Women are sending Donald Trump bills for their birth control in protest
Donald Trump's administration recently rolled back federal rules that keep contraception co-pay free for 62.4 million women, so a coalition of reproductive rights organizations are taking their fight straight to the president.
This week, the Keep Birth Control Copay Free campaign launched an online tool inviting people to submit an invoice to the billionaire president for the annual amount of their contraception.
But the tool, which created more than 15,000 invoices in the 24 hours after its launch, is meant to generate more than just a heaping dose of outrage.
Both Trump and the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the federal rules on copay-free birth control, receive a copy of the invoice. Each bill is also submitted to the Federal Register as an official comment opposing the proposed rule. The comment period lasts until Dec. 5.
The administration's rule went into effect immediately earlier this month. It allows any public or private employer to deny employees coverage of FDA-approved contraception if they cite moral or religious objections.
So workers who once received copay-free birth control may now have to pay the partial or full out-of-pocket cost. That rule reverses an Obama-era policy that required employers to cover birth control, but made also accommodations for religious organizations.
Full coverage helped many people who needed birth control finally get consistent access to it. A 2010 survey commissioned by the Planned Parenthood Action Fund found that one in three female voters had difficulty affording birth control at some point in their lives.
The campaign's invoices include the estimated annual cost for oral an IUD, implant, shot, patch, ring, as well as oral contraceptives and sterilization. Without copay-free birth control, women stand to spend hundreds of dollars a year to prevent pregnancy -- that may sound small, but it can make a real difference in the lives of low-income women especially. An IUD, which can last for several years, would cost an estimated $1,111.
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The invoices also come with some real-talk fine print about the less obvious costs of limited access to affordable contraception: "**Does not include the societal costs of lost wages, limited educational opportunities, lower earning power and impact to family incomes due to unintended pregnancies."
While it's unlikely that the Trump administration will reverse its decision, the invoice generator does give people a clever way to protest the move while reminding the public that copay-free birth control is essential for ensuring women's economic and personal freedom.
Topics Activism Gender Health Social Good Donald Trump
Rebecca Ruiz is a Senior Reporter at Mashable. She frequently covers mental health, digital culture, and technology. Her areas of expertise include suicide prevention, screen use and mental health, parenting, youth well-being, and meditation and mindfulness. Rebecca's experience prior to Mashable includes working as a staff writer, reporter, and editor at NBC News Digital and as a staff writer at Forbes. Rebecca has a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and a masters degree from U.C. Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.
