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CNA Staff, Oct 21, 2024 / 12:15 pm (CNA).

The Biden administration announced on Monday that it will require insurance companies to cover over-the-counter contraception in what the White House called the “most significant expansion ... in more than a decade” of access to birth control under federal law.

The new rule requires insurance companies to remove the prescription requirement for coverage of contraception. The administration seeks to expand contraception in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, according to a White House press conference.

“The Biden-Harris administration is advancing the most significant expansion of contraception coverage under the Affordable Care Act in more than a decade,” said Jennifer Klein, assistant to the president and director of the White House’s gender policy council, in the White House press briefing.

“For the first time ever, women would be able to obtain over-the-counter (OTC) contraception without a prescription at no additional cost, and health plans would have to cover even more prescribed contraceptives without cost sharing,” Klein said.

The new rule requires insurers to provide OTC contraception to women at no cost without requiring a prescription. The rule also increases the required coverage for prescriptive contraception drugs, requiring one drug per category of contraceptive, such as oral contraceptions or implants.

Following a comment period, the new rule is set to require insurance companies to expand coverage of contraceptives by fully covering multiple methods of birth control including oral contraception, condoms, and “emergency contraception.”

Catholic Church has long condemned artificial contraception

The Catechism of the Catholic Church calls contraception a “morally unacceptable” form of birth regulation, stating that “every action” that “proposes … to render procreation impossible” is “intrinsically evil” (No. 2370).

In his 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI called “the transmission of human life” a “most serious role in which married people collaborate freely and responsibly with God the Creator,” writing that it is “a source of great joy” though it “sometimes entails many difficulties and hardships.”

In the document Paul VI wrote that marriage is designed by God for a husband and wife to develop a union through the “mutual gift of themselves.”

The pontiff condemned “any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse is specifically intended to prevent procreation — whether as an end or as a means.” 

“We must accept that there are certain limits, beyond which it is wrong to go, to the power of man over his own body and its natural functions,” the document read.

The only means of “spacing births” that the Church supports is “tak[ing] advantage of the natural cycles immanent in the reproductive system” through natural family planning (NFP).

Paul VI acknowledged that there are sometimes serious reasons for couples to “decide not to have additional children for either a certain or an indefinite period of time,” depending on “physical, economic, psychological, and social conditions.”

However, “every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life,” Paul VI wrote. Union and procreation are “both inherent to the marriage act,” Paul VI continued, making contraceptives “unlawful.” 

Over-the-counter contraceptives could also have negative medical consequences for women, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) noted. 

Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, who heads the USCCB’s laity, marriage, family life, and youth committee, condemned the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval of OTC contraception in 2023. 

Barron noted that giving OTC hormonal contraceptives “without the supervision of a doctor and contrary to the mounting evidence of many harmful side effects — violates the Hippocratic oath by putting the health of women at grave risk.”

Contraception mandates have also led to legal challenges in the past for religious organizations, including the case of the Little Sisters of the Poor.

The religious sisters spent nine years embroiled in a legal struggle as they appealed for a religious exemption from the Affordable Care Act birth control rule. That rule required employers to provide for contraceptive coverage for employees through their health care plans.

The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled in favor of the Little Sisters in 2020.