Sen. Denise Hayman, D-Bozeman, (center) discusses her Montana Right to Contraception bill she plans to introduce during the 2025 session in a news conference at the Capitol on Oct. 31, 2024. (Photo by Blair Miller, Daily Montanan)
A Democratic state senator from Bozeman plans to run a bill in the upcoming legislative session that would put provide Montanans with a clear right to contraceptives as part of the push for bodily autonomy.
Sen. Denise Hayman, D-Bozeman, said Thursday that since Congress is deadlocked on moving forward with the federal version of the Right to Contraception Act – the latest version stalled in the Senate in June after a motion to move forward to a vote on the bill itself failed to reach the 60-vote threshold – she believes Montana lawmakers can come together to pass one of their own. Sen. Jon Tester, a Democrat, voted for the motion, while Sen. Steve Daines opposed it.
She filed a bill draft request for the Montana Right to Contraception Act on Thursday.
“If the politicians in Washington, D.C., won’t take action to protect our right to contraception, we will,” Hayman said at a news conference at the state Capitol that also featured Rep. Jill Cohenour, D-East Helena, Brooke Cardwell, a certified nurse midwife, and Persephone Fossi, the president of Student Advocates for Reproductive Rights at Montana State University.
The four said Hayman’s bill would mirror the latest U.S. Senate contraceptives bill, sponsored by Sen. Ed Markey, D-Massachusetts. That bill says that a person has the right to obtain and use contraception free of coercion and protects health care providers who prescribe contraceptives for both women and men. Hayman said she planned for her bill to keep the government out of peoples’ choices to use contraceptives, including IUDs, condoms and birth control pills.
“Montanans are fiercely independent. We don’t like being told what to do, particularly when it infringes on personal liberties and common sense,” she said. “We want freedom to decide for ourselves when or if to start a family, and we don’t want these decisions made for us.”
Cardwell said people often make the mistake of believing contraception is only used to prevent pregnancies. But it is also used to manage medical conditions and for preventative care, and allows people to decide when they might want to start a family, if ever, she said.
She also said that other states’ restrictions on reproductive health have led to medical providers leaving those states because they cannot perform the care their patients deserve and require.
Fossi, who has worked at an OB/GYN clinic during her time in school, said Americans are lucky to live in a time and place where access to high-quality contraceptives is widely available because it allows them to choose when or whether they want to have children.
She said at the clinic, she has seen patients come in whose doctors would not provide them birth control for women, and young people who were not provided sex education at all during their upbringing. She said that politicians spreading what she called “false information” about contraceptives is making matters worse.
“Attacking birth control, like IUDs and emergency contraceptives that millions of people use every day safely, it is incredibly important that we maintain our contraceptive freedoms as Montanans and Americans,” Fossi said. “…As a young woman planning her future, I don’t want lawmakers interfering with my right to make decisions about my future.”
Cohenour pointed out that in Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in the Dobbs case in 2022 that overturned Roe vs. Wade protections, he also wanted to reconsider “all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents” because they were all “demonstrably erroneous.”
One of those decisions was the court’s 1965 opinion in Griswold vs. Connecticut, which established the right to contraception and led to Roe vs. Wade in 1972.
“After Dobbs, we should not be counting on this court to protect our rights,” Cohenour said. “Make no mistake about it, our right to contraception is under threat from people like Justice Thomas, who want to roll back the clock on our freedoms.”
Asked if they see momentum from Montana’s vote on CI-128, the initiative seeking to enshrine abortion in Montana’s constitution, which a poll released this week shows is garnering significant support, carrying over into the legislative session, Cardwell said she believes if Montana passes the initiative, that will show that the state cares about women and bodily autonomy.
“Bill after bill after bill across our nation is coming after women’s rights and freedoms to be able to do all the things that we just talked about – our ability to have children when we want to in conjunction with our families and our doctors,” Cohenour added. “That is what is being protected with 128; that is what is being protected with this kind of a bill.”
Republicans are likely to still hold the majority in both the state House and Senate even if Democrats flip some seats following redistricting, as Republicans held supermajorities in both chambers last session. Hayman said she was hopeful that Democrats could pick up more seats in next week’s election, but acknowledged the bill would likely have to pass with Republican support.
She said she believed it could garner that support however, in part because contraceptives are a less partisan issue than abortion. Cardwell and Fossi said it was important to note that contraception is a matter that transcends political lines and genders.
A bill from Rep. Alice Buckley, D-Bozeman, last session to require insurance cover a 12-month supply of contraceptives was passed with broad majorities and signed by Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte.
“As a constituent of representatives, it’s very important that both sides of the aisle remember that when we talk about passing laws that will impact the people of the state, we pass laws that resonate with the people who live here, that are important to the people who live here,” Cardwell said.
Cohenour said she believed the issue could break through any partisan lines during the upcoming session for that reason.
“One thing is that the women of the legislature actually do talk to each other, and I think this would be one of those bills that would be a good one to talk across the aisle and have bipartisan support for going in,” she said. “And I think we could accomplish that because it is a nonpartisan issue. It’s really about health.”