Republicans’ sneaky strategy to undermine birth control

All but two Senate Republicans voted to block the Right to Contraception Act on Wednesday, refusing to protect a right at risk after the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization eliminated the right to abortion. Only those two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, voted for the bill. The rest accused Democrats of trying to scare voters.

But if voters are scared, it is because of what Republicans are doing, not the Democrats. It took nearly 50 years for Republicans to achieve their goal of overturning the right to an abortion. The GOP attack on contraception is a similarly slow burn and has the same end goal: the disappearance of a long-cherished constitutional right.

Of course, Senate Republicans, aware that contraception access is overwhelmingly popular even with their own voters, pretended their “no” votes were meaningless. “This is a show vote. It’s not serious. It doesn’t mean anything,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. More than 20 GOP senators signed a statement from Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., declaring “There is no threat to access to contraception… and it’s disgusting that Democrats are fearmongering on this important issue to score cheap political points.” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., baselessly claimed the bill could be applied to protect access to abortion pills. He also scoffed at the notion that Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that struck down state criminal bans on the sale of birth control to married couples, is in danger. “Nobody’s gonna overturn Griswold,” he said. “No way.”

Hawley knows full well that the conservative legal movement sees Griswold as the “judicial activism” undergirding Roe. When Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his Dobbs concurrence that Griswold also should be overturned, he wasn’t freelancing. Christian right activists and legal scholars have long disparaged the right recognized in Griswold as the corrupt foundation of Roe v. Wade, and of later cases protecting LGBTQ rights. In this conservative legal world, Griswold became known as “the bad case that started it all.” In 2017, while he was directing then-President Donald Trump’s selection of judicial nominees, Leonard Leo delivered a speech lambasting the “creation of rights found nowhere in the text or structure of the Constitution,” citing Griswold, Roe, and Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision legalizing same-sex marriage.

The right’s strategy is to chip away at access to birth control in federal and state policies, while working toward an even more extreme conservative Supreme Court majority that would find a way to overturn Griswold or otherwise eviscerate this crucial right. After Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court went up in flames nearly 40 years ago, in part over his virulent criticism of Griswold, right-wing activists launched a network of conservative advocacy groups to prevent future defeats. These groups set out to ensure both that future Supreme Court nominees would not get tripped up by questions about Griswold, and that nominees who expressed any support for the decision would not advance.

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Meanwhile, the GOP and the conservative justices have attacked contraception in other ways, including using religious belief to excuse anti-scientific disinformation. In its 2014 decision in Hobby Lobby v. Burwell, the high court held that religious employers who believed IUDs and emergency contraception are abortifacients (even though they are not) had a religious right to opt out of Affordable Care Act requirements that they cover contraception in their employee health insurance plans.

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Now, this same disinformation about IUDs and emergency contraception is spreading in state legislatures. As The Washington Post reported this week, since the downfall of Roe, Republicans in at least 17 states have blocked Democratic efforts to expand or protect access to contraception, citing false claims equating certain methods with abortion.

Last month, Trump said he was “looking at” restricting the right to contraception if he returned to the White House. Though he scrambled to walk back the statement, he left the door open to restrictions at the state level. And the blueprint laid out in his allies’ Project 2025 calls for his administration to, among other restrictions, end requirements that employers cover emergency contraception, and add requirements they cover “fertility awareness-based methods,” according to a report last month in Politico.

Project 2025 even calls for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to “update its public messaging about the unsurpassed effectiveness of modern fertility awareness–based methods.” (The efficacy of these methods, which heavily depend on the circumstances of the user and the cooperation of her partner, among other things, are far from “unsurpassed.”) In other words, Project 2025 envisions the administration implementing religiously-motivated changes to how the federal government promotes family planning, elevating right-wing Christian ideology over science.

Both Trump and Senate Republicans want to obscure their true intentions. But the reality is there for all to see. Republicans do not want to protect birth control from the Supreme Court they shaped. They want policy based on extreme religious views, not science. Wednesday’s vote chillingly confirmed exactly where they stand.