Biden administration will require insurance coverage for over-the-counter contraceptives

The Biden administration announced Monday that it will require insurance companies to cover over-the-counter contraceptives, in what the White House called the “most significant expansion… in more than a decade” of access to birth control under federal law.

The new rule requires insurance companies to eliminate the prescription requirement for contraceptive coverage. The government seeks to expand contraception following the annulment of the ruling Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court in 2022, according to a White House press conference.

“The Biden-Harris administration is moving forward with the most significant expansion of contraception coverage under the Affordable Care Act in more than a decade,” said Jennifer Klein, assistant to the president and director of the gender policy council. of the White House, at the White House press conference.

“For the first time in history, women would be able to get over-the-counter (OTC) contraceptives without a prescription and at no additional cost, and health plans would have to cover even more prescription contraceptives with no cost-sharing,” she said. Klein.

The new rule requires insurers to provide over-the-counter contraceptives to women at no cost and without the need for a prescription. The rule also increases required coverage for prescription contraceptive drugs, requiring one drug per contraceptive category, such as oral contraceptives or implants.

Following a comment period, the new rule will require insurance companies to expand contraceptive coverage to fully cover multiple methods of birth control, including oral contraception, condoms and “emergency contraception.”

The Catholic Church has long condemned artificial contraception.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church llama to contraceptives “morally reprehensible” mechanisms of birth regulation, stating that “any action” that “proposes… to make procreation impossible” is “intrinsically evil” (n. 2370).

In his encyclical Human Life In 1968, Pope Paul VI defined “transmitting human life” as a “very serious duty” of “husbands, free and responsible collaborators of God the Creator,” adding that it is “a source of great joys, although sometimes accompanied by many difficulties and anguish.”

In the document, Paul VI wrote that marriage is designed by God so that husband and wife develop a union through “their personal gift to each other.”

The Pope condemned “any action that, either in anticipation of the marital act, or in its realization, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, as an end or as a means, to make procreation impossible.”

“Insurmountable limits must necessarily be recognized to the possibility of man’s control over his own body and its functions,” the document reads.

The only means of “spacing births” that the Church supports is “taking into account the natural rhythms immanent to the generative functions” through natural family planning (NFP).

Paul VI recognized that there are sometimes serious reasons for couples to decide “to avoid a new birth for some time or indefinitely,” depending on “physical, economic, psychological and social conditions.”

However, “any marriage act (any use of marriage) must remain open to the transmission of life,” wrote Paul VI. Union and procreation are two “inseparable” aspects of the marriage act, Paul VI continued, which makes contraceptives “illicit.”

Over-the-counter contraceptives could also have negative medical consequences for women, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) noted.

Bishop Robert Barron, Bishop of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, who heads the USCCB Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth, criticized the FDA’s approval of over-the-counter contraceptivesin 2023.

Mons. Barron Indian that administering over-the-counter hormonal contraceptives “without a doctor’s supervision and contrary to growing evidence of many harmful side effects, violates the Hippocratic Oath by seriously putting women’s health at risk.”

Contraception mandates have also led to legal challenges in the past for religious organizations, including the case of the Little Sisters of the Poor.

The nuns spent nine years embroiled in a legal fight as they appealed for a religious exemption from the Affordable Care Act’s birth control rule. That rule required employers to provide contraceptive coverage for employees through their health care plans.

The United States Supreme Court finally ruled in favor of the Little Sisters, in 2020.

Translated and adapted by the ACI Prensa team. Originally published in CNA.