For vulnerable House Republicans, there is no pivot to birth control

02 September 2023

Earlier this month, I said there are probably two things that we can count on. One is that the Republicans won’t stop trying to stop pregnant people from determining their own fates. The other is that the Republicans, knowing that anti-abortion politics is increasingly unpopular now that abortion is no longer a federal right, are going to try hiding such efforts.

In mid-August, operatives in Ohio tried covering up their true intent – which was blocking a forthcoming ballot measure that would, if successful, enshrine abortion rights in that state’s constitution – with grotesque fearmongering about children getting sex-changes without their parents’ consent. They were hiding anti-abortion politics with anti-trans politics.

Luckily, Ohio voters saw through it.

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Hiding their true intent continues, with reporting from the Times showing that House Republicans who represent swing districts are now talking up legislation, introduced in July, that would ostensibly expand birth control.

The Times: “It is an increasingly common strategy among vulnerable House Republicans — especially those in politically competitive districts — who are trying to reconcile their party’s hard-line anti-abortion policies with the views of voters in their districts, particularly independents and women.”

And: “Appearing to embrace access to contraception has become an imperative for Republican candidates at all levels who are concerned that their party’s opposition to abortion rights has alienated women, particularly after the Supreme Court’s decision last year to overturn Roe v. Wade and the extreme abortion bans in GOP-led states that have followed."

The newspaper quoted a GOP strategist who said this was good politics. “Republicans have long said we need to find alternatives to abortion. This is one. There are a lot of Republicans who have longstanding records of promoting contraception. It’s a meaningful effort to engage women voters.”

I stress that sentence because it seems to distill one of the core problems. Anti-abortion politics has never been about abortion, not really. It’s always been about regulating women’s bodies. To that end, anti-abortion politics has usually included birth control in that, to many Republicans, it’s the same as abortion, and should be regulated to an equally extreme degree.

Here’s Lindsay Beyerstein in 2021: “Anti-choicers have been fighting to redefine contraceptives as abortion for years. They rallied behind pharmacists who put their religious beliefs ahead of their obligations when refusing to dispense Plan B. In 2014, the Supreme Court ruled that companies can deny employees comprehensive health care insurance based on their specious belief that birth control is abortion” (my italics).

Are there, in fact, “a lot of Republicans who have longstanding records of promoting contraception”? Maybe. But they don’t influence conservative Supreme Court justices the way that anti-abortion Republicans do.

Another problem facing vulnerable House Republicans who wish to hide unpopular anti-abortion politics with popular policies that would ostensibly expand access to birth control is their party’s longstanding antipathy toward it. In essence, the GOP argument has been that promoting access to birth control is promoting sexual activity, especially among teenagers, and that the government should not be involved in that.

What they meant, however, is that the government should not provide women with the means of escaping the moral consequences of sex – which is to say, getting pregnant. We know that that’s what they really meant, before the fall of Roe, because that’s what they are coming out and saying now that Roe is gone. “Actions have consequences” is the new anti-abortion mantra. If you don’t want to face the consequences of sex, don’t have sex.

Perhaps House Republicans in swing districts can dodge the scrutiny of women and independents who want federal abortion rights restored, but can they also avoid the scrutiny of Republicans who have been conditioned to believe that promoting birth control is promoting sexual activity?

The third problem is that the legislation that the Republicans introduced last month calls for doing things that are already being done, and it calls for them to be done in language that defeats the purpose of introducing the legislation. It would direct the FDA to provide guidance for two companies that make birth control pills and that want to sell them over the counter. One is already authorized to do so. The other doesn’t need the guidance.

But it’s the language of the legislation that undermines the GOP’s need to hide their unpopular anti-abortion politics. Per the Times, the language comes this close to saying that birth control is the same as abortion. It suggests “that pregnancy begins at the point of fertilization rather than when a fertilized egg is implanted in the uterus. Oral contraception is defined in the bill as a drug that ‘is used to prevent fertilization.’”

The Republicans know that anti-abortion politics is unpopular. That’s why they keep trying to hide it, either with fearmongering about kids getting sex changes or with phony “pivot to birth control,” as the Times put it.

But they can’t quit it.

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