Left balks at GOP proposal to offer over-the-counter birth control, for some reason

A group of Republican senators is supporting a bill that would make over-the-counter birth control mandatory, while preserving access to birth control for those who obtain it through their insurers.

Surprisingly, though, left-leaning groups like Planned Parenthood hate the idea.

The GOP bill, sponsored by Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), reportedly would compel pharmaceutical companies that produce oral contraceptives to apply to the FDA for permission to make their products available without a prescription, and would simultaneously abolish the Obamacare provision that currently prevents enrollees from using their health spending account funds to buy non-prescription medication.

In other words, Gardner’s bill would allow customers to buy birth control simply by visiting a store, and it would allow people covered under an Obamacare plan to pay for it using funds accrued to their health savings plans.

Sounds like a liberating proposition, eh? Maybe — but not if you’re dead-set against the GOP and incapable of agreeing with them, even when they’re agreeing with you.

The prospect of all that easy access to contraception “hasn’t stopped some from flipping out about the bill,” Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown observes:

Jezebel blogger Stassa Edwards admits that “allowing [the pill] to be sold OTC would be a sizeable step in” the direction of expanding access. But “it seems like Gardner and Ayotte’s proposal is a sneaky way to effectively end Obamacare’s mandatory contraception coverage,” she warns. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) has previously advocated for OTC oral contraception. But ACOG President Mark S. DeFrancesco cautioned against Gardner and Ayotte’s bill, stating that “instead of improving access, this bill would actually make more women have to pay for their birth control, and for some women, the cost would be prohibitive.

Then there’s Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards, who contorts the group’s well-known stance on access to contraceptives by calling the bill a “sham and an insult to women” that “would give women fewer birth control options and force women to pay twice for their birth control.”

So this bill, for the left, is really a Trojan (apologies if you detect a pun) horse attempt at subverting Obamacare — not an expansion on an Obamacare provision that accomplishes something for which the president himself has advocated repeatedly (but never managed to accomplish).

“To suggest that making birth control pills available for purchase in more places and with less restrictions is to ‘give women fewer birth control options” insults the English language,” Reason argues:

The fact that one pill manufacturer applies for over-the-counter status wouldn’t mean all birth control pill manufacturers would then have to be sold so; there could and likely would still be prescription-only oral contraceptives. Besides, myriad other birth control methods — from hormonal implants to the (much longer-acting and more effective than the pill) IUD — would still be prescription only, and hence still ‘free’ under the contraception mandate. There’s also no reason to think the contraception mandate couldn’t be stretched to require coverage for over-the-counter birth control also.

… [C]ritics like Richards and Edwards are cool with keeping birth control restricted under the mere possibility that it might undermine the contraception mandate — though, once more, there’s no reason why it has to. Gardner and Ayotte’s bill, from what we know about it, would simply make the process for switching birth control brands from prescription to over-the-counter status easier … [and] let women buy this birth control with funds from a health, medical, or flexible savings account.

Much will be cleared up when the full text of the bill is made available — which, unlike Obamacare itself, will probably happen before it actually passes.

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