Emergency IUDs and Stockpiling Plan B Are Only Solutions for Wealthy Women
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By Marie Solis - Jezebel
September 25, 2020
““Get an IUD” might seem like sage universal advice for those able to get pregnant, but it primarily serves to stoke alarm, convincing people that they need to make a hasty decision about birth control. It’s also primarily a pitch to women with a considerable amount of privilege, who have the ability to make decisions about their reproductive health without being constrained by their socioeconomic circumstances. This group of women will likely always be able to access the care they need. Getting an IUD can be a solution for one woman, personally—and a potentially very good one—but it’s far from a solution for decades of dwindling access to reproductive health services.”
”Still, perhaps the biggest assumption baked into people’s urgings to make an emergency IUD appointment is that this is something people have access to at this very moment. These entreaties forget that even with Ginsburg on the court, birth control and abortion were already inaccessible to large swaths of the country, especially pricier methods of birth control like IUDs.”
“She said somewhere between 85 to 90 percent of the patients who visit Whole Woman’s Health clinics in Minnesota and Maryland have insurance through Medicaid or private insurance, whereas “barely 10 percent” of the patients she serves in Texas are insured. If patients need to get the IUD removed, due to negative side effects (which include mood changes, cramping, and irregular bleeding) or a desire to change methods, they will also have to front the full cost of a second clinic visit.
“The idea of ‘options’ of contraceptive methods—I put ‘options’ in air quotes—is absurd to talk about,” Hagstrom Miller continued. “So it’s a bit of a privileged narrative, about going out to get an IUD. The people who are going to be hit the hardest already have less access and less coverage.””
