Hi, folks. As Julie mentioned in her intro post, I’ll be guest blogging at Repo Repro this summer while she masters the bar exam. A little about me: I’m headed into my second year at UC Davis School of Law (King Hall) and will be co-chairing my LSRJ chapter for the 2008-2009 academic year. I’m also a news junkie, and blogging is one of the things I do for fun (yeah, huge nerd here) so I’m thrilled to have an opportunity to apply those dubious talents for a good cause. Thanks for reading!

–Erin Simonitch

Small changes can make a big difference.

It’s a principle that helps sustain and hearten those of us committed to social justice. Without it, the magnitude of the work would overwhelm us. But it’s a double-edged sword, because the principle operates whether the change is for better or for worse. So it’s also why law schools drill “baby lawyers” to obsess over details and precise wording. Use the wrong language in a contract agreement, leave out an important detail, fail to thoroughly define your terms, and sooner or later the consequences will explode into thousands of dollars of unnecessary expenses, while you’re stuck in court debating the meaning of the word “chicken.” (As my property professor likes to point out, litigators exist to clean up other lawyers’ messes.)

Members of Congress demonstrated their failure to understand this concept when they passed the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act, making a small change in federal Medicaid law that has a big impact on young women’s access to contraceptives. Before the Act’s passage, pharmaceutical companies could and did offer hormonal contraceptives at significant discounts. But in drafting the new rules for calculating Medicaid rebates, lawmakers left out a provision that would have preserved those discounts for campus health centers. Now, pharm companies must sell contraceptives to clinics at higher prices or suffer a financial penalty–a “business decision” that’s all too easily made by corporations for whom the bottom line is, well, the bottom line.

The result, of course, is that students pay the price. Contraceptive costs have risen dramatically on college and university campuses, sometimes as much as 500%.

So law students, listen up–this means you, too, perhaps even more than undergraduates who are still young enough to piggyback on their parents’ insurance plans, unless you have enough outside financial resources to buy into private health care yourself. (Don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t have that kind of cash.)

Paying a few extra bucks for a prescription may not seem like such a big deal to our well-compensated Congresscritters. But in these days of skyrocketing fees for higher education and nationwide economic woes, students feel the pinch of limited budgets more than ever. When everything from fuel to food is suddenly more expensive, we have to make hard choices–unless, of course, we are independently wealthy, or have a supportive family in a happier tax bracket. But no one should have to choose between groceries or other necessities and birth control.

Because students tend to be young, unmarried, and yes, sexually active, we are particularly vulnerable to the consequences of limited contraceptive access. Unintended pregnancies are a major cause of college dropouts among women students. If women start deciding that birth control is just too expensive to take regularly, it could seriously impact their education and advancement in the workforce. While there are certainly other methods of contraception, hormonal birth control is crucial because it is female-initiated and highly effective. Women who aren’t comfortable asking their partner to use a condom may skip b. c. completely or resort to Plan B, the “morning-after pill,” which is cheaper than traditional birth control if used episodically but which was never intended to be Plan A. (Women who use Plan B as a substitute for a daily pill also miss out on the annual physical exams required to get a birth control prescription.)

But the costs extend beyond those faced by individual students. Congress itself has found that every public dollar spent on contraceptives saves our government three dollars in pregnancy-related health care. An increase in the number of unintended pregnancies also inevitably means an increase in abortions, which again cost health providers and insurers far more than does contraception.

With all that said, it seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it? Especially when you consider that drug companies, not the government, were the ones providing the discounts to campus health clinics–and even more so when you realize that the language required to undo the damage would fit on a Post-it note. It’s a small change that will do a great deal of good. But it’s been over two years now–why hasn’t Congress fixed its mistake?

In fact, some members have tried to do just that, only to find their proposals blocked or dropped (most recently, because of pressure from the White House.) It seems that opposition to contraception–let alone contraception for young, unmarried women–still remains strong in Washington. Despite the clear policy and budget benefits of providing affordable birth control to all women, despite the fact that less accessible contraception leads, logically, to more abortions, this opposition throws the real moral agenda behind abstinence-only and anti-choice campaigns into sharp relief. It’s about sex: who gets to have it, who controls it, what its purpose is, and who gets punished for it. And by extension, it’s also about women’s roles in society: setting a high premium on reproductive and sexual autonomy limits young women’s options across the board.

Small change adds up. Unfortunately, so do contraceptive costs under the Deficit Reduction Act. And while the cost in terms of students’ finances is bad enough, it’s only compounded by the potential cost to our reproductive freedom and to our educational and employment equality.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 10:39 pm and is filed under sexuality, politics, law, education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.