For individual women, this is certainly about their wallets. The Affordable Care Act’s requirement that health insurance offer birth control without cost-sharing has resulted in an estimated 57.6 million American women getting contraception without a co-payment. That has saved them a huge amount of money: $1.4 billion in 2013 alone.

Image Credit... Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press

The ability to opt out of offering no-cost contraception, then, is not just about religious objections. Obamacare lifted an enormous financial burden that women alone had to bear. Before the A.C.A., 85 percent of health insurance plans at large companies offered contraceptive coverage, but most required at least a co-payment. Individual women paid about $250 a year. Now the president has given insurance companies a way out of taking on that burden.

The Trump administration has tried to reassure women that they can still get inexpensive birth control, asserting that “many forms of contraception are available for around $50 a month.” Even if that’s the case, $50 a month — $600 a year — is no small item in many people’s budgets, particularly for the women who make up a majority of low-wage workers. As the Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has pointed out, the cost of an intrauterine device, one of the most effective forms of contraception, is about the same as a month’s minimum-wage pay.

This doesn’t just matter to individual women. Consumer spending makes up about 70 percent of all economic growth, and women are responsible for an outsize portion of that spending. Billions of dollars less a year in their pockets means billions of dollars less that they could spend on goods other than birth control, dampening their ability to support businesses and the economy.

But a larger economic impact of reconstructing a cost barrier to contraception is likely to be felt throughout the entire work force. High birth rates have historically lowered women’s ability to get and keep paid work, which isn’t so hard to understand — holding down a job becomes a lot more difficult when it has to be balanced with pregnancies and raising children. That’s particularly true if women aren’t even in control of when they become pregnant.