Access to Contraception in Low-Income Communities

DIONE GEILING – Across the nation, many Americans are faced with the hardship of finding affordable healthcare. These individuals are faced with the dilemma on whether to buy groceries, pay bills, or go to an annual checkup. Many Americans are unable to afford their basic healthcare rights of visiting primary care doctors, mental health clinics, and even sexual health facilities. Being unable to afford these healthcare services leaves millions of Americans unable to afford numerous preventative measures such as contraceptives. 

According to the Power to Decide, about 19 million women with a low socioeconomic status live in contraceptive deserts. A contraceptive dessert is coined as the term “lack[ing] reasonable access in their county to a health center offering the full range of contraceptive methods.” Women in contraceptive deserts struggle to obtain basic reproductive methods such as healthcare facilities, condoms, birth control, and even comprehensive sex education. These women find that paying for contraceptive methods out-of-pocket poses a huge barrier to accessing these services, especially for women who do not have health insurance. Being unable to afford contraception also forces these women to use contraceptive methods that don’t work for them. A study found that about 23% of low-income women would obtain different contraceptive methods if it wasn’t for the cost. Dr. Megan L Kavanaugh found that women using condoms or SARCs (birth-control pills, the patch, the shot, or the ring) as methods of contraception felt like they were using the wrong contraceptive method compared to women who were using LARCs (IUDS or implants). Due to the cost barrier, many of these women – insured and uninsured – are forced to use short-term contraceptive methods like condoms or SARCs due to them being considerably cheaper than LARCS 

Along with not  being able to afford contraception, many of these individuals find it hard to trust health care providers to provide them adequate care due to medical trauma. These women have expressed that their providers did not inform them about the side effects of these contraceptive methods. Some healthcare providers have “also acknowledged the history and coercion and harm that was inflicted on many women.” Around the 1940’s, Margaret Sanger created the first contraceptive clinic to provide working class Americans with contraceptive methods. Although her creation has long-lasting effects, she utilized these clinics to provide contraception to Black women. By providing contraception to the Black population, she believed that she would be limiting the fertility of these women and the amount of children they were conceiving. This long history of anti-blackness and racism has caused many women of color to be reluctant to trust their healthcare providers or even go on birth control.  
As mentioned, accessing healthcare is a right that every American should have. No one should feel the need to prioritize bills over receiving adequate healthcare. Increasing access to affordable healthcare, and healthcare in general, can expand the amount of people who are able to obtain contraception. By doing so, we can expand the number of healthcare facilities that offer a wide range of contraceptive methods and increase the accessibility to contraceptive care, sexually transmitted infection (STI) prevention and treatment, obstetrical care, and abortion services. Accessing healthcare is a basic human necessity and accessing contraceptive methods would allow many individuals to have reproductive autonomy and create economic mobility for women, men, parents and children.

Copy Editor – Sameeka Prabath

Photography Source – https://tcf.org/content/report/advancing-contraceptive-equity-policy-priorities-for-2023/