Tag: birth control

Last week, doctors and reproductive rights advocates announced that they will lobby the FDA to include birth control in a list of drugs that can be offered without prescriptions.

Despite the Catholic Church’s efforts to frame the federal government’s decision requiring health insurers to cover birth control as a matter of “religious freedom,” a new poll shows that almost 70 percent of the Americans believe the decision was a “matter of women’s health, not religious freedom.”

DENVER— The political battle in Colorado over abortion, women’s healthcare and family planning heated up Monday when lawmakers, activist groups and supporters on opposite sides of the issues took turns rallying on the west steps of the capitol here.

Stop talking about birth control. That was the key message from some of the most prominent leaders of America’s anti-abortion movement, speaking Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference. During a talk on how to advance the movement through messaging, an all-female panel discussed the Obama administration’s birth-control-coverage mandate and suggested that the best way to defeat it is by calling it an “abortion mandate.”

Polling released this weeks indicates that a strong majority of Americans, including a majority of Catholics, support President Obama's stanch on making few exceptions to the mandate that health insurance plans include access to no-cost contraceptives.

House Speaker John Boehner announced during a floor speech this week that he would take legislative action against a federal decision requiring insurance companies to cover contraception as a preventive service if the Obama administration does not reverse course.

The Obama administration this week signaled it might compromise with religious groups that are currently up in arms over a federal decision requiring health insurers to cover contraception as a preventive service.

The Hill is reporting that Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., has introduced a bill that would roll back a recent decision by the Obama administration to require that insurance providers — with the exception of religious employers — cover birth control as a preventive service. Rubio is among a small group of legislators that receives money from a Catholic group that has been opposed to the mandate for some time.

The Obama administration announced today that it is standing by its decision to require that insurance providers — with the exception of religious employers — cover birth control as a preventive service. Instead of giving in to requests that all objectors be able to opt out, the feds have instead given religious groups a one-year extension to meet the mandate.

According to a recent Kaiser Health Tracking Poll conducted by Public Opinion and Survey Research Program, 66 percent of Americans agree with the federal government’s recent decision to include birth control in its list of preventative services.