Idaho Expands Access to Birth Control, but That’s Not a Remedy for Its Abortion Ban

Idaho started in the new year with small but important good news for reproductive rights: Effective this month, insurance companies in the state must cover six months of prescription contraception coverage at a time, which means that, instead of only being able to access one to three months’ worth of birth control pills at a time, Idahoans are entitled to coverage for a six-month supply. In 2022, a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that a third of female contraceptive users missed taking their birth control because they couldn’t access their next supply of pills in time.

Senate Minority Leader Melissa Wintrow (D), the sponsor of the new law, had introduced a bill like this twice before; last year, it narrowly passed the state House by one vote and the Senate by three. In an op-ed last week, Wintrow wrote that the new policy “represents a significant step forward” at a time when “our draconian, conflicting reproductive rights laws have led to pregnant women being airlifted to Utah and more than 22% of our OBGYNs fleeing the state.” And it does—any amount of progress that can be prised out of a Republican-controlled legislature matters and can change lives. 

Of course, to Wintrow’s point, Idaho still enforces a total abortion ban so extreme that attorneys for the state argued at the Supreme Court last year that Idaho should be allowed to require its doctors to not provide life-saving, stabilizing, emergency abortions. The Supreme Court ultimately punted that case, allowing doctors to offer some stabilizing abortions for the time being, but sent it back to a lower court for further litigation. In December, attorneys for Idaho argued in federal court that even if pregnancy complications threaten to cost someone a limb, they should still be denied emergency abortion care. These laws haven’t just strained access to abortion: Because OBGYNs have been driven out of the state en masse, access to the full range of reproductive health care, including some forms of birth control, is threatened.

Shortly after the Supreme Court’s ruling in June 2024, the president of the Idaho Hospital Association told Northwest Public Broadcasting that “several of our members are struggling to hire OBGYNs” as well as maternal-fetal medicine doctors: “Those searches are going sometimes six months, eight months, even up to a year before they can find somebody that’s willing to come and practice that kind of medicine.”

And, just to pass Wintrow’s vitally important bill, this required a seemingly small but ominous footnote: The legislation clarifies that it doesn’t require insurance companies to cover emergency contraception and medication abortion. To state the obvious, it should! But also, implicitly equating a form of birth control with abortion is a long-standing tactic among anti-abortion activists and Republican lawmakers that ultimately tees up birth control itself for future attacks. On the campaign trail, then-candidate Donald Trump suggested he’d consider further restrictions on birth control, which he targeted under his first administration, slashing federal family planning funding and allowing more insurers and employers to deny birth control coverage.

Idaho’s new birth control policy is certainly a step in the right direction—and the margin by which it passed the legislature speaks to the importance of local elections. But the policy victory exists beside the reality that increased birth control isn’t a substitute for abortion, nor is it a remedy for an abortion ban that’s been harming the state for almost three years now.