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How America’s ‘most powerful lobby’ is stifling States see drop in birth control, emergency contraceptives, efforts to reform oil well cleanup in state after state USC study shows By Mark Olalde, ProPublica
By City News Service
This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Photo by Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition on Unsplash
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California oil wells. | Photo by h2kyaks CC BY-NC 2.0
Series: Unplugged: Will Taxpayers Foot the Oil Industry’s Cleanup Bill? nplugged oil and gas wells accelerate climate change, threaten public health and risk hitting taxpayers’ wallets. Money set aside to fix the problem covers less than 2% of the impending cost. Last year, representatives of New Mexico’s oil industry met behind closed doors with the very groups with which they typically clash — state regulators and environmentalists — in search of an answer to the more than 70,000 wells sitting unplugged across the state. Many leak oil, brine and toxic or explosive gasses, and more than 1,700 have already been left to the public to clean up. The situation is so dire
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that oil companies agreed to help try to find a solution. After months of negotiations, the state regulators who ran the meetings emerged with a proposal that they hoped would appease everyone in the room. The bill would instruct drillers to set aside more money to plug their wells, authorize regulators to block risky sales to companies that would be unlikely to afford to clean up their wells and implement a buffer zone between wells and hospitals, schools, homes and other buildings. The industry, unhappy with the state’s final language, turned against the bill it helped shape. The influential New Mexico Oil and Gas Association told its supporters that HB 133 was “a radical
and dangerous approach designed to strangle the oil and gas industry” and asked them to send their elected representatives a form letter opposing it. If passed, the trade group proclaimed, the bill would “Destroy New Mexico.” The Independent Petroleum Association of New Mexico, which represents small oil companies, called the bill “overzealous.” In the face of such opposition, Democrats removed key provisions. The New Mexico Oil and Gas Association eventually changed its position to neutral, but largely stripped of substance, the bill died on the floor of the House of Representatives. “Industry killing the bills was the dynamic I saw,” said Adam Peltz, a senior attorney with the Envi-
ronmental Defense Fund who helped write the New Mexico proposal, as well as similar bills in other oilproducing states. New Mexico faces a multibillion-dollar shortfall between the money companies have set aside to plug wells and the actual cost of doing so, according to state research, a reality mirrored in many states. Across the country, more than 2 million oil and gas wells sit unplugged, but the money held in cleanup funds, called bonds, is many tens of billions of dollars short of the projected costs, ProPublica and Capital & Main found. Now, a once-ina-lifetime effort to shrink that shortfall is underway, See Oil wells Page 14
omen living in states with the most restrictive abortion policies after the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade experienced steep declines in the use of birth control pills and emergency contraceptives, according to a USC study released Wednesday. The findings, which appear in the medical journal JAMA Network Open, suggest that the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case had an even wider impact for women’s reproductive health than previously thought, the authors said. According to the study, states that implemented a full ban on abortion after the ruling saw significant declines in the number of prescriptions filled for birth control pills and emergency contraceptives at pharmacies. These reductions weren’t found in states whose policies were unchanged after the Dobbs decision, according to the findings. The study said many family planning clinics with abortion services closed immediately after the Roe reversal, particularly in the most restrictive states. “Because 11% of women rely on such clinics for the
provision of prescriptions for contraceptives -- many of which are filled at outside pharmacies -- these closures may have reduced access to oral and emergency contraceptives,” Dima Qato, associate professor at the USC Alfred E. Mann School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences of USC, said in a statement. The Supreme Court decision may also have contributed to declines in the use of emergency contraceptives due to misunderstandings about their legality, according to the study. A January 2023 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that half of women in full-ban states believed Plan B was illegal in their state. During the time period analyzed, March 2021 and October 2023, 142.8 million prescriptions for oral contraceptive pills and 904,269 prescriptions for emergency contraceptives were dispensed at retail pharmacies, researchers said. Before Roe’s reversal, trends in monthly prescription rates for oral and emergency contraception were See Abortion policies Page 27