Rep. Holmes Norton Puts Reproductive Care In Context In Hearing

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Part of Rep. Holmes Norton’s (D-DC) questioning during the contraception hearing with Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke placed contraception coverage in a larger context of women’s access to reproductive care. We’re accustomed to the fact that women live longer today, Norton said. I wonder if people realize that’s a 20th century phenomenon. If you visit the graveyards from the past, women died earlier, many from child birth and it’s complications.

Norton went on to discuss her own experience of having two children in the 1970s. My family paid almost all the cost of bearing those two children in a hospital. As recently as the 1970s, insurance companies paid a fraction of the cost of a normal childbirth in a hospital.

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