Warning: Birth-Control Desert Ahead

What if you had to drive more than 100 miles to get an IUD or a pack of Pills? In certain zip codes, women already do—and the situation may get worse.

- Jennifer Gerson Uffalussy

As an undergrad at Penn State University in State College, Pennsylvania, Jennifer Pamplin, now 25, juggled psychology classes, homework, friends, a boyfriend, a work study gig…and a three-hour drive home to Pittsburgh whenever she needed birth control pills.

With no health insurance through her parents and no money for a student plan through school, she’d qualified for Medicaid, the publicly funded program for low-income Americans (see stats at right). But while it covered her Ortho Tri-Cyclen, no doctor or pharmacy near campus accepted Jennifer’s plan. Eventually, she became so overwhelmed by the time and gas money it took to refill her prescription that she let it lapse.

That’s when she got pregnant. By then, she was in the process of moving to Montana to attend graduate school and hadn’t yet applied for Medicaid in her new state. She had no job or insurance—and chose to have an abortion. Not that that was accessible either: After scrounging together the money, she and her boyfriend made two separate road trips—totaling 15 hours—to the closest public clinic in the state that provided abortions. “I felt like the pregnancy was my fault,” she says. “It was like I had failed myself.”

In fact, it was the system that had failed her.

STRANDED WITHOUT CARE

Jennifer was one of nearly 20 million American women stuck in a “contraceptive desert”— defined by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy as a county in which there’s only one (or no) public clinics that offer the full range of birth-control choices for every 1,000 women in need of subsidized contraception. We know what you’re thinking: vast rural stretches and tiny towns, right? Wrong. These health-care wastelands also exist in major cities, on both U.S. coasts, and in the heartland, according to the National Campaign.