Dn the framework of the Social Security financing project for 2023, the Minister of Health, François Braun, announced to us, on September 20, 2022, the implementation, from 1er January 2023, easier access to emergency contraception for women of all ages. Concretely, we will now all be able to obtain the “morning after pill” in pharmacies, without a prescription and free of charge.
Previously, this was only allowed for underage women, while women between the ages of 18 and 26 had to present a prescription to be reimbursed. Things are therefore moving forward, but too slowly and without the ambition suited to the fight against a highly unequal situation that persists. During 2016, according to the latest figures available, emergency contraception concerned 6.2% of heterosexual women aged 15 to 49 who did not want to have a child.
“Classic” female contraception concerned 92% of them. So what about advances for this overwhelming majority of women for whom contraception is not an option? Today, it is still the sacred age of 26 that determines the right of women to be reimbursed in whole or in part for certain means of contraception.
The age criterion is archaic
The Social Security financing law for 2023 came very recently to extend the free use of certain means of contraception to women under 26, compared to 18 a year ago. This particularly concerns so-called “first and second generation” pills, implants or intrauterine devices. This is an important step forward.
But, past the fateful age of 26, the cost of these means of contraception is automatically lowered to 65%. In France, therefore, there is no access to free contraception for women over 26, who have no choice but to finance it from their own means. This contributes to a discriminatory burden on their purchasing power.
The construction of a whole system of contraceptive care around the sole discriminating criterion of age is both archaic and intolerable. Archaic first, because it carries, in an underlying way, a natalist vision which would like that, after 26 years, any normally constituted woman fully assumes her natural desire for a child.
The timid advances in male contraception
It should be remembered that in 2019 the average age of women at the birth of their first child was 28.8 years (Eurostat). And, unsurprisingly, the age curve is increasing. Intolerable then, because it contributes to reinforce the contraceptive responsibility which still weighs almost exclusively on women.
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