JUNEAU (LifeSiteNews) — Alaska Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy has vetoed legislation that would have forced insurance companies to cover up to a year’s worth of birth control pills, calling it “bad policy.”
Currently, it is standard policy among Alaska insurance companies to cover birth control, but only a supply of up to 90 days at a time. HB 17 would have required any health care insurer in the state to “provide coverage” for “prescription contraceptives” as well as any related “consultations, examinations, procedures, and medical services,” and “reimburse a health care provider or dispensing entity for dispensing prescription contraceptives intended to last for a 12-month period for subsequent dispensings of the same prescription contraceptive to the insured regardless of whether the insured was enrolled in the health care insurance plan at the time of the first dispensing.”
The bill passed the state Senate 16-3 and state House 26-12. But in his veto message, Dunleavy explained that it “sets the standards under which the State may enforce the coverage requirements for contraceptive methods. Contraceptives are widely available, and compelling insurance companies to provide mandatory coverage for a year is bad policy.”
Alaska’s News Source reports that Democrat state Rep. Ashley Carrick, the lead sponsor of HB 17, did not confirm or deny plans to attempt to override the veto, saying only that all options were on the table.
In addition to the insurance prices such a mandate would raise, forcing coverage of contraception raises conscience concerns due both to many Christians’ moral objections to birth control and the fact that many types of “contraception” commonly touted as alternatives to abortion are actually forms of it.
In January 2023, for instance, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) amended Plan B’s label to “clarify” that it was not an abortifacient. But such drugs do in fact have abortifacient potential, and whether they prevent conception or implantation depends on when they are taken relative to a woman’s cycle.
“If Plan B is taken five to two days before egg release is due to happen, the interference with the LH signal prevents a woman from releasing an egg, no fertilization happens, and no embryo is formed,” Dr. Donna Harrison of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians & Gynecologists (AAPLOG) explains, citing numerous studies. However, if the pill is taken during the “two-day window in which embryos can form but positive pregnancy tests don’t occur,” studies indicate it “has a likely embryocidal effect in stopping pregnancy.”
Further confusing the issue is the manipulation of semantics by activists in the medical establishment. The American Congress of Obstetricians & Gynecologists (ACOG), a purportedly impartial medical authority that in reality is heavily pro-abortion, redefined “conception” in the 1960s to refer to implantation rather than fertilization, for the purpose of making contraception more culturally acceptable.
Even so, a 2011 survey found that most OB/GYNs continued to say that life begins at fertilization, not implantation, and a 2019 survey found that 96% of biologists “affirmed that a human’s life begins at fertilization.”
Fourteen states currently ban all or most abortions. But the abortion lobby is working feverishly to cancel out those deterrent effects by deregulated interstate distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and embedding abortion “rights” in state constitutions.
With the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022 allowing states to directly ban abortion, left-wing activists have identified easier distribution of abortion and contraceptive pills as one of the most effective ways to preserve abortion “access.”