US President Joe Biden signed an executive order Friday designed to strengthen and protect access to contraception. Biden signed the order nearly one year after the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the landmark reproductive rights case Roe v. Wade. Since then, some states in the US have steadily chipped away at reproductive rights, including access to abortion and medication.
The order begins by stating, “Access to contraception is essential to ensuring that all people have control over personal decisions about their own health, lives, and families.” While contraception was not explicitly targeted in the court’s Dobbs decision, it is connected to an individual’s fundamental privacy right to health—which used to include access to abortion. Before any further actions are taken to further erode that right, Biden ordered the Departments of the Treasury, Labor, and Health and Human Services to issue guidance “to further improve Americans’ ability to access contraception, without out-of-pocket expenses.”
As it stands now, under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), individuals in the US who enroll in healthcare plans do not have to pay out-of-pocket for birth control and contraceptive services. In Friday’s executive order, Biden ordered relevant agencies to help streamline and expand coverage of contraceptives under the ACA.
The order builds upon two prior Biden-issued executive orders relating to reproductive healthcare access in the US. The first order, signed in July 2022, directed federal agencies to protect access to medical abortions, emergency care, contraception access and patient data. Biden then signed a second order into law in August 2022, which protected American individuals’ right to travel across state lines to obtain reproductive healthcare.
In the time since those initial two executive orders were signed, states across the country have moved to further restrict peoples’ access to reproductive healthcare services. Within the past two months, North Dakota, South Carolina, Nebraska and Florida all enacted restrictive bans on abortion. In the midst of this, a May report from Care Post-Roe found that states that enact such restrictive bans lead to healthcare providers being unable to meet the standard of care and negative health outcomes for patients.
However, the courts have further blocked some states’ attempts to restrict access to reproductive healthcare. And a recent Gallup poll found that 61 percent of Americans thought the court’s decision to overturn Roe was a “bad thing.”
Echoing that sentiment in his executive order, Biden stated, “It remains the policy of my Administration to support access to reproductive healthcare services and to protect and defend reproductive rights in the face of ongoing efforts to strip Americans of their fundamental freedoms.”
