Donald Trump Has a Sneaky New Way To Help Religious Employers Deny Women Birth Control

White House proposal would refer those women to services meant for low-income families.

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Over the past two years, the Trump administration has been trying to gut access to birth control coverage for women: It proposed rules that would allow almost any employer to claim moral or religious exemptions to the Affordable Care Act’s mandate of providing access to birth control, and would effectively strip federal funding from women’s health clinics such as Planned Parenthood, that provide abortions. 

Though legal challenges have largely prevented these rules from taking effect, reproductive-rights advocates have continually raised concerns that the policies, if implemented, could leave thousands of women without access to birth control. Now, according to the New York Times, the Trump administration is suggesting that family planning clinics for low-income people could help fill in the gaps. Such clinics receive funding through a federal program called Title X, which they use to serve more than four million people a year. By law, Title X programs have to prioritize members of families at or below the federal poverty line.

According to a new proposed rule, a woman would be considered “from a ‘low-income family'” if she had been denied birth control coverage by her employer for moral or religious reasons—but her family’s actual income would not affect her ability to access those clinic services.

Critics are worried that diverting more women to these clinics would put a strain on services that are already in very high demand. The proposal would “hijack Title X programs and use their limited federal funds to subsidize employers’ refusal to comply with the contraceptive coverage requirement,” Clare Coleman, president of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, told the Times.

By weakening the Affordable Care Act’s rules for contraceptive coverage,  Trump would be messing with a very popular program. A 2015 study estimated that, during the first year of the Affordable Care Act, women saved about $1.4 billion on co-payments for birth control pills. In a Kaiser Health poll last year, 68 percent of people said they supported requiring private employers to provide contraception coverage. My colleague Pat Caldwell notes in a recent post that even a majority of Republicans were in favor.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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