In last month’s Republican presidential primary debate, amid the back and forth over exactly when or how to ban abortion in the U.S., former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley asked for some consensus. “Can’t we all agree that contraception should be available?” she pleaded with her rivals. Haley is just one of a number of female Republican candidates desperately trying to run away from last year’s widely unpopular Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Although criminalizing abortion nationwide has been a core Republican goal for decades, these candidates are hoping voters will overlook the party’s anti-abortion extremism if they tout expanded access to contraception, instead.
This is worse than a campaign “pivot.” It is a transparent ploy to hoodwink voters into believing that the post-Roe GOP is genuinely in favor of greater access to contraception. The recent history of the GOP and its unbreakable bond with the Christian right shows that the party has only grown more extreme on both abortion and contraception.
The GOP has only grown more extreme on both abortion and contraception.
As The New York Times reports, vulnerable House Republicans like Iowa’s Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Virginia’s Jen Kiggans are pitching voters with their support for contraception. Miller-Meeks introduced the Orally Taken Contraception Act of 2023 this year to “streamline the process to access over-the-counter contraceptives.” The bill was co-sponsored by eight Republican women, including Kiggans and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. Last spring, Politico reported that Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds’ support for a bill to allow over-the-counter birth control pills signaled a change in direction for the Iowa GOP.
These supposedly pro-contraception initiatives now are triggered by a Republican electoral panic over Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe. These politicians have seen that a post-Dobbs backlash is real, with the anti-abortion position consistently in the losing column in Kansas, Wisconsin and Ohio. Yet despite this handwriting on the wall, Miller-Meeks’ bill hasn’t gone anywhere. Reynolds’ bill failed to make it through the state Legislature. And no one else on the debate stage agreed with Haley’s plea.
Reynolds’ own actions reveal why. In a speech in February at an event celebrating the end of Roe sponsored by the Family Leader, Iowa’s leading Christian right advocacy group, Reynolds focused exclusively on her anti-abortion bona fides, including her support for a six-week ban on the procedure. She didn’t mention or even allude to her support for expanded access to contraception as a component of this plan, because she knew her influential hosts opposed it. While access to birth control is popular with voters in general, it is hardly a crowd-pleaser with Republican voters and legislators.
If Republicans were genuinely supportive of contraception access, they would have supported it nationally when Supreme Court precedent still guaranteed a right to an abortion. Instead, the GOP and its Christian right allies have spent years undermining access to contraception. For decades, they have opposed Title X, the federal family planning program dating to the Nixon presidency. They have relentlessly attacked Planned Parenthood — ostensibly under the guise that the organization provides abortion services, but their quest to defund it under Title X reveals their willingness to sacrifice contraception access, as well.
When the Affordable Care Act required employer-sponsored health insurance plans to cover contraception costs without copays, the interlocking machinery of the House GOP and Christian right advocacy groups kicked into gear, holding hearings designed to shame women and portray the Obama administration as having “trampled on freedom of religion.” (Defending these efforts during the 2012 election, Haley herself claimed, “Women don't care about contraception.”)
In facing the broader electorate, pro-contraception signaling makes for a good press release, but it is practically meaningless.
Multiple Christian right legal firms took up the fight, bringing hundreds of lawsuits challenging the requirement as a violation of Christian employers’ religious freedom — an effort that continues today. The first landmark result was the Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Hobby Lobby v. Burwell, in which the majority held that a family business had religious freedom rights, which were violated because the company’s evangelical owners believed (wrongly) that IUDs and emergency contraception like ella and Plan B can cause abortions. Leading anti-abortion activists also falsely claim that birth control pills are “abortifacients” and that they are harmful to women’s health, despite ample evidence of their safety and efficacy.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas gave voice to this extremism in his concurring opinion last year in the Dobbs decision. He signaled that the decision should prompt the court to reconsider not just its 1973 decision in Roe but also its 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which struck down a state law barring married couples’ possession of contraception.
GOP women like Miller-Meeks and Reynolds have trumpeted their support for over-the-counter birth control bills to the general public but not, as Reynolds showed, to the Christian right audiences that drive Republican turnout at the polls. Instead, they have bowed and scraped to a base that has been led to falsely believe that organizations like Planned Parenthood murder babies, engage in child sex trafficking and turn kids into sex addicts. One Christian right think tank even claimed on the 40th anniversary of Title X in 2011 that the program amounted to a “U.S. war on fertility.”
In facing the broader electorate, pro-contraception signaling makes for a good press release, but it is practically meaningless. Miller-Meeks introduced the Orally Taken Contraception Act a day after the Food and Drug Administration had already approved the birth control pill Opill to be sold over the counter. Even if such measures did pass, they would run headlong into a maze of religious exemptions and even face challenges, as suggested by Thomas, to ban them outright.
These candidates are trying to win by deceiving moderate and independent voters into thinking they are less extreme on abortion because of their position on contraception. But those voters shouldn’t be fooled. The core of these candidates’ own party, and the legal infrastructure that party has built, would stymie the very plans they are promoting to win elections.