Reproductive Justice News Roundup: Are Things Still Terrible? Yes, Yes They Are

I hadn’t written a post in a while, so I thought that maybe all the anti-reproductive rights and bodily autonomy problems we have had cleared up.  Turns out I was wrong! 

Don’t Get Too Excited About Texas: Yes, it’s true that District Court Judge Yeakel overturned a component of Texas’s omnibus bill that would have closed several clinics yesterday. However, he did the same thing last year, but was overruled by the ultra-conservative Fifth Circuit. Expect to see the number of abortion providers in Texas dwindle even further. [Texas Tribune]

California Passes “Yes Means Yes” Bill for Campus Sexual Assault: The bill states that lack of resistance does not indicate consent. If Governor Jerry Brown signs it into law, it will make it easier for colleges to address issues of sexual assault, especially in cases in which students feel uncomfortable going to the police. Let’s hope that a positive model of sexual consent becomes the norm in law and in sexual health education. More of this, please! [Think Progress]

In Local News, Massachusetts Also Terrible Sometimes: A District Court judge ruled that a Western Massachusetts prison’s policy of male guards videotaping female strip searches is unconstitutional. Because women prisoners experience especially high rates of sexual violence from their guards and prisons are disproportionately African-American, the guards’ freedom to humiliate and harass prisoners is an issue of race, gender, and poverty that we should all be deeply concerned about. I’m not optimistic that this ruling will do much to change the system, but it is a start. [Mass Live]

In More Terrible News, Feticide Laws Harm Women: An Indiana woman faces up to 50 years in prison after delivering a possible stillbirth at home. She took drugs to induce an abortion at 28 weeks but had severe bleeding and went to the hospital. She could go to jail whether or not the fetus was already dead when it was delivered. Laws that penalize pregnant women prevent them from seeking care, and it’s not a coincidence that Indiana has focused on charging women of color. [Bustle]

I Wish This Guy Had a Chance of Winning: Arizona congressional candidate James Woods responded to pro-life haters by sending them condoms with the phrase “prevent abortion” on the wrappers. This guy is great. Also he’d be the first blind congressman in nearly 100 years (and the first open atheist ever)! By the way, he’s absolutely right that birth control and sex ed do way more to prevent abortion than hateful rhetoric and anti-abortion access laws. [Jezebel]

WELP now I’m depressed, so here’s a hilarious flowchart from Playboy, of all places.

 

 

 

The Rocky Path to Birth Control

Contraception coverage has turned into an increasingly complex Rube Goldberg machine.

Whatever they may say, conservative Christians who oppose the contraception mandate are not ultimately arguing for freedom of religion. They don’t have a problem with IUDs when they benefit their retirement plans. What they really care about it preventing women from accessing birth control. They want to control our bodies, especially the bodies of poor women who could never afford to pay for many kinds of birth control out of pocket. 

First, Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, which included a provision requiring insurance plans to cover preventive care without any copay. The Department of Health and Human Services later announced that this provision included birth control.

There was a Republican temper tantrum, but the law was more or less upheld in court.

Next, some religious (read: Christian) nonprofits argued that they should not have to pay for insurance plans that included birth control because birth control went against the religious beliefs of the mission of the organizations. Obama sighed, rolled up his sleeves all sexily, and created a loophole: nonprofits with religious missions could tell their insurance companies that they did not want to provide birth control coverage. The insurance companies would then have to provide birth control coverage to the female employees of those nonprofits separately.

From here, two cases have taken the religious exemption from “irritating, but ultimately fine” to “a complete waste of time and taxpayer money, and also, misogyny.” The cases are Hobby Lobby, which I’ve ranted about extensively here, and Wheaton College v. Burwell. In essence, the Supreme Court first declared that even for-profit corporations can be people who have religious freedom, and therefore must be granted the same exemption as religious nonprofits. They then closed the loophole earlier described, leaving women no real way to access no-copay birth control. (Note that they officially only closed the loophole temporarily; they haven’t decided the Wheaton case yet—just issued an injunction.)

The Obama administration has enacted a new loophole, which will require companies to tell the government, rather than the insurance companies, that they have a religious opposition to birth control. The government will then tell the insurance companies, which will provide birth control coverage directly to employees and their families, rather than doing so through the employers’ plans.

However, the ultimate issue remains: these conservative men don’t want women to be able to access cheap birth control through any means. It doesn’t matter to them whether their own insurance plans pay for it or if they have to fill out a form. Anything they do, in their eyes, results in women’s greater reproductive freedom, and that is unacceptable to them. The Supreme Court now has to answer this question: do women have reproductive autonomy? Do we have the right to birth control? The ball is in their court.