All but two Republicans in the Senate voted Wednesday to block the Right to Contraception Act, refusing to protect a right that was in jeopardy after the Supreme Court upheld the right to abortion in 2022 in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization eliminated. Just those two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine voted in favor of the bill. The rest accused Democrats of trying to scare voters.
But if voters are afraid, it’s because of what Republicans are doing, not Democrats. It took almost fifty years for Republicans to achieve their goal: reversing abortion rights. The Republican Party’s attack on contraception is also slow and has the same end goal: the disappearance of a long-cherished constitutional right.
Of course, Senate Republicans, aware that access to contraception is overwhelmingly popular even among their own voters, acted as if their “no” votes were meaningless. “This is a show mood. It’s not serious. It doesn’t mean anything,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. More than two dozen Republican senators signed a statement from Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., declaring: “There is no threat to access to contraception… and it is disgusting that Democrats are fear-mongering on this important issue for cheap political points.” to score.” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., baselessly claimed the bill could be used to protect access to abortion pills. He also scoffed at the idea that Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that ended the criminal ban on the sale of contraception to married couples, is in jeopardy. “No one will bring down Griswold,” he said. “Not really.”
Hawley is well aware that the conservative legal movement sees Griswold as the “judicial activism” that supports Roe. When Judge Clarence Thomas wrote in his Dobbs concurrence that Griswold should also be overturned, he was not freelancing. Christian Right activists and legal scholars have long discredited the law recognized in Griswold as the corrupt basis of Roe v. Wade, and of subsequent cases protecting LGBTQ rights. In this conservative legal world, Griswold became known as “the bad case that started it all.” In 2017, while overseeing then-President Donald Trump’s selection of judicial nominees, Leonard Leo gave a speech denouncing the “creation of rights found nowhere in the text or structure of the Constitution,” citing Griswold , Roe and Obergefell v. Hodges. , the 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage.
The right’s strategy is to eliminate access to contraception from federal and state policy, while simultaneously working towards an even more extreme conservative majority on the Supreme Court that would find a way to overthrow Griswold or otherwise remove this crucial right from the to clear away. After Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court went up in flames nearly four decades ago, in part because of his virulent criticism of Griswold, right-wing activists launched a network of conservative advocacy groups to prevent future defeats. These groups wanted to ensure that future nominees to the Supreme Court would not be stumbled by questions about Griswold, and that nominees who expressed any support for the decision would not advance.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party and conservative judges have attacked contraception in other ways, including by using religious beliefs as an excuse for anti-scientific disinformation. In its 2014 decision in Hobby Lobby v. Burwell, the Supreme Court ruled that religious employers who believed that IUDs and emergency contraception are abortifacients (even though they are not) had a religious right to opt out of the Affordable Care Act’s requirements that cover contraception within the meaning of the Affordable Care Act. their employee health insurance.
Now the same misinformation about IUDs and emergency contraception is spreading in state legislatures. As The Washington Post reported this week, Republicans in at least 17 states have blocked Democratic efforts to expand or protect access to contraception in at least 17 states since Roe’s demise, citing false claims that equate certain methods with abortion.
Last month, Trump said he was “looking at” restricting birth control rights if he returned to the White House. Although he rushed to reverse the statement, he left the door open for state-level restrictions. And the blueprint laid out in his allies’ Project 2025 calls on his administration to end employer requirements for emergency contraception, among other restrictions, and add requirements covering “fertility awareness-based methods ‘, according to a report last month in Politico. .
Project 2025 even calls on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to “update their public message about the unsurpassed effectiveness of modern fertility awareness-based methods.” (The effectiveness of these methods, which depend heavily on the circumstances of the user and the cooperation of her partner, among other things, is far from ‘unsurpassed’.) In other words, Project 2025 envisions the government making religiously motivated changes in the how the federal government promotes family planning and elevates right-wing Christian ideology over science.
Both Trump and the Republicans in the Senate want to obscure their true intentions. But the reality is visible to everyone. Republicans don’t want to protect birth control from the Supreme Court they created. They want policies based on extreme religious views, not science. Wednesday’s vote chillingly confirmed exactly where they stand.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
