Trump's Birth Control Mandate Doesn't Just Hurt Women — It Enslaves Them

Millions of women could soon lose their reproductive freedoms to receive contraceptive coverage and have safe abortions.

With each piece of legislation Trump signs with his tiny hands, America moves closer and closer to a government that strips women of their bodily autonomy.

Although the GOP failed to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, Trump just overhauled the ObamaCare birth control mandate that ensured either employers or private insurers provided birth control coverage for women.

The now-dismantled birth control mandate gave more than 55 million women access to a wide array of contraception, including the pill, the IUD, the ring, and the patch — all without co-payments.

Trump's new regulation, which goes into effect immediately, allows any employer to deny birth control coverage for moral or religion reasons. Unlike the ACA, which only allowed nonprofit religious organizations to seek exemption from covering contraception, now even nonreligious, for-profit, and publicly traded companies can all seek exemptions on the basis of vague moral grounds.

Allowing an outright denial of coverage due to moral and religious reasons ignores the reality that birth control is not solely prescribed as a contraceptive. Many women use birth control as a medical necessity to treat issues such as endometriosis and PCOS.

Regardless, millions of women could lose their benefits and have to pay for their birth control, which can cost up to $1,000+ out-of-pocket.

Whether the mandate is constitutional is yet to be determined. The ACLU, who has already filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, claims the mandate qualifies as sex discrimination because it singles out care that only women need and doesn't target other kinds of preventative care.

It comes as no surprise that Trump signed this mandate on the heels of his failed repeal and replace plan. The proposed TrumpCare bill removed an ObamaCare protection that prohibited insurance companies from labeling certain female-only health issues — including pregnancy, c-sections, and postpartum depression — as pre-existing conditions. It was a blatant assault on women.

For a party that claims to be pro-life, it seems ironic that the GOP is limiting access to contraception while simultaneously passing a bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

The former literally prevents the latter. Access to birth control has brought the rates of unplanned pregnancy and teen births in the country to modern lows. Simply put, it allows women to achieve equality in society.

Limiting the options for both birth control and abortions turns women into de facto slaves of their own reproductive cycles that they can no longer control.

Make no mistake — Trump is singlehandedly signing away women's autonomy over their own bodies.

Then again, did you really expect anything less from the Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief?

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