There are 21.4 million women in the U.S. who need subsidized birth control living in a county somewhere with limited access. That's the major takeaway from a new analysis of contraception access from two reproductive policy organizations, Power to Decide and the Guttmacher Institute, shared exclusively with NPR. Both organizations are nonprofit and nonpartisan, and both support access to reproductive and sexual health services, including abortion.
The analysis produced two interactive, county-level maps. It's an updated version of a map of contraception deserts that Power to Decide first made in 2017. "We did the best we could with the limited data we had right then," says Rachel Fey, who runs state and federal policy work at Power to Decide, formerly known as The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy.
"[We] used that as a way to talk to policymakers, the press, the average person about what it really looked like for some people — particularly people on the lower end of the income scale, or in rural areas, or who were disproportionately Black and brown — when it comes to contraceptive access." These new maps draw on research expertise at Guttmacher to develop a different methodology, "that I think is more accurate and it's a truer picture of the barriers that people face," Fey says. In Maricopa County, Ariz., the new analysis shows there are 29 clinics that receive public funding for family planning, and almost 300,000 women in need of subsidized birth control. Researchers estimate that only 8% of the need is being met, which is what they call an "extreme access gap." That doesn't surprise Wendy Redford, chief clinical officer of Wesley Community & Health Center in Phoenix.
"I think that largely reflects that certain groups' needs are not being met," she says. Even in a big city with a lot of options, "if you don't have high resources — namely insurance and even Medicaid — if you don't have those things, accessing care is incredibly difficult because doors are shut on you." Wesley doesn't shut its doors on anyone, she says, and they try hard to make sure their low-income and uninsured patients know that they offer a wide range of birth control options for free, thanks to federal funding from a grant program called Title X. "We talk about it at every single visit," Redford says.
"When a patient comes in, we ask them, 'Are you wanting to get pregnant in the next year?' And if they're not, 'How can we help you not do that?'" She's passionate about how important birth control is for her patients. "If you've got three kids and you don't want four kids because you're already splitting everything three ways and trying to make that stretch, how can we help you keep your family on a more financially stable path?" she says. "This can change a woman's life." Figuring out how to measure clinic capacity and demand in each county across the country was a challenge, explains Megan Kavanaugh, principal data researcher at Guttmacher, a nonprofit research and policy think tank.
They started by focusing on specific health care providers. "Our maps are showing access to brick-and-mortar clinics that receive federal or state level funds to deliver contraceptive care," she says. The team then used patient case loads for those clinics to determine their capacity to see patients.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
