Post Roe V. Wade, A Senator Wants to Make Birth Control Access Easier — and Affordable
Consider This from NPR
NPR
4.2 • 6.2K Ratings
🗓️ 21 May 2023
⏱️ 12 minutes
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Summary
While more than 100 countries currently allow access to birth control pills over the counter, the U.S. is not one of them.
Washington Senator Patty Murray says it's important that the pill is easily available - but also affordable.
When - and if - that day comes and the pill is available over the counter, Murray wants to require insurance companies to cover the cost, free of charge.
NPR's Sarah McCammon speaks with Senator Murray on the proposed legislation.
And we hear the latest on the legal challenge to the abortion medication mifepristone, as attorneys gather in New Orleans at the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to argue whether it should be removed from the market.
NPR's Becky Sullivan and Selena Simmons-Duffin contributed reporting on the real-life experiences of individuals taking mifepristone.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It took Larissa Adams and her husband a long time to get pregnant. |
| 0:12.0 | And when she did, she had a miscarriage. |
| 0:14.0 | And we thought that was going to be the end of it and that we would get pregnant again. |
| 0:17.0 | And what ended up happening was that we spent the next four or five years getting pregnant regularly |
| 0:22.0 | and then miscarriage after miscarriage after miscarriage. |
| 0:25.5 | Her doctors needed to intervene to complete each miscarriage. |
| 0:29.0 | Adams would take MIFA Pristone and Mesoprostol, the two drugs that are used together for miscarriage management and for abortions. |
| 0:36.0 | After a number of miscarriages, Adams was able to conceive a single viable embryo through IVF. |
| 0:43.0 | By a sheer luck, I don't know. I've always wondered. I'm like, are we the luckiest people in the world or have the worst luck? |
| 0:48.0 | But it's stuck and now we have a three year old and she's totally healthy. |
| 0:52.5 | In VR, Selena Simmons, Duffin and Becky Sullivan spoke to a number of people about why they took MIFA Pristone. |
| 0:58.5 | Some said MIFA Pristone gave them a sense of control, like Michelle Brown, who found out she was pregnant while planning her wedding. |
| 1:05.5 | She said she was a little bit panicked at first. |
| 1:08.0 | But then after doing more reading and thinking, we then got pretty excited actually about the pregnancy. |
| 1:14.0 | And then we found out that it was not working out. |
| 1:19.0 | Brown had started to miscarry. Her doctor had suggested waiting for the bleeding to begin. |
| 1:24.0 | Brown was living in New Orleans at the time and working at a university about an hour away. |
| 1:29.0 | Her commute took her across long bridges over swamps and lakes. |
| 1:33.0 | Areas where it would be hard to pull over. |
| 1:36.0 | Every time I had to commute to and from a university, I just had all of this like dread essentially. |
| 1:41.0 | Because I was like really afraid like, what if it happens now? Right? |
| 1:45.0 | Like the cramping and the bleeding. |
... |
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