest victims in hospital emergency rooms across the state. They would be most impressed with scientific advances in the 50 years since "the pill" hit the market and the wide variety of contraceptive options now available to women. They would be completely vindicated by the fact that the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has listed "family planning" as among the 10 Great Public Health Achievements of the 20th century.

And they would be utterly dismayed but probably not all that surprised to find that affordability and access still pose enormous barriers to women, and that familiar adversaries are still hard at work generating as much controversy as possible over the issue of birth control.

In the next year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will be considering whether birth control should be included in the preventive care benefits covered at no cost for women. For a nation focused on preventive care, this issue should be a no-brainer:

On average, a woman spends 30 years of her life trying to avoid getting pregnant. That's a lot of years of using birth control, and a lot of money out of pocket.

Co-pays for birth control pills typically range between $15 and $50 per month, and for other methods, such as IUDs, co-pays and other out-of-pocket expenses can reach into the hundreds of dollars.

More than one-third of American women have struggled with the cost of prescription birth control at some point in their lives, and as a result, have used birth control inconsistently.

Right now, half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended. If we are serious about reducing the unacceptably high rate of unintended pregnancies in this country, we need to take practical steps to increase access to affordable birth control.

The women's health pioneers of Minnesota were ridiculed by church and even medical authorities. "Birth control is a fetish of old maids," a University of Minnesota gynecologist told one of the local papers in 1929.

It would shock these women to see that their adversaries' thought processes have not evolved much since then. At least the same is not true of forward-thinking Americans, 71 percent of whom say prescription birth control should be covered without any out-of-pocket costs.

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Sarah Stoesz is president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota.

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