B.C.’s move to supply free prescription contraception spurs push for national access

Proponents of British Columbia’s move to supply free prescription contraception say the policy could spur other provinces to follow suit but a national plan would best serve people’s reproductive needs and slash health-care costs overall.

Obstetricians and reproductive rights advocates say other countries, including the UK, already provide free contraception as a part of their health-care plans.

One in every of those advocates is Grade 11 student Sophie Choong, who joined a campaign launched by a bunch called AccessBC to push the federal government to maintain an election promise to supply free contraception.

She helped put up billboards on a highway in Victoria, home of the B.C. legislature, and was also involved in placing ads on transit in January.

On Tuesday, Finance Minister Katrine Conroy announced in her budget speech that free prescription contraception can be available as of April 1 at a value of $119 million over three years. The choices covered will include oral hormone pills, contraceptive injections, copper and intrauterine devices and subdermal implants, together with so-called Plan B, also generally known as the morning-after pill.

Choong called that a “beacon of hope” for the remainder of the country.

“There are various young individuals who do need access to contraception and that’s only a reality,” she said. “The opposite big problem is that many individuals don’t have access to contraception because they don’t get parental approval (to assist pay) for it.”

Teale Phelps Bondaroff, a spokesman for AccessBC, said the group has been pushing free of charge contraception in B.C. for six years and people fronting campaigns elsewhere in Canada, including Ontario, Manitoba, Recent Brunswick and Nova Scotia, see B.C.’s decision as a catalyst for potential change of their jurisdictions.

“We’ve had tens of hundreds of individuals from across British Columbia take part in multiple waves of letter writing,” he said. “We lobbied politicians directly from all sides of the political spectrum.”

Dr. Wendy Norman, family planning research chair with the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, worked to supply evidence to the B.C. government on the advantages of providing free contraception.

“We were capable of conduct a door-to-door survey throughout the province and discover what people needed and put this into a cheap model,” Norman said of the Contraception and Abortion Research Team (CART), a network of researchers and clinicians that she founded.

“We conducted a sexual health survey throughout the province, knocking on people’s doors to ask them, would they tell us about their sexual health needs and behaviours and intentions? By utilizing that data, we were capable of see that 40 per cent of pregnancies were unintended, that individuals who wanted to stop a pregnancy weren’t capable of afford their contraception.”

The associated fee of stopping unintended pregnancy was the largest challenge many cited, Norman said.

“If those contraceptives had been available to them, the savings to the federal government can be something within the order of $27 million a 12 months,” she said of the survey done in 2015. The outcomes were presented to the B.C. government in 2018.

“The truth is, when you should try to administer your fertility, probably the most effective methods are the costliest upfront for a patient,” she said.

For ladies who may already be battling other health issues similar to addiction and mental health, one in all the potential outcomes of unintended pregnancy is complications requiring hospitalization and neonatal intensive take care of the child, Norman said.

“The system could also be helping that family as they move forward. But that’s not even included in those cost-effectiveness (models),” she said.

Together with doctors, B.C. pharmacists will later this 12 months have the ability to prescribe contraception and are trained to counsel people on hormonal contraception, said Norman, who can be a professor within the department of family practice on the University of British Columbia.

Australia, Recent Zealand, the UK and the Scandinavian countries already provide free contraception, she said.

The federal government is funding a national sexual health survey to be managed by Statistics Canada.

“We hope we will get the information for all of the jurisdictions to have the option to maneuver forward and understand how best to serve health equity through public policies that support people to time and space the youngsters that they’ll have,” Norman said.

Dr. R. Douglas Wilson, president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada, said support for “reproductive prevention” needs to be a national priority moderately than provinces coming up with their very own policies since the emotionally charged issue of abortion means access varies across the country.

“Some provinces are very conservative and have stronger opinions in regards to the provision of abortion services. If we’re taking a look at balancing health-care dollars, it’s significantly better to stop pregnancies than to must cope with unwanted pregnancies that require each physical and potential emotional trauma for a termination of a pregnancy,” he said.

“It truly is the most effective thing to permit men and women to stop pregnancies moderately than to must cope with the results of an unwanted pregnancy.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 1, 2023.

Note to readers: It is a corrected story. An earlier version said Norman is an associate professor, as a substitute of professor.