Birth Control? Really?
Terry H. Schwadron
May 23, 2024
And just like that, as part of our election campaign, we’re talking about making contraceptives illegal.
Or not.
As an apparent sop to evangelical voters — who don’t use contraceptives? — Donald Trump blurted to a radio interviewer this week that he is “looking at” restrictions on the manufacture and sale of contraceptives. In less than a day, when he saw a rising tide of backlash, Trump issued a social media post declaring, “I DO NOT SUPPORT A BAN ON BIRTH CONTROL, AND NEITHER WILL THE REPUBLICAN PARTY!” (For good or evil, the use of capital letters in social media rants continues to be legal.)
Was he talking about condoms, morning-after pills, IUDs and birth control pills? About teenagers or married adults? More exemptions from employer-paid health plans? We have no idea.
So, maybe there is no new policy coming. But just in case, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, already is at the barricades seeking a Senate vote on a non-existent bill to The Right to Contraception Act to retain legal status. In the closely divided Senate, most Republicans are against it and so, chances for failure are high.
Joe Biden’s White House weighed in with remarks saying Trump was attacking women — again, a reminder that reproductive rights have taken an oversized place in the contentious issues of the election.
All because of a poorly thought, off-the-cuff, highly politicized opinion on culture, we’re looking at the possibility of imposition of specific morally based restrictions sought by a few that have no business being imposed universally, never mind as national legislation. The supreme irony, of course, is that the blurt came from Trump, who is on trial for falsifying business and campaign documents to hide hush money payments from a tryst with an adult film star — without use of a condom, per undisputed trial testimony.
How Did We Get Here?
We must roll the videotape on the contraception issue back to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning any perceived right to abortion under which we had been living for 50 years. In the concurring opinions, Justice Clarence Thomas had bucked the majority declarations that the thinking would be limited to abortion policy and insisted that it could equally be extended to legal availability to contraceptives.
That idea has, er, spawned a host of legislative efforts towards extending anti-abortion thinking to the distribution of pills, condoms, and devices that some moral purists find objectionable. The application of Obamacare provisions to require companies underwriting health care to include contraceptive coverage in insurance policies brought forth legal challenges.
The Supreme Court ruled, for example, in Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul, Home, v. Pennsylvania, that the Trump administration had acted within its authority to increase religious-belief exemptions to the ACA’s contraception requirement.
it’s all a far cry from what might be considered a legacy of health awareness, concern about teen-age pregnancy, a consistently expressed voter desire for individual liberties and a resistance to government intrusion in personal matters. If you don’t want to use contraceptives, don’t. Where’s the need for embracing this viewpoint in law, whether national or state?
Indeed, it stretches the imagination to understand the moral case here against the availability of contraceptives. At best, ethicists explain that some birth control techniques can prevent the implantation and development of a fertilized egg. Birth control came about to keep sex from becoming procreative, and maybe that’s the real point. Even evangelicals don’t promote a bill to ban sex.
Those opposed to contraception suggest that blocking fertilization, including through the current Supreme Court case involving mifepristone, amounts to an abortion, and that if abortion is wrong then those forms of contraception must also be wrong. If contraception is somehow against Divine Will, aren’t cancer treatments, flouride and every prescription drug ever created?
But in every election where abortion is on the ballot, the outcome has been the same — towards keeping abortion restrictions away from law. Choice seems the mantra from both sides of the aisle — except in cases where religious-minded moralists object to same-sex unions, transgender rights, or sex-related matters.
The Political Side
Apart from the issue itself — no one knows what Trump was talking about — this incident is another reminder of policy by slogan rather than substance.
It’s a time in which people can lose their jobs over the wrong on-air remark, or dismiss harmful, misogynistic opinions as “locker room talk.” Stupid slogans at protest rallies substitute as thoughtful foreign policy, and culture-dismissive declaration of “wokism” too often is enough to justify banning of books. This week a Trump campaign video highlighting his would-be election as the start of a new “reich” either is or isn’t what he had in mind. Biden has a continuing record of gaffes as well, though none that call for the end of democracy.
Again, do these guys think we’re dumb?
One would think that with the focus on reproductive rights, each candidate would have a well-thought set of answers and approaches to share.
Biden has been clearly in favor of rights protection, willing to file court challenges to adverse state laws in Republican states — at least since he dropped his own anti-abortion stance several years ago. Trump is waffling around the various reproductive and gender-identity issues, depending on his audience. He wants to leave all contentious issues to the states but believes that women should bear some prosecutable vulnerability for undergoing abortions.
Of course, the image of Trump as defender of morals is a bit at odds with the trial testimony in the hush money case.
We deserve better thinking. If candidates don’t know what to say, stay silent.
##