Imagine you're heading into your local health clinic to pick up a birth control prescription.
It's a familiar routine. You do this every few months and today, nothing is out of the ordinary. You walk through the clinic doors, and everything seems exactly as it did 3 months ago, and 3 months before that.
You assume you'll pay the usual $30 fee and be on your way - same as always. A clinic staff member processes your information, looks up from the computer…and tells you that you owe $200.
You don't have $200 for birth control. You always budget your money carefully to make sure you have enough for the other important stuff like food, rent, and gas. You'd planned for $30, but you're being asked to hand over more than six times that.
So - what do you do?
This isn't just one story. Right now, millions of real women across the country are facing this impossible choice. And since the Trump Administration's "domestic gag rule" went into effect in last month - things have gotten much worse.
For more than 50 years, millions of Americans have accessed free or low-cost birth control via health centers funded by the Title X Family Planning Program. The Administration's new rule prevents Title X clinics from providing information about the full range of reproductive health services, specifically abortion. If clinics want to keep the federal funding they rely on, doctors and nurses must withhold basic (and totally legal) health care information from their patients.
If you think that’s wrong, you're not alone: the gag rule is opposed by 20 national health groups including the American Medical Association, and there are active lawsuits attempting to get the rule blocked in court.
But here's the thing: court battles can take a long time. And when it comes to accessing vital health care, women can't wait - not for the next paycheck, or gas money, or time off work - and they shouldn't have to.
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