As we've highlighted these past few months, the 2026 North Carolina legislative session has been heavy on pushing policies that mirror harmful federal priorities (e.g., targeting immigrant communities, attacking LGBTQ youth, etc.) and light on promoting policies that actually benefit North Carolinians, such as ensuring access to contraception for everyone who needs it.
Last month, I joined North Carolina senators at the General Assembly for a press conference on a 2025 state bill, the “Right to Use Contraception Act” (SB 413/HB 474). This bill states that the North Carolina government cannot interfere in a person’s right to use contraception. Considering the popularity and wide usage of contraception in our society, this bill would seem noncontroversial. However this bill has not been signed on to by anyone in the Republican party, and has not moved since it was introduced in March 2025.
Without proactive intervention, the future of birth control access will mirror what has happened to abortion access in the nearly four years since Roe was overturned. Just as with abortion, we’ve witnessed decades of attempts to erode access to contraception, including misinformation from state financed anti-abortion centers, medically unsound abstinence-only sex education curricula, attacks on insurance coverage, bans on minors’ access to contraception, and anti-choice medical professionals, websites, and social media influencers spreading false and inflammatory information about the efficacy, science, use, and safety of birth control.
This is the same playbook for attacks on abortion, and the end goal is the same in both instances - to block access to common, safe, and necessary aspects of reproductive health care, in particular women’s healthcare, to score political points.
That’s why proactive legislation that explicitly protects access to contraception, like SB 413/HB 474, is so critical at this moment. We can’t rely on supposed “settled law” and established health practices when a political minority is using all levers of the government to impose its extremist conservative agenda on the rest of us. Access to contraception is an issue of health and freedom, not politics, and we encourage you to talk to candidates about their stance on reproductive freedom as the 2026 election draws near!
With the NC General Assembly still in session right now, you can contact your legislators to ask them if they support this bill; to talk about protecting voting rights; or to share what priorities you want to see lawmakers focus on. You can send them an email here. You can also find other ways to take action on our Take Action page!
