“It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry” ― H.L. Mencken
Kellyanne Conway tries to thread the choice/contraception needle
Kellyanne Conway claims the GOP can win women’s votes using contraception. That seems like another absurd ‘alternative fact’. Especially as the Supreme Court today decided to hear a case that might restrict medical abortions. Conway would like women to think of choice and contraception as distinct issues. But I suspect that many women conflate the two. This approach is reasonable, as they are both parts of the reproductive continuum.
Can you be a pro-woman misogynist?
Republicans face a paradox. They are misogynists who need women to vote for them — an electoral choice which that demographic is disinclined to make. In 2020, women favored Biden by 11% — unlike men, who gave Trump a 2% edge. The GOP has done nothing to improve its standing with women since.
After that election, Republicans succeeded in stripping women of the constitutional right to choose. In addition, they have shown the practical effect of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe by enacting abortion bans in 14 states and restricting the right to only six weeks in two others.
Worse for their pro-woman PR effort, the GOP promise to make exceptions for women’s health is a fiction. The Texas Supreme Court's decision to deny a mother the right to terminate a genetically unviable fetus, putting her health and future fertility at risk, has proved that their ‘exceptions’ to an abortion ban are a herd of unicorns.
Republicans and birth control
The GOP has shown itself an implacable foe of pregnant women’s reproductive rights. And they are angling to compromise the rights of non-pregnant women to stay un-pregnant by attacking certain methods of birth control. Note: some extreme conservatives (Clarence Thomas et al.) would like to broaden the ban to almost all birth control methods. However, they have not yet figured out how to stop women counting.
Conway plays Sisyphus
Some conservatives have realized that this gleeful crusade to demean women is political suicide. (An overwhelming 93% of Republicans support the pill. While 62% are even OK with Plan B.) These rare right-wing realists understand the electoral devastation of foot-shooting Republican rhetoric on women’s issues. Kellyanne Conway is one. And she is trying to get Republican lawmakers to see the problem.
As The Hill reports:
Kellyanne Conway is going to Capitol Hill on Wednesday with a message for Republicans: promote contraception or risk defeat in 2024.
The former senior counselor and campaign manager for President Donald Trump is part of a group set to brief Republicans on how they might get ahead of Democrats’ attacks that the GOP is anti-woman by talking more about protecting contraception and less about banning abortion.
It is a good political strategy. Unfortunately for Conway, there is little reason to believe Republican politicians are interested in stopping their assault on women. They are unchastened by a perfect record of electoral failure when abortion is on the ballot — even in red states (see Kansas and Ohio). As DK’s Walter Einenkel pointed out in his diary JD Vance claims not to know any Republicans against birth control. Here's a list of 195 of them
The Supreme Court is also not helping her cause.
SCOTUS hates women
Conservatives may like to draw a line between contraception and abortion — except when they claim young female flibbertigibbets are using abortion as contraception. However, I suspect that for women, choice and contraception are two facets of the same issue.
“I am all for contraception, but I want to ban abortion” may sound like a reasonable position to a conservative guy. But I imagine the people most directly affected by the subject, women of childbearing age, would prefer to vote for politicians who support a woman’s right to choose in all circumstances.
Bearing that in mind, the Supreme Court today did not do the pro-contraception, anti-abortion bloc any favors. They decided to review the legal status of a drug used in medical abortions. As SCOTUS Blog reported:
The Supreme Court on Wednesday morning agreed to review a ruling by a federal appeals court that would significantly restrict (but not eliminate altogether) access to a drug used in medication abortions, which account for over half of all abortions performed in the United States. Wednesday’s announcement means that the justices will weigh in on the issue of abortion for the first time since overruling the constitutional right to an abortion last year in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Their decisions in the new cases, Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine and Danco Laboratories v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, are likely to come sometime next summer, in the middle of the 2024 presidential campaign.
If the six conservatives on the court continue on the path that started with Dobbs, they will make abortion illegal in all circumstances a federal mandate — states' rights be damned. If they achieve that, where is the evidence that they will not overturn Griswold (1965), which guaranteed contraception to married couples, and Eisenstadt vs Baird (1972), which extended the right to everyone else?
How will the war on women end?
Zealots do not respect boundaries. Poland is never enough. Hopefully, their anti-contraception fanaticism will prove to be their Stalingrad.