Southwest Women’s Law Center
In 2017, the New Mexico Perinatal Collaborative, Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, Southwest Women’s Law Center (SWLC), and Young Women United are continuing their work, begun in 2016 with support from NIRH, to increase access to LARC while preventing coercion. By assessing the current state of LARC access in rural New Mexico and specifically among Native women, improving training, mentoring, and educational materials for health care providers, and advocating for administrative policy change that will address inadequate LARC reimbursement, the coalition is eliminating barriers to LARC across the state, with a specific focus on underserved populations NIRH supports its LARC partners by offering technical assistance as needed, linking their work to state and national trends and best practices, and lifting up their successes and lessons learned to share with the field. Through past partnerships with NIRH, SWLC, Planned Parenthood of New Mexico (PPNM), and Young Women United (YWU) have collaborated to form a statewide advisory working group to address administrative barriers to LARCs across the state. Their work together involved research to map the landscape of LARC access and determine the breadth of challenges that providers face, coupled with policy advocacy to address known financial barriers, innovative solutions for advance stocking of devices, and the debundling of LARC reimbursement from the global rate received by federally qualified health centers (FQHCs). They have worked to secure access to LARCs through private insurance, including by ensuring that insurance companies are covering LARCs as required by law and informing consumers of that coverage and by advocating for the state to include LARC provision as a measure of “network adequacy.” Such a measure would require that insurance plans include a sufficient number of providers who can offer LARCs, an area of particular importance in such a rural state. The work of this collaboration is centered on communities of color as decision makers and partners to responsibly integrate non-coercive provider training and public awareness of LARCs. In 2011, the Southwest Women’s Law Center hosted a bootcamp for legislators in New Mexico on current and pending reproductive health policy and provided messaging training and talking points on insurance coverage of abortion.