Stateline: Nevada State Senator Pat Spearman and Birth Control Prescriptions: Women Gain Record Power in State Legislatures

Stateline Nevada State Senator Pat Spearman and Birth Control Prescriptions: Women Gain Record Power in State Legislatures

Nevada state Sen. Pat Spearman has led legislation to passage as the party's chief majority whip. A record number of women have taken leadership roles in state legislatures, meaning they can not only add to the conversation, but in many cases control which conversation is being had. J. Scott Applewhite The Associated Press

This story has been updated to correct the title of Kelly Dittmar and to accurately reflect the number of states with female house speakers.

Nevada state Sen. Pat Spearman, a Democrat and chief majority whip, successfully shepherded legislation in 2020 requiring pharmacists to honor 12-month doctors’ prescriptions for birth control pills, over the objections of some male lawmakers.

“We had men on a committee making statements like, ‘if you give them a whole year’s supply, they are going to sell them,’” Spearman recalled in a phone interview. “People don’t get them to sell them, they get them to use them.”

Women in the Nevada legislature, the only one with a female majority, brought focus to the issue, Spearman said.

“There’s no doubt that it would not have gotten done [in 2020] had women not held power,” she said.

That bill and others addressing the disproportionate number of Black women who die in childbirth and designating areas for nursing mothers, for example, “sailed through because we had women on the committees who understood what they were talking about,” Spearman said.

A similar birth control bill was sponsored in Virginia in 2017 by state Rep. Eileen Filler-Corn, a Democrat. Over the next few years, Filler-Corn also took on other women’s issues. She successfully put into law a requirement that campus police investigating sexual assault crimes undergo sensitivity training, and stopped internal ultrasound requirements as a prerequisite to abortions.

Filler-Corn is now the speaker. She presided over the House of Delegates when Virginia became the 38th and final state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 2020.

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Stateline Nevada State Senator Pat Spearman and Birth Control Prescriptions: Women Gain Record Power in State Legislatures

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