Leadership Quote by Louise Slaughter

The sentence is built to sound almost boring, and that is its political force. Louise Slaughter isn’t offering a soaring slogan; she’s laying down a plain, prosecutorial fact pattern: “many,” “cannot afford,” “on their own.” Each phrase anticipates the predictable counterargument that contraception is merely a matter of personal responsibility. By stressing cost and self-funding, she frames access not as a lifestyle preference but as a barrier created by economics and policy.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of a system that treats reproductive autonomy as a consumer good. “Contraceptive services and supplies” is careful legislative language, broad enough to cover clinic visits, prescriptions, counseling, and devices - not just a box of pills. It signals that the real obstacle isn’t ignorance or morality; it’s the infrastructure of healthcare financing: insurance coverage, Medicaid eligibility, Title X clinics, employer plans, and the kinds of restrictions that make “coverage” exist on paper but not at the pharmacy counter.

Slaughter, a longtime advocate for women’s health in Congress, is speaking from the context of U.S. fights over whether contraceptives should be mandated as preventive care or carved out for religious and ideological objections. The line’s intent is coalition-minded: it appeals to fairness rather than identity politics, and it turns contraception into a pocketbook issue. The rhetorical move is also strategic: it shifts the debate away from sex and toward what happens when policy forces poor women to absorb costs that wealthier women barely notice - making inequality reproduce itself, literally and financially.