You may dimly recall a moment last year when House Republicans tried halfheartedly to “pivot” on the issue of abortion. Reacting to an electoral backlash in the 2022 elections, they desperately tried to reassure their constituents that even though there was no longer any right to abortion, the real issue was access to birth control, and, um, yes! They still approved of birth control!
They were lying, of course. They’d already gone on record the year before opposing the Right to Contraception Act, which was introduced by Democrats immediately after the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade. That bill (which was ultimately blocked in the Senate thanks to—yes, Republican opposition) would have guaranteed every American’s right to purchase contraception without government restriction. That is, before the Supreme Court could fulfill the aims of Justice Clarence Thomas (among others) to eradicate it the same way he and his right-wing colleagues had so gleefully erased Roe.
But—as has been emphasized repeatedly—Republicans’ real motivation is to control and punish the behavior of (mostly women) who may want to have non-procreating sex. So any legislation increasing access to birth control is invariably conflated with the overarching forced-birth dogma issued by the religious fanatics who vote to keep Republicans in office. True to form, Republicans’ excuse in opposing the Right to Contraception Act was that it included (among other things) further funding for Planned Parenthood, the leading provider of reproductive health care in this country. Yes, Planned Parenthood does indeed provide—as a small fraction of its many services—assistance in terminating pregnancies. So, as a result of Republican intransigence and their absolute dependence on the forced-birth lobby, the right to obtain birth control in this country remains suspended on a slender thread, dependent upon the tender mercies of this reactionary Supreme Court.
Apparently this is just fine with Republicans. The fact that their extreme position is deeply unpopular with the vast majority of Americans, however, is slowly starting to sink in.
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A new survey from Americans for Contraception shows just how vulnerable Republicans are on the issue of birth control, even as many of them scrambled frantically this week to affirm their support for IVF treatment. This common method of implanting frozen embryos for infertile couples has now been put in serious jeopardy by another right-wing panel of forced-birth judges in Alabama, which had fancifully characterized such cellular-level embryos as “unborn children.”
As the New York Times’ Annie Karni reports this week, that survey has some very bad news for Republicans:
A new national poll conducted by Americans for Contraception and obtained by The New York Times found that most voters across the political spectrum believe their access to birth control is actively at risk, and that 80 percent of voters said that protecting access to contraception was “deeply important” to them. Even among Republican voters, 72 percent said they had a favorable view of birth control.
When voters were told that 195 House Republicans had voted against the Right to Contraception Act, 64 percent of them said they would be less likely to support Republican candidates for Congress, according to the poll. And overall, the issue of protecting access to contraception bolstered voters’ preference for Democrats by nine points, giving them a 12-point edge over Republicans, up from three.
As if this wasn’t enough to concern Republicans, the demographic results of the survey are even more ominous. As Karni reports:
The survey found that birth control access was especially motivating to critical groups in the Democratic coalition, including Black voters and young people, who are currently less enthusiastic about the election.
Even the people who conducted the poll were surprised at just how strongly people reacted to the idea that Republicans would not protect birth control access. As Karni explains, “Pollsters said the shift in overall party preference—known as the generic ballot—was notable, particularly by such a large margin.”
Last year Republicans tried to inoculate themselves by introducing utterly meaningless legislation that would do absolutely nothing to protect contraception access, just to have something—anything—to point to if and when their constituents asked them about it. As reported last August (also by The New York Times’ Annie Karni), that bill (called the “Orally Taken Contraceptive Act”) directed the Food and Drug Administration to issue “guidance” to those pharmaceutical companies that planned to manufacture birth control pills to be sold without a prescription.
The problem, however, as noted in Karni’s report this week, was that the proposed legislation (which she notes went unopposed by the forced-birth Susan B. Anthony organization) was completely redundant:
Only two drug companies are actively working to offer birth control over the counter. One of them, Opill, was already approved for sale without a prescription before the legislation was introduced. The other, Cadence Health, is years into the application process with the F.D.A. and does not need the guidance that the bill directs the agency to issue.
So this GOP-sponsored legislation, which has yet to be brought up for a vote, was basically an elaborate stunt. As Karen Stone of Planned Parenthood explained to Karni, “They’re posturing to save face with voters, all while failing to support existing legislation that would actually help people access over-the-counter birth control.” But even worse, it was a stunt deliberately intended to further the goals of the forced-birth lobby, with religious-tinged language “suggesting that pregnancy begins at the point of fertilization rather than when a fertilized egg is implanted in the uterus.”
In short, Republicans have done nothing to preserve access to birth control. They are simply running out the clock, waiting for this Supreme Court to do their dirty work for them.
As Karni reports, the pollsters who conducted the Americans for Contraception survey have some sage advice for Democratic politicians: Americans want continued access to all available methods of contraception, and they ”want to be the ones making the decisions on what methods they use.” It’s an issue that cuts across political and demographic lines, and one that Republicans recognize could spell disaster for them this November.
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