Back

The political playbook for attacking birth control shares some similarities with the playbook for attacking abortion
— a slow and steady chipping away of rights and access.

Both efforts rely on measures like slashing funding for low-income patients, enacting parental consent laws to restrict minors’ use, and empowering ideologically supportive lawmakers and judges who push friendly legal frameworks.

But the major difference between pushing to restrict abortion access and pushing to restrict birth control is that leaders are typically much quieter about their goals for the latter, aware that open discussion will prompt fierce backlash.

They typically try to paint those who suggest they’d take aim at contraception as alarmists and conspiracists.

When Democrats in Congress introduced a bill to codify access to birth control following the overturn of #Roe, for example, they were met with emphatic performances of exasperation.

“This bill is completely unnecessary. In no way, shape, or form is access to contraception limited or at risk of being limited,” declared Florida Republican Rep. Kat Cammack during debate on the House floor.

“The liberal majority is clearly trying to stoke fears and mislead the American people.”

Still, a growing number of Republican lawmakers
— including Sens. #Marsha #Blackburn and #Mike #Braun
— have recently declared that Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 Supreme Court decision establishing a constitutional right to birth control, was wrongly decided.

#Griswold relies on the same legal right to privacy that underpinned #Roe, and in his concurring #Dobbs v. Jackson opinion in 2022, Justice #Clarence #Thomas encouraged the Supreme Court to “reconsider” Griswold and other privacy-related decisions.

Former Arizona Senate candidate #Blake #Masters went so far as to pledge to “vote only for federal judges who understand that Roe and Griswold” should be overturned.

Leaders more than occasionally reveal their underlying beliefs.

Recent statements, as well as recent actions from reproductive rights opponents, have sent clear reminders about how some influential activists really think about contraception:
that it’s just another form of abortion.

Activists aim to blur the line between birth control and abortion

Anti-abortion leaders tend to take advantage of one basic fact about the American people:
There is great confusion about how pregnancy works, how abortion pills end it, and how birth control and emergency contraception (such as Plan B) prevent it.

For example, one recent poll found that a stunning 73 percent of Americans think emergency contraception can end a pregnancy.

But among most medical experts, including those at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists
— there is no confusion.

#Birth #control, including emergency contraception, prevents ovulation (when an egg is released) and fertilization (when egg and sperm meet).

#Pregnancy begins when a fertilized egg attaches to the lining of the uterine wall, a process called #implantation.

Many fertilized eggs never implant.

Yet for a highly motivated wing of the anti-abortion movement, pregnancy starts not at #implantation but at #conception,

and human personhood begins then too, not at #birth.

These “fetal personhood” activists want to endow fetuses, embryos, and fertilized eggs with full rights and legal protections and thus frame any effort to prevent implantation
— be it through discarding embryos from IVF or taking a daily birth control pill
— as a form of killing unborn children.

It’s a stretch of scientific consensus, but certain Christian activists have long clung to this idea and have slowly been codifying it in state law through bills that claim "human life begins at conception".

More than a third of states currently have such laws on the books.

To blur the line between abortion and contraception, many of these activists call birth control methods “abortifacients”
— agents that induce abortion.

But this is misleading because there’s no pregnancy to abort.

Real abortifacients are the medications that end pregnancies, namely misoprostol and mifepristone.

(2/n)

#IVF #Alabama #disgusting #Joseph #Scheidler #Randall #Terry

https://www.vox.com/24087411/anti-abortion-roe-dobbs-birth-control-contraception-ivf