(Albany, NY Nov. 2, 2011) In the latest Congressional attack on women’s health care, House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health Chair Rep. Joe Pitts held a hearing today on taking away new preventive health benefits from millions of women nationwide, including health plan coverage of birth control without copays. This benefit in new health insurance plans is one of the greatest advancements for women’s health care in decades.

Today’s hearing is in keeping with the House’s pattern of attacks on women’s health. “Since the beginning of this Congressional session, the House has passed seven anti-women’s health care bills, showing the ideological focus that dominates their work,” said Family Planning Advocates President and CEO M. Tracey Brooks. “Yet, the Republican House leadership has yet to put forth a jobs bill; the dominant focus of the American people.”

In August of this year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human services accepted the recommendation of the nonpartisan Institute of Medicine that birth control and eight other health care services be considered  preventive and, therefore, covered by health plans without co-pays or deductibles.

This most recent effort in a series of assaults on women’s health care again shows that “House Republicans are out of touch with mainstream America,” Brooks stated.  Seventy-one percent of American voters, including 77 percent of Catholic women voters and 72 percent of Republican women, support health plans covering birth control without co-pays, according to Brooks.

“The new HHS guideline on birth control meets a tremendous need given that more than 98 percent of U.S. women have used contraception at some point in their lives,” stated Brooks. “Yet, according to the Guttmacher Institute, nearly half of all pregnancies in the U.S. every year are unplanned, making the case for broader access to birth control.

Family Planning Advocates of New York State is a non-profit, statewide organization dedicated to protecting and expanding access to a full range of reproductive health care services. It represents New York’s Planned Parenthood affiliates and other family planning centers, as well as hundreds of organizations and thousands of individual members.