The Quickie: Nebraska's Gender Affirming Care Ban Creates Confusion For Providers
For Immediate Release: Oct. 13, 2023
Welcome to “The Quickie” — Planned Parenthood Action Fund’s daily tipsheet on the top health care & reproductive rights stories of the day. You can read “The Quickie'' online here.
In today’s Quickie: NE’s confusing gender-affirming care ban burdens providers, a UT study finds cost is the biggest factor in abortions, and Black women face barriers accessing PrEP.
NEBRASKA’S GENDER AFFIRMING CARE BAN CREATES CONFUSION FOR PROVIDERS: Earlier this month, Nebraska issued new restrictions on gender affirming care that will make it difficult for transgender youth to access it. Among these regulations is a requirement that they go to 40 hours of “gender-identity-focused” therapy before receiving care, which providers say creates an unnecessary burden; it also limits therapy to two hours a week, meaning it could take months to receive care at the earliest.
Coupled with a national shortage of mental health care providers, “we could be talking years to get to 40 hours,” Dr. Nicole Chaisson, director of gender-affirming care for Planned Parenthood North Central States, told The Hill.
The language mandating the therapy states that it must be neutral, but Dr. Chaisson raised concerns that it may not be gender affirming and leaves room for it to be problematic.
“Everything we do with patients should be gender and identity affirming, even if they choose not to be on hormones,” she said. “Even if I see a cisgender woman, I should be gender affirming.”
Read more in The Hill.
UTAH ABORTION STATISTICS FIND SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS TO BE A LEADING FACTOR IN ABORTIONS: This week, Utah published its most recent abortion statistics as of 2021. Of the nearly 3,000 Utah residents who had an abortion, almost half of them cited the cost of childbirth and caring for a child as their reason for having an abortion.
“We know that the people who come through our door, the patients that come through our door, that decisions about whether to continue a pregnancy are often rooted in factors like the cost of child care, the availability of health insurance, and whether or not they have parental leave or mental health resources, and the ability to support additional children,” Jason Stevenson, policy director at Planned Parenthood Association of Utah, told The Salt Lake Tribune.
The research also found that people of all ages and all education levels, people who are using some form of contraception, and people who already have children and are of varying marital status are getting abortions in Utah.
Read more in The Salt Lake Tribune.
UNEQUAL ACCESS: WHY PrEP ISN’T REACHING BLACK WOMEN: A story from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that Black women face significant obstacles in accessing PrEP, the safest and most common treatment for HIV. Though Black women make up an outsize share of HIV patients, issues like medical racism, noninclusive marketing, and stigma are “tremendous barriers” that prevent them from being prescribed PrEP. On top of the $2,000 cost to start PrEP, the medication requires regular blood testing, which poses economic and logistic issues that disproportionately affect Black Americans. Currently, the treatment is only covered by private insurance, and not health care programs like Medicaid.
“Policies that increase access to health insurance, such as Medicaid expansion, can improve access to PrEP,” the study said. “This may be especially impactful for the southern US.”
Tiara Willie, an assistant professor of mental health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, urged the health care system to shift its focus to helping Black women access this crucial care: “If we don’t figure out how we can change the system, we’re just going to continue to keep failing Black women.”
Read more in KFF.