This is interesting, but doesn’t address a couple of key points.
About half the counties in Texas don’t have the number of public clinics required to meet the contraceptive needs of the population. So Nurx, an at-home birth control delivery app, decided to give women in the state the option to get birth control whenever they want and without ever needing to step into a clinic or even physically see a doctor.
Starting today, those in the Lone Star State will be able to tap the Nurx app and get contraceptives delivered straight to their door.
While Texas isn’t the only state with a giant “contraceptive desert,” or an area without at least 1 clinic to every 1,000 women in need of publicly funded contraception, it is certainly the biggest area of land in the United States not meeting these needs.
And with Trumpcare looming, and Trump’s recent “Religious Freedom” order, which allows businesses to deny birth control coverage based on religious reasons, many women could lose access to their publicly funded birth control pills and even more publicly funded clinics could go under, leaving a large and vulnerable population wide open to other, possibly dangerous methods of preventing birth.
As the story notes, there are other birth control delivery services on the market, but Nurx appears to be the only one operating in Texas. The legislative session is over, but I can easily imagine someone taking aim at this in a future session, though to be fair I thought there would be a reaction to the Mexican abortion option, too. Be that as it may, the real issue here isn’t lack of places to buy the pill, it’s the increasing restrictions on insurance coverage for it, which will become a crisis if Trumpcare passes in any form. It doesn’t matter what your delivery options are if you can’t afford to buy it in the first place. Still, it’s good that Nurx exists, and I hope it has some company in the market soon. I also hope it doesn’t have a large chunk of that market taken away from it by Congress.
When will the females on houston cit council began lobbying the texas legislature to allow pharmacists to prescribe birth control similar to many other states?
I guess they skipped these ideas at Harvard, UH and Rice…
Many states Joe? Isn’t it about 4 or 5? Council has more than enough to do without messing with this issue. Besides, Houston has plenty of doctors available, unlike the rural areas the pharmacist bills tend to target