Panel says recommendation to provide birth control coverage without co-pay is ‘evidenced based’

The Institute of Medicine’s recent recommendation to the U.S. Department of Health to include birth control services in a list of preventive services for women has incited controversy among anti-abortion rights advocates where there should not be, members of the IOM panel said at a National Press Club briefing Wednesday.

“Our eye was on evidence,” said Dr. Linda Rosenstock, dean of the School of Public Health at the University of California-Los Angeles and chair of the IOM Committee on Preventive Services for Women, in response to recent criticism from anti-abortion rights groups that requiring all health-insurance plans to cover birth control and emergency contraception attacks consumers’ conscience rights.

Rosenstock said the 50 percent rate of unintended pregnancy in America is one of the highest in the developed world. That statistic, coupled with health risks for mother and baby if the pregnancy is unplanned (IOM found that babies were born healthier if they were born at least a year after older siblings) informed the committee’s recommendation regarding birth control services, which includes counseling of the different methods of birth control available.

Another IOM committee member, Dr. Paula Johnson, who is chief of the Division of Women’s Health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, noted that different contraceptive methods have adverse effects on different populations of women. It is important, she said, for women to learn about the full range of available methods approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

IOM is recommending HHS to require all insurance plans not only to cover all FDA-approved birth control methods available but to eliminate shared consumer costs, or co-pay.

“As someone who has worked on women’s rights for nearly 30 years, I can say that today’s news marks one of the biggest advances for women’s health in a generation,” said NARAL President Nancy Keenan in a press statement after the report dropped Tuesday.

IOM’s other recommendations for HHS include:

Annual counseling on sexually transmitted infections for sexually active women

Screening for gestational diabetes

Adding human papillomavirus (HPV) DNA testing in addition to “conventional cytology” testing every three years for women over 30

Annual counseling on sexually transmitted infections for sexually active women

Annual HIV counseling and screening for sexually active women

Comprehensive lactation support and counseling and costs of renting breastfeeding equipment

Screening and counseling for interpersonal and domestic violence

Despite the panel’s insistence that the recommendations reflected “critical gaps” in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and were based on previous recommendations from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, anti-abortion rights advocates have suggested that IOM’s recommendation would essentially be demanding that all insurance companies pay for women’s abortions.

National anti-abortion rights policy group Americans United for Life recently likened the recommendation to Planned Parenthood getting a “bail-out from the federal government.”

Predicting IOM’s decision, AUL staff counsel Anna Franzonello wrote in a blog post Tuesday:

“[I]t seems that Planned Parenthood is about to get another bail-out from the federal government and that no American will be able to choose an insurance plan that does not cover abortion-causing drugs, such as ella. Inconsistent with longstanding American values, such a coercive measure would be, unfortunately, all-too consistent with the anti-life agenda of the Obama Administration.”

The conservative online publication LifeNews.com criticized a recent NPR story, arguing the FDA-approved “morning-after pill” ella works the same way as the abortion pill mifepristone (despite contradictory opinions from many American medical associations such as the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists) and “can kill an already-implanted human embryo.”

“Any group that attacks [IOM’s] recommendations looks far outside the mainstream,” NARAL spokesperson Ted Miller told The American Independent. “Currently, nearly one in three women finds it difficult to pay for birth control. This is a decision that unifies most Americans.”

In light of IOM’s report, NARAL is working to convince HHS to ensure that insured American women will have access to all forms of FDA-approved birth control without having to pay a co-pay. This is the final phase of the organization’s BC4ME campaign, which began last fall and was updated in June with a Facebook application that generates how much money women would be able to save on various forms of birth control

“Unfortunately, the current anti-choice majority in the U.S. House of Representatives has voted twice this year to defund family-planning programs that provide contraception and other basic care to millions of women and couples,” Keenan said. [W]e will fight them every step of the way.”