Free the Pill: Native American women and the need for “over the counter” access to birth control pills!

Executive Summary 

The Native American Women’s Health, Education, Resource Center (NAWHERC) is a project of the Native American Community Board (NACB), based on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in Lake Andes, South Dakota and has been serving Indigenous women and families for 32 years. It is headquartered in the Resource Center, which provides direct services to the communities, including working on policy issues that improve the health and wellbeing of Native women and their families.  

The Oral Contraceptives (OCs) Over-the-Counter (OTC) Working Group is committed to making the birth control pill available over the counter to reduce disparities in reproductive health care access and outcomes, and to increase opportunities to access safe, effective contraception, free of unnecessary control, as part of a healthy sexual and reproductive life. The Native American Women’s Health, Education Resource Center (NAWHERC) has been participating in the OCs OTC Working Group for the past three years. The working group’s effort and message is communicated to the public through Free the Pill, a multi-year public education campaign supporting an over-the-counter birth control pill.  

We are the organization that successfully advocated for the Indian Health Service to put emergency contraceptives (Plan B One-Step) over the counter, but it was five years after the rest of the women in the country had over-the-counter access. We would like to see OCs OTC reproductive justice access for Native women to happen simultaneously as the rest of the women in the US. We are working with the national Free the Pill movement and have created an educational campaign tailored to Native women and girls and plan to roll out activities along with the national coalition. We are not totally on our own, but we want to have access simultaneously.  

In our work, we utilize traditional “talking circles” or roundtables with community women to identify priority areas for our work. Throughout 2016 we hosted women’s roundtables on rape and sex trafficking, with the women’s recommendations leading to a broad campaign to break the silence and create safe zones for young people to seek help. Reproductive justice issues for Native American women are a blanket woven of all of these aspects of our sexuality – access, choice, family dysfunction and sexual history and/or trauma. By hosting talking circles with Native women in the “bellwether” states of Oklahoma, New Mexico, and South Dakota, we take our directions from the women in the communities most impacted by restrictive policies. By utilizing a traditional and confidential process, we identify the issues and gaps Native women face in accessing health care and turn them into helpful policies.