Contraceptive coverage gaining in Legislature.

Byline: David Steves The Register-Guard

SALEM - The Oregon Legislature renewed one of its most long-running debates Thursday, when a Senate committee passed a bill that would require health insurers to cover contraceptives.

The proposal, which easily passed in its first hearing in the Senate Human Services Committee, drew hundreds of activists to Salem for the committee work and a mid-day rally to urge the passage of Senate Bill 756. It could be on the Senate floor as early as next week, said committee Chairman Bill Morrisette, D-Spring- field.

Many participants have been pushing the issue for more than a decade.

When the Legislature first started debating whether to require insurers to cover the cost of birth control pills and devices, Michelle Goodin was Michelle Mattern, 20 years old, and still in college.

Since then, she's finished school, gone to work for the city of Eugene, led a legal fight to require the city to cover contraceptives in its health insurance plan, gotten married and now is pregnant with her first child.

In response to her 2003 legal action, the city of Eugene's health insurance now covers employees' birth control. Goodin said her pregnancy gave her a new perspective on the city's previous policy, which still persists elsewhere in Oregon under employer-provided medical cov- erage.

"They wouldn't cover my birth control, but they're willing to cover the cost of my pregnancy," said Goodin, a Springfield resident who is now 32. She was among the activists who came to the Capitol to urge lawmakers to pass the contraceptive mandate that has been proposed but rejected each session since 1993.

Senate Majority Leader Kate Brown, D-Portland, was among the early supporters of the proposal 12 years ago when she was in the House's Democratic minority. Now, as majority leader in the Senate, Brown is in a position to ensure that the bill passes in her chamber - a process that got under way with the session's first public hearing in the Senate Human Services Committee on the legislation.

Brown is chagrined that the Oregon Legislature didn't pass such a bill years ago.

"This is embarrassing," said Brown, who noted that 21 other states adopted such legislation in the 1990s. "This is really very basic health care for most women.'

Brown added, though, that she's uncertain how the bill would fare in the House, where Republicans hold the majority.

Activists and organizations that advocate for women's abortion and reproductive rights hold sway with the Senate, but their political adversary, Oregon Right to Life, remains influential among the House's conservative majority in the Republican caucus.

The group's executive director, Gayle Atteberry, said that while Oregon Right to Life had not formally taken a position on SB 756, it generally opposes requiring coverage of contraceptives.

Atteberry said her group was neutral on the use of birth control pills and devices that prevent pregnancy, but some forms of birth control, such as emergency-contraceptive or "morning after" pills, amounted to "abortive" measures, because they prevent an already-fertilized egg, or zygote, from developing.

Paul Robinson, a spokesman for Planned Parenthood of Southwestern Oregon, said the notion that such forms of contraception were "abortive" is not shared by those in the health and science fields, but represents a theological determination that human life begins at conception. A retired pastor with the United Church of Christ, Robinson said that view was not held by all religious groups. He noted that while the Catholic Church and some Protestant denominations hold this belief, many other Christian denominations and the Jewish faith do not consider life to have begun until later in the gestational cycle.

Robinson said the mandatory coverage of contraceptives should unite people who disagree over the more controversial abortion question - since the use of birth control prevents most unwanted pregnancies from occurring, resulting in fewer abortions.

But for the Republican-controlled House, the abortion issue isn't the only one that could make SB 756 a tough sell.

Rep. Billy Dalto, a Salem Republican who chairs the House Health and Human Services Committee, said that while he didn't want to discuss the abortion-tinged politics of the contraceptives bill, there was another element that made it difficult for pro-business Republicans such as himself to support the measure.

"We have to be very careful as a body about adding any mandates that increase the cost of insurance coverage," said Dalto, whose committee in past sessions has been charged with handling contraceptives-related legislation.