Their new proposals are unnecessary, unscientific, and harmful to conscience rights.
Their new proposals are unnecessary, unscientific, and harmful to conscience rights.
O n Wednesday, Senator Chuck Schumer plans to bring the Right to Contraception Act to a vote in the Senate. If passed, the bill would create a “statutory right” to contraception.
Concerningly, this act would tie the hands of medical professionals who wish to treat patients based on their medical expertise by requiring them to prescribe contraception at the patient’s request. Such a regime created by the federal government would enforce a transactional approach to medical care, where medical professionals have little say in the drugs they prescribe for their patients. The bill would also eliminate religious protections for doctors and force them to provide contraception in violation of their religious beliefs.
This is yet another step in the Left’s slow march to destroy medical professionals’ right to conscientious objection, and another push to ignore the harms that birth control has done to women’s health and their ability to access the restorative reproductive care they deserve.
While it is expected that the Right to Contraception Act will likely be blocked, bringing it to the floor of the Senate is a messaging strategy for Democrats who wish to promote their reproductive-rights agenda during the election season.
In another effort to promote their agenda, a group of Senate Democrats introduced the Access to Birth Control Act in early May. This bill would require pharmacies to “maintain compliance” with sweeping conditions for providing contraception to customers seeking these drugs. Not only could this bill create incredible burdens on pharmacies, but the text seems to suggest prioritizing access to contraception over other medications, many of which are lifesaving and imperative for the health and well-being of their customers. The bill also touts the benefits of contraception without mentioning any of the myriad risks or harms associated with the drugs.
Both bills claim that contraception is a “safe” form of health care. The Right to Contraception Act goes so far as to call it “essential.” These claims are simply not true. The risks and harms associated with these drugs are numerous.
Hormonal contraceptives contain synthetic versions of the hormones estrogen and progesterone. These hormones shut down a woman’s menstrual cycle — and, with it, her fertility — for as long as she takes the drug. And because many cells across the body have receptors for these hormones, birth control affects a woman’s entire body. That is why it can cause such disparate risks and side effects as stomach upset, headaches, and loss of libido on the milder side of things, and blood clots and breast and cervical cancers on the rarer but far more serious side. Other side effects that are often downplayed, perhaps because the mechanisms behind them are not well understood, include anxiety, depression, autoimmune disease, weight gain, and more.
To bolster its claim that hormonal contraceptives are “essential health care,” the Right to Contraception Act states, “Contraceptives are highly effective in preventing and treating a wide array of medical conditions.” It’s true contraception can suppress the symptoms of certain reproductive conditions such as endometriosis, polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), and adenomyosis, but contraception does nothing whatsoever to treat the underlying disease. Even more concerning in the case of endometriosis, it’s possible that hormonal birth control may actually make the disease worse. And while it’s also true that hormonal contraceptives have a small preventative effect on some cancers (such as ovarian cancer), those benefits are arguably outweighed by their contribution to more prevalent cancer risks, in particular, breast cancer.
The long-standing, knee-jerk use of birth control to address many women’s health concerns has arguably led to our current reality, in which women’s reproductive-health conditions are largely ignored and have gone undiagnosed and untreated for so many. For example, endometriosis, which is as common as diabetes, can take, on average, over ten years to diagnose. Endometriosis, along with PCOS and adenomyosis, is one of the leading causes of infertility in the United States. Yet these diseases often remain indefinitely unaddressed precisely because they have simply been “Band-Aided over” by contraception.
At the end of the day, expanding “access to contraceptives” is simply unnecessary. Contraceptives are some of the easiest drugs to obtain for little to no cost — and, lest we forget, one form of hormonal contraception is now available over the counter, with others likely to follow.
Instead of wasting their time and taxpayers’ money on empty political messaging bills such as the Right to Contraception Act and the Access to Birth Control Act, members of Congress should find ways to promote restorative reproductive medicine that can treat the “medical conditions” that contraception masks, improving health and fertility in the process. Restorative reproductive medicine, a simpler diet, and lifestyle changes, along with hormonal corrections or surgeries (where necessary), can improve or treat the underlying causes of many of the reproductive conditions and diseases that currently contribute to our skyrocketing rates of infertility.
In other words, Congress’s efforts to expand access to birth control ignore the evident risks and harms associated with contraception. Furthermore, the bills misleadingly disseminate the message that contraception can improve women’s health in a way that the science does not bear out.
Both the Right to Contraception Act and the recently introduced Access to Birth Control Act will do nothing to improve women’s health. They will only serve to limit women from receiving the care they need from medical professionals and pharmacists who deserve to practice their profession without coercion from the government and in line with their conscience and religious beliefs.
Natalie Dodson is a policy analyst with the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s HHS Accountability Project.
Grace Emily Stark holds a master’s degree in bioethics and health policy from Loyola Chicago and is the editor in chief of Natural Womanhood, “The Magazine of Fertility Awareness and Women’s Health.”