State Rep. Knute Buehler, a Republican, sponsored the legislation in Oregon.
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The laws are one of the first major pushes at the state level to make access to birth control more widely available. OR and California policymakers are trying to buck that trend with what the NY Times calls “groundbreaking” new laws that would allow birth control to be doled out by a pharmacist without a doctor’s Rx.
Pharmacists can prescribe birth control after a short screening process in which women fill out questionnaires about their health and medical histories. Statistics demonstrate that nearly 3 million pregnancies annually in the US are unintended, a bigger rate than Europe’s.
This kind of unresolved question makes it even more significant that California and OR will become laboratories for a new kind of birth control provision-and will hopefully lead the way for the rest of us.
The OR law does require that a girl under 18 must have a prior prescription from a doctor before she can get birth control from a pharmacist.
Dr. Mark DeFrancesco, president of the organization, stated that he is afraid of creating a model that would continue to make hard for women to get these contraceptives.
Should OR and California’s new system work out, though, it’s likely that other states will follow in their example. Unlike most discussions of access to birth control, however, including the national debate over the Obama administration’s clause that requires healthcare plans under the Affordable Care Act to include coverage for contraceptives, the political process following the two laws was nearly completely free of partisan debate. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) opposes the laws allowing pharmacists to prescribe because they believe that hormonal contraceptives should be available over the counter. When the state of Colorado made birth control free and available to teens, it estimated that it saved .85 in short-term Medicaid costs for every dollar spent, and perhaps more over the long term.
Most Western countries require a doctor’s prescription for hormonal contraceptives like pills, patches and rings, but starting sometime in the next few months, women in California and OR will be able to obtain these types of birth control by getting a prescription directly from the pharmacist who dispenses them. Pharmacy board representatives from other states, including Arizona and Idaho, observed a recent meeting in OR about the new rules. “They’re both worthwhile goals, but one should not be held hostage to the other”.
The economic incentives to make birth control more accessible are equally clear.
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Public-health advocates hope these arrangements could spread across the country, as states grappling with persistently high rates of unintended pregnancy seek to increase access to birth control with measures that so far have been unavailable under federal law. Prescriptions will be covered by insurance regardless of where they’re coming from.
