Trump Continues Assault on Women; New Rule Moves to Allow Employers to Deny Birth Control Coverage

If the Trump administration has its way, religious employers will be allowed to deny their female employees contraceptive insurance coverage. Currently, under Obamacare, birth control is deemed an essential preventive health service that is fully covered.

According to HuffPost, the White House Office of Management and Budget used its website to post that it was looking into a final rule that would allow employers who claim religious affiliation to deny women contraceptive coverage.

“The draft rule announced today attempts to tear away women’s control over their own private health decisions and put that control in the hands of employers and politicians,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told HuffPost. Pelosi called the move “sickening.”

In 2012, back when the world had a president who stood for something, President Barack Obama made birth control, well-woman visits, mammograms and sexually transmitted infection screenings all part of preventive health services, which meant that a woman’s employer had to provide 100 percent coverage of such visits. HuffPost notes that it was the first time in history that birth control had been included as a part of normal preventative health care. If Trump’s administration is successful in allowing this religious rollback, women will be forced to pay out-of-pocket for all birth control.

Obamacare “guarantees coverage to more than 55 million women, saved women $1.4 billion on birth control pills in the first year it went into effect, and has contributed to the lowest U.S. abortion rate since the procedure became legal in 1973,” HuffPost reports.

The Center for Reproductive Rights plans to challenge the new rule.

“Without health coverage of contraception under the [Affordable Care Act], countless women will lose their basic right to prevent pregnancy and plan when they have children,” Nancy Northup, president and chief executive officer of the legal advocacy group, told HuffPost.

“Plain and simple: President Trump’s executive order will hurt women. And the Center for Reproductive Rights is ready to fight back in court,” she said.

Read more at HuffPost.