Why are women’s reproductive still at the forefront of many political debates, especially in the year 2020? Perhaps it’s because for some reason our president still deems it his right to control women’s reproductive organs even though…. they aren’t his. Women’s maternal health doesn’t seem to truly matter to lawmakers unless it becomes something that they can control, and this really isn’t a problem internationally. Americans still don’t get paid maternity leave in most jobs and the time span of maternity leave is comically short, especially when compared to other countries such as Canada or Germany where maternity leave can reach up to two years in duration. This issue regarding unpaid maternity leave is only the beginning of these issues and with Pres. Donald Trump in power, many problems that had only been tiny problems have now blown up significantly.

According to Kinsey Hasstedt in an article for Vox, “In his first year in office, Trump and his administration have brought an ideologically motivated and aggressive campaign against women’s sexual and reproductive rights to the White House”.

One of the bigger rollbacks that President Trump has caused was his rollback of the birth control mandate in October. The birth control mandate, or contraceptive mandate, was a government regulation that required health insurers or employers to provide their employees with health insurance that helps cover part of the cost of contraceptives (healthcare.org), and if you’re asking yourself why this is so vital, I can give you a personal example: when I asked the pharmacist how much my birth control would cost without insurance (because my insurance hadn’t covered the new script yet), she told me it would cost over $230, but with insurance, I usually pay $12. This is vital because if a woman can’t afford to pay $230 for birth control, there’s no way in hell that she can afford to raise a baby. Trump’s rollback “relaxed the Obama-era birth control mandate” (Belluz), meaning that companies can “now refuse to cover the cost of birth control by seeking religious or moral exemptions” since apparently if women have easy access to birth control, that will make them more “promiscuous”, even though there are plenty of medical reasons that women and girls take birth control, such as regulating their menstrual cycle (why I went on it in the first place, not because I was a particularly promiscuous 14-year-old), helping their acne, and plenty of other personal reasons that go beyond simply wanting to have safe sex.

This attack on the Contraceptive mandate is also an effort to undermine Medicaid which statistically has helped immensely with reproductive health. According to the article “How women’s reproductive rights stalled under Trump”, under the Affordable Care Act, the act which the contraceptive mandate is “housed” under, “the proportion of uninsured women of reproductive age dropped by 41 percent”, and while no, the Trump administration has not found a way to fully repeal the ACA, they have found ways of overriding the amount of coverage it provides by directly attacking Medicaid. This is detrimental to the amount of affordable care that can now be provided to women since “the program for low-income Americans pays for half of all births, including two-thirds of unplanned births […] and in 17 states, Medicaid programs also cover abortion with dollars” (Belluz). Congress attempted to pass ACA repeal-and-replace bills in the past year that would have phased out Medicaid expansion by cutting federal funds for it. Since those bills didn’t pass, Republicans within the Trump administration instead turned to the state level to do their dirty work, ie. by “encouraging states to implement work requirements for the program (which Kentucky has already done and Mississippi is now considering)” (Belluz).

What exactly does this have to do with women’s reproductive health you may ask? Well, if fewer people have access to Medicaid, then an incredible number of Americans will lose insurance coverage, and since many of those Americans will be women, that means that fewer women will be able to have access to contraceptives (birth control) at an affordable level, and among other things, Vox’s Dylan Scott reported that with decreased Medicaid coverage, fewer women are likely to have money to cover things such as cancer screenings, and “making sure that mothers and babies have proper health care throughout a pregnancy”.

This drastic decrease in the amount of coverage that simple women’s reproductive health access that has happened since the Trump administration is staggering, and I’ve barely even scratched the surface in everything that could be considered a violation of women’s reproductive freedoms.

Source 1: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/1/30/16947086/trump-womens-health-reproductive-rights

Source 2: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/10/14/768731628/trump-is-trying-hard-to-thwart-obamacare-hows-that-going