The Economy Cant Grow Without Birth Control
I just do not understand why trump put in this new rule. it is cruel. just plain cruel
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/29/opinion/economy-birth-control.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region®ion=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region
The Economy Cant Grow Without Birth Control
Oct 29, 2017
Bryce Covert
This month, 41 Democrats introduced a bill with a simple mission: It would undo the Trump administrations recent change to the Affordable Care Act that paves the way for virtually any employer to deny its employees access to contraception without a co-payment. Before President Trumps new guidance, the law required nearly all employers to offer workers health insurance plans that include contraception without cost. But the new rules, effective immediately after the announcement, allow any employer to request that the government let it opt out based on religious or moral objections.
In a statement on the bill, Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, said that birth control is about being healthy and financially secure.
Indeed, while access to contraception is clearly about womens health, it also profoundly affects the economy.........................................
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For individual women, this is certainly about their wallets. The Affordable Care Acts requirement that health insurance offer birth control without cost-sharing has resulted in an estimated 57.6 million American women getting contraception without a co-payment. That has saved them a huge amount of money: $1.4 billion in 2013 alone.
The ability to opt out of offering no-cost contraception, then, is not just about religious objections. Obamacare lifted an enormous financial burden that women alone had to bear. Before the A.C.A., 85 percent of health insurance plans at large companies offered contraceptive coverage, but most required at least a co-payment. Individual women paid about $250 a year. Now the president has given insurance companies a way out of taking on that burden.
The Trump administration has tried to reassure women that they can still get inexpensive birth control, asserting that many forms of contraception are available for around $50 a month. Even if thats the case, $50 a month $600 a year is no small item in many peoples budgets, particularly for the women who make up a majority of low-wage workers. As the Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has pointed out, the cost of an intrauterine device, one of the most effective forms of contraception, is about the same as a months minimum-wage pay.
This doesnt just matter to individual women. Consumer spending makes up about 70 percent of all economic growth, and women are responsible for an outsize portion of that spending. Billions of dollars less a year in their pockets means billions of dollars less that they could spend on goods other than birth control, dampening their ability to support businesses and the economy.
But a larger economic impact of reconstructing a cost barrier to contraception is likely to be felt throughout the entire work force. High birth rates have historically lowered womens ability to get and keep paid work, which isnt so hard to understand holding down a job becomes a lot more difficult when it has to be balanced with pregnancies and raising children. Thats particularly true if women arent even in control of when they become pregnant.
On the other hand, a raft of evidence has definitively found that when women gained greater access to the pill in the late 1960s and early 70s, they were able to delay marriage and childbirth and invest in careers through education, job training and staying in paid work.................................
Me.
(35,454 posts)Too many simply cannot wrap their heads around the fact that reproductive rights and economics go hand in hand and are dependant upon each other.
Pantagruel
(2,580 posts)would have a HUGE societal and dollar cost. Think about a million "unwanted" children entering the U.S. system yearly.
Me.
(35,454 posts)Once they're born.
brer cat
(24,615 posts)Wealthy women will always have access to birth control and abortion as well as safe child care options; this is pure piss-on-the-poor. And for those who believe correcting economic injustice will trickle down into social justice, a minimum wage increase doesn't provide cover when an unexpected baby arrives to a single mother/family already in poverty who don't have access to affordable child care. Someone is going to stay home with baby and it won't be on paid maternity/family leave.