Congress Must Restore College Birth-Control Discounts

With Congress sprinting toward its holiday recess, Slate’s Amanda Schaffer urges legislators to correct a 2005 omission that has made birth-control pills much more expensive for college women. With heavily funded federal abstinence programs doing little and teen birth rates back on the rise, now's not the time to make it tougher for college women to get contraception, Schaffer writes.

Lawmakers now say that the exclusion of university health centers from a list of providers eligible for drug discounts was an oversight, but efforts to correct the mistake have been slow. The impact has been great: Pills that used to cost $3-10 per month now cost $30-50. "Make it easier for college students to protect themselves," Schaffer urges. (More birth control pill stories.)