While much of the siren call against federal appeals court Judge Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court surrounds abortion rights, women’s access to birth control should be equally as concerning. Ever since the Affordable Care Act required that insurers provide women’s birth control without a copay, access to contraception has been under assault.
While lawmakers try to read the tea leaves on Gorsuch regarding abortion, his position on access to birth control is crystal clear. As a member of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, Gorsuch has twice sided against the ACA birth control benefit. In Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. v. Sebelius and in Little Sisters of the Poor v. Burwell, Gorsuch argued that the ACA mandate to provide employees with birth control violated the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
What is missing from the debate is that access to birth control isn’t just about reproductive rights.
At age 34, I was diagnosed with endometriosis, a chronic and often debilitating condition in which tissue that normally forms the lining of the uterus grows outside the uterus, where it doesn’t belong. According to the National Institutes of Health, endometriosis is one of the most common gynecological diseases, affecting some 5.5 million women in North America. In healthy women, the endometrial tissue is shed during normal menstrual cycles.
Endometriosis often caused me to double over in searing pain that radiated from my stomach to my back. Migraines usually followed. Endometriosis caused my infertility, as it does for up to 40 percent of women with the disease. It is one of the top three causes of female infertility.
A laparoscopic surgery to remove a uterine fibroid found I had stage 4 endometriosis, meaning it had traveled far and wide, coating surrounding organs, hitting nerves and causing pain. Endometriosis can’t always be confirmed through imaging, so I was fortunate the surgery revealed it. My doctor couldn’t remove all of it during laparoscopic surgery, so a more invasive procedure was later performed to burn off the remaining wayward tissue.
Even after surgery, endometriosis often returns. There is no cure for this uniquely female disease. For the last 12 years, I have taken continual birth control pills (I skip the placebo and take an active pill every day) to keep my endometriosis from recurring.
Contraceptives can and should be part of women’s personal and private health care decisions. Women with a family history or risk of ovarian and endometrial cancers may take oral contraceptives as a preventive. According to the National Cancer Institute, birth control pills have “consistently been found to be associated with a reduced risk of ovarian cancer,” and that “the longer a women used oral contraceptives, the more her risk of ovarian cancer decreased … by approximately 50 percent after five years of use.” The longer a woman uses oral contraceptives, the lower her risk for endometrial cancer, even after she stops taking the pills. Ovarian cancer is the fifth leading cause of cancer death among women in the U.S., and the only women-specific cancer other than breast cancer in the top five.
Discussing menstruation may seem vulgar to some. But health care is messy, and lawmakers who don’t have the stomach to discuss the very real health issues facing women have no business determining their health care options.
Rita Colorito is a Glen Ellyn-based health and lifestyle writer whose work has appeared in Costco Connection, Prevention.com, OncLive.com, and MedShadow.org.
