Dozens gathered on the sidewalk across from the Alaska State Capitol building Wednesday holding pink and cardboard signs saying, “healthcare is a right, not a privilege” and “reproductive freedom by any means necessary.”
And about half the group were teenagers who canʼt vote yet.
They were there to protest Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s veto of a bill that would have expanded access to birth control.
For Juneau Douglas High School Yadaa.at Kalé senior Nova Brakes-Hines, the specter of limited reproductive care has haunted her for two years — and her family for longer.
“My mom was a teen mother and didn’t really have the right to choose, and Roe v. Wade is something that’s been affecting me since I was 15 and it got overturned,” Brakes-Hines said. “So it’s just really important to me.”
She said she wants to have control over her own future.
“I am a really hard working student, and I do a lot of things to try to make the best future for myself,” she said. “And so the idea that that could be stripped away from me at any moment, even if it’s not my choice, is really terrifying for me and a lot of young women.”
She said that when she’s old enough, she hopes to vote the politicians who are trying to take that away out of office.
House Bill 17 would have required health insurance companies to provide birth control for 12 months at a time. Now, they only cover one to three months before patients would have to return to the pharmacy or provider.
And while going back to the pharmacy regularly is inconvenient for people in larger cities, it can be impossible in rural communities, said Supanika Ordóñez, another protestor.
“And there’s a big difference when you can get a year’s worth of prescription versus just a month at a time, especially if you don’t have access to a pharmacy, it’s really prohibitive to have to keep going back,” Ordóñez said.
Juneau Rep. Sara Hannan – who is a Democrat – said that for people working and living in remote communities, the delays in receiving their prescription could lead to lapses in taking the medication, which impacts its effectiveness.
“But across Alaska, the de-facto norm is mail-out prescriptions,” she said. “And we know if there’s a mail delay and you can’t get a renewal until 90 days, and they don’t send it until day 87 and the mail doesn’t get there until it’s day 92 and you’ve had a five-day gap in your contraceptive, that’s a problem.”
And Hannan said she thought the legislature had worked out any concerns with the bill in the many years itʼs spent in committee. It also had bipartisan support.
“So I think because this bill had been worked on for eight years, right?” she said. “This wasn’t its first rodeo. I’ve been in legislature three terms. It had already been there before I got elected, and I think we believed that those concerns had been addressed. This isn’t introducing any new process of techniques. It’s just giving a consumer and access to a drug that they need.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for Dunleavy told Alaska Public Media that “Contraceptives are widely available, and compelling insurance companies to provide mandatory coverage for a year is bad policy.”
But Juneau Sen. Jesse Kiehl – also a Democrat – said the veto doesnʼt make sense, and it wasnʼt expected.
“It was an incomprehensible veto, and you can hear people are really upset about it,” he said amid the chanting Wednesday. “They should be.”