When 21-year old Christina Martel would renew her birth control prescription at Planned Parenthood, it was usually a relatively simple affair. But this summer, getting her prescription became significantly more difficult.
Martel, who is uninsured and makes less than $1000 a month at her part-time job, said she can't afford to go to a regular gynecologist to get her prescription adjusted, so she asked her new Indianapolis Planned Parenthood clinic about their sliding-pay scale for low-income patients this past June.
The clinic told Martel she would have to pay full price to meet with a physician because they had just been defunded by the state government, so she decided to wait until she returned to her home-state New Hampshire last week to have a doctor's appointment. Not only had Planned Parenthood been defunded there as well, she found out, but their license to dispense birth control and antibiotics had also been taken away.
"I was shocked to learn that they were no longer able to dispense medication on-site, and enraged when I realized this meant that I would have to pay triple the cost to get it filled at a pharmacy," she told HuffPost in an email.
Martel had paid $12 for a month's worth of birth control pills at Planned Parenthood. She now has to pay $33 a month at the regular pharmacy, which she said really starts to add up.
"I'm just an average broke college student with loans coming out my ears, and I don't want to shell out $33 every month for a prescription that I take first and foremost as a relief to the discomfort I experience on a monthly basis due to painful menstrual symptoms, and secondarily as a means of not getting pregnant," she said.
GOP lawmakers in four states so far -- Indiana, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Kansas -- have defunded Planned Parenthood in their 2011 legislative sessions because some of the organization's clinics provide abortions. A council of five men in New Hampshire voted to stop the flow of Title X family planning funds to Planned Parenthood and cancel a state contract that allowed it to dispense low-cost birth control and antibiotics on site. Texas passed a bill that puts Planned Parenthood at the bottom of the priority list for state funds, and an Ohio lawmaker floated a "Dear Colleague" letter on Wednesday announcing his intention to defund the health provider.
