Today Amplify is joining the National Women's Law Center and Planned Parenthood as a contributor to their Birth Control Blog Carnival. A number of wonderful organizations and writers are participating — you can find a compilation of all of the reflections and analyses on the NWLC's blog.

Earlier this week, the Institute of Medicine (IOM), the independent health arm of the National Academy of Sciences, issued a set of groundbreaking recommendations to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services about preventive health care. Among other things, the IOM has called for FDA-approved birth control to be available without co-payments for all U.S. health insurance plans.

As we wrote yesterday, it's important to remember that these recommendations are just that: the IOM has done its part, but now it's the Obama administration's turn to make sure that these recommendations are implemented faithfully and completely. (If you haven't already, take two minutes to urge President Obama and Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to adopt the IOM guidance in full.)

Now, many in the news media have presented this story using some simple us-versus-them framing. A number of articles and editorials that have covered the IOM's new report weave in quotes from the usual opponents of basic reproductive health, including the laughably anti-family Family Research Council — a fringe group notorious for propagating lies about emergency contraception. In response to the IOM recs, a Family Research Council spokesperson warned that the federal government should not endorse "controversial [contraceptive] services just to placate the abortion industry." Such a conspiracy-driven conflation of contraception and abortion isn't accidental. Indeed, it perfectly illustrates where exactly far-right groups have decided to draw their line in the sand. They're not only against abortion rights. But they're also dead-set against any kind of birth control access and the very idea of birth control itself. They are, ultimately, opposed to letting women and their families access basic health care.

It's time to stop pretending that there is even a penumbra of a real contraception "debate" here. Read the relevant news coverage this week, and you'll quickly find out who makes up the two opposing sides here:

• In favor of expanded birth control coverage: "Obstetricians, gynecologists, public health experts and Democratic women in Congress hailed the recommendations."
• Against contraceptive access: "The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and some conservative groups, including the Family Research Council, denounced the recommendation on birth control."

(The above list is taken from a New York Times article published this Tuesday.)

In other words — on one side, you have clinicians and health care providers, medical and social scientists, and public officials who have actually worked with and served the people and communities that the IOM's report is intended to help. Practitioners whose operative tools are empirical investigation, empirical evidence, and science-backed consensus. On the other end (at the very extreme end), you have the Family Research Council, a group whose expertise is a particular brand of loud-mouth political campaigning — i.e., an ideological, armchair spoiler that knows nothing about actual health delivery. And then you have the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, an institution that must be befuddled by the fact that 98% of Catholic women (who have had sex) have defied its supremely wise counsel and used contraception.

This is all to say that the ethical verdict and the sheer numbers are on our side. Millions of American women and their families use birth control in order to take responsibility for their health — and they would be helped that much more if they knew that their most important health care decisions won't ever have to be compromised by a lack of money or the vagaries of the economy.

Hopefully, the choice for the Obama administration is already clear. There are the ideologues. And then there's the American majority. Best to listen to those who know that reproductive health care IS and will always be preventive health care.