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The new study didn’t answer whether the Dobbs decision caused more people to get sterilized. But, “what we’re seeing is that people don’t want to get into a situation of needing an abortion and not being able to obtain one,” Gretchen Borchelt, vice president of reproductive rights and health at the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), tells Yahoo Life. She cites anecdotes from calls to the NWLC’s CoverHer hotline, which helps women get insurance coverage for contraception. Borchelt adds that the upward trend in sterilizations is likely to continue.
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Borchelt suspects that concerns over abortion access aren’t the only driving force behind the uptick in sterilizations. Federal law, expanded in 2010 by the Affordable Care Act, now requires many insurers to cover 18 forms of “female controlled” contraception, including sterilization, at little or no cost to the patient (there are some exceptions, however). “The ACA has put sterilization on an equal cost-level with other forms of contraception, where it once would have been cost prohibitive” for many people, Borchelt says.
On one hand, more access to more forms of contraception, and more people taking advantage of highly effective forms of birth control are all good things, experts say. But on the other, the trend in sterilization reflects the ripple effect of the loss of federal protections for abortion.
Borchelt says that the Dobbs decision is still “upending our society” and “has opened up a broader conversation” about contraception and access to reproductive health care. “It’s not just panic … but improved contraceptive access or use [doesn’t mean] we don’t need abortion care; we need both,” she says.
