Thread by @19thnews

President Joe Biden signed executive orders Thursday that will have major ramifications for women and LGBTQ+ people’s access to health care and reproductive health services.

@MikhailAlexa with the details: bit.ly/3r20O8E

1️⃣ The Biden-Harris administration will direct @HHSGov to open and heavily publicize a special enrollment period for the Affordable Care Act insurance marketplace, from February 15 to May 15. bit.ly/3r20O8E

Women, who are more likely to cite cost as a barrier to having insurance, could benefit from a heavily publicized enrollment period for subsidized insurance. bit.ly/3r20O8E

Transparency about the process could also be beneficial to transgender people, one in five of whom are uninsured. bit.ly/3r20O8E

The executive order also further directs federal agencies to look at Trump-era policies that worked to undermine the ACA:

— rules loosening health insurance protections for people with pre-existing conditions
— Medicaid waivers that could have undercut the program’s benefits

This order will also specifically focus on robust outreach, including paid advertisements, to reach eligible people who have not been made aware of the open enrollment.

The Trump administration previously cut efforts to advertise open enrollment periods. bit.ly/3r20O8E

2️⃣ Biden also signed an executive order that could start the process for rescinding Trump-era restrictions to Title X, the program that provides federal grants for family planning clinics. bit.ly/3r20O8E

The Trump administration prohibited clinics from getting funding from Title X if they provided referrals for abortions, leaving out more than 400 Planned Parenthood affiliates.

Many of these clinics provided a range of reproductive health services. bit.ly/3r20O8E

The change by the Trump administration cut Title X’s patient capacity by half, affecting 1.6 million patients, according to @Guttmacher.

If implemented, Biden’s change could bring back those clinics that were barred. bit.ly/3r20O8E

To address reproductive rights abroad, Biden also repealed the Mexico City policy, also known as the “global gag rule,” which prohibits foreign aid groups that get certain kinds of U.S. funding from “perform[ing] or actively promot[ing] abortion as a method of family planning.”

Trump further expanded this policy to include all public health aid abroad, about $12 billion dollars, per @Guttmacher, including money that addressed HIV treatment, pregnancy-related health, malaria, tuberculosis, water and sanitation, and child nutrition.bit.ly/3r20O8E

Studies show that the implementation of the Mexico City policy was associated with a 13.5 percent reduction in the use of contraception and a 40 percent increase in the rate of abortion. bit.ly/3r20O8E

In Mozambique, a country suffering from high levels of AIDS-related mortality, at least 90 family planning clinics have closed since 2017 as a result of this rule, according to The Lancet, a medical journal. bit.ly/3r20O8E

Health-care advocates have called on Biden to take immediate action to erase all of the reproductive policies the Trump administration put in place to limit global funding. bit.ly/3r20O8E

“We are calling on the Biden administration to take bold action to stop this deadly cycle of granting or rescinding human rights when the political tides shift. The U.S. has an obligation to safeguard human rights for all.”

More from @MikhailAlexa: bit.ly/3r20O8E