“Fetal personhood” activists struggle to maintain the fiction they are neutral on birth control

When asked about their intentions to restrict or protect access to birth control, Republican lawmakers and leaders of the anti-abortion movement will typically point out the fact that there’s no bill currently under consideration explicitly aimed at banning #contraception.

As journalist Jessica Valenti noted in her "Abortion, Every Day" newsletter, the president of Ohio Right to Life mocked a state Democrat who warned of the risk to birth control by saying,
“she can’t cite a piece of legislation that bans contraception … it’s fear-mongering.”

Susan B. Anthony #Pro-#Life #America’s website calls it a “MYTH” that Republicans want to stop people from getting birth control.

“FACT: No state anywhere has banned birth control,” it says.

And yet taking one big swing to restrict access has never been the strategy of the anti-contraception playbook.

Rather, activists either maintain neutrality on birth control or say nothing while actively working to conflate abortion with birth control and pass laws that redefine life as beginning at conception.

As journalist Christina Cauterucci pointed out at Slate, the anti-abortion group #Americans #United #for #Life claims on its website that it takes “no stance on the underlying issue of contraceptive use,”
but elsewhere it insists that people who use emergency contraception
“take the lives of their unborn children.”

When Mother Jones reporter Kiera Butler attended the annual conference of the anti-abortion group #Heartbeat #International in 2022, she found restriction of birth control to be a major theme, with several sessions dedicated to the topic.

The push to redefine the start of #personhood as the point of #conception holds real implications for fertility treatments and the wide range of available birth control methods.

Many lawmakers in states with such “fetal personhood” laws on the books have not fully grappled with the practical consequences of how enforcing those laws in the post-Roe era might work.

In the near future, most Republicans will likely continue to dismiss the idea that there’s any threat to birth control at all, and leaders of anti-abortion organizations will surely do their best to change the subject.

But pay attention to how fights over expanding access to birth control
— including nonhormonal methods like condoms
— play out.

Pay attention to proposals to gut funding for #TitleX, a federal program that provides birth control to millions of low-income people in the United States.

Pay attention to efforts in Congress to restrict access to contraception in foreign aid spending bills.

And pay attention to how courts and lawmakers aim to expand the definition of abortion.

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