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- 23 - accessHealthNews.net September 2023 Volume 9 | Issue No. 74 I n the wake of the Dobbs decision, confusion, fear, and uncertainty about abortion and contraceptive options have interfered with people's ability to access critical reproductive health services, especially in Missouri, a state which has implemented many laws and legislative measures unfriendly to reproductive health care access. Recently, the Missouri Family Health Council launched a program that provides free emergency contraception, called the Free EC Program. Michelle Trupiano, executive director at the MFHC, spoke about the program. The MFHC has been around for over 40 years. Its network includes 20 different health centers that operate around 70-75 health centers across the state and collectively serve over 40,000 patients per year. "Our mission is to champion access to every individual to culturally sensitive quality sexual and reproductive health services," Trupiano said. The MFHC operates in two ways. The first way is in the programmatic service delivery side, where they work as an administrator of grants to find opportunities to help the safety network provide quality family planning services to anybody who needs them, especially under- resourced people who may not be able to access them otherwise. They have also run the Title X federal Family Planning Program for over 40 years. Though they do not provide direct services through that, they put together a network that they flow funding to. They work with health departments, federally qualified action agencies, community action agencies, planned parenthood, and other standalone clinic sites. The MFHC also runs an initiative funded by the Missouri Foundation for Health called The Right Time, a contraceptive equity initiative that aims to remove all financial barriers and any other barriers on the clinic side that may impede people from accessing the care that they need and deserve. They run training and a host of support activities to clinics to ensure that they have all the tools they need to provide quality services. The other side of the MFHC's work is an advocacy program that they run. "We know that there's a lot of systemic and racist barriers that prevent people from accessing care," Trupiano said. "We know that it doesn't really matter how great of a job we do on the service delivery if people can't get the care that they need due to a whole lot of obstacles in front of them, so we try to do a lot of work in Jefferson City and with lawmakers to try to break down some of those barriers and to look holistically at what that looks like." The Free EC Project launched on June 1, but it had been in the works for several months. The MFHC borrowed the idea from a model in Texas and launched it because of the Dobbs decision, wherein abortion became illegal immediately in the state of Missouri and many other states across the country. "One of the other consequences was a lot of confusion and misinformation around contraception, especially emergency contraception and what it is, what it isn't, and whether it was legal," Trupiano said. "So we really launched the initiative for two reasons, and one was to try to combat misinformation around the legality of emergency contraception, that EC is different from medication abortion. A lot of people don't know that and they confuse the two, and so they think that it's illegal or something that they can't access. The second reason was just to get it into the hands of anybody who may need it, so that they have it in their medicine cabinet in case an emergency were to happen. We are really excited about the initiative." Free EC has a women's health nurse practitioner who acts as their clinical director overseeing the program to make sure that the information they are giving is medically accurate and factual. "In my non-clinician lay-speak, emergency contraception is just that," Trupiano explained. "It's contraception that works after unprotected or under-protected intercourse." Emergency contraception works to prevent pregnancy like any other contraception works pre-sexual activity, so it does not terminate a pregnancy. It can work up to 120 hours after unprotected or under-protected intercourse. "Our goal is just that people have accurate information to make decisions that are best for them. We do not have a specific goal in terms of contraception people do access or don't access, it's just about people having accurate information and ability to access it if they want it." - Michelle Trupiano, Executive Director of MFHC READ MORE

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