By Rich Lowry
Syndicated Columnist
The war on contraception that wasn’t
We don’t know who they are or where they are. All we know is that some place or other, a shadowy group of powerful Republicans is meeting to figure out how to ban contraceptives.
For all we know, they also might be scheming to cover up what really happened at Area 51 and to obscure the identity of the real assassin of JFK.
If the Bilderbergers aren’t involved, they should be. The Democratic charge that Republicans are somehow working to cut off access to contraception is so ludicrously unfounded that it amounts to an outlandish conspiracy theory. Yet this allegation undergirds the Democratic effort to pass a sweeping new “Right to Contraception Act” through Congress.
Sure, contraception is already legal in every state and no one is trying to ban it, but you can’t be too careful. The contraception act is supposedly a — ahem — prophylactic measure.
The political play clearly is to offer legislation with numerous provisions that Republicans can’t support and then when they vote against it, as all but two Republicans did in the Senate, to say: “See? We told you so. Republicans hate contraception so much that they blocked the ‘Right to Contraception Act.'”
The Democratic maneuver generated the desired headlines all over the media about Republicans opposing a bill to protect contraception.
A key piece of the Democratic fear-mongering is that Justice Clarence Thomas said in his concurring opinion in Dobbs that Griswold v. Connecticut, which established the constitutional right to contraception, should be overturned. This doesn’t mean that Thomas himself is hostile to contraception or supports bans of it — only that he thinks Griswold is constitutionally defective.
It’s an enormous leap to go from this stray remark to any serious threat to contraception. For the Thomas view to be effected in the real world, the Supreme Court would have to take up a landmark contraception case, which isn’t in the offing; he’d have to get four other votes to overturn Griswold, when that isn’t assured; and the justices would have to not find another constitutional source for a right to contraception, even though Thomas himself held that out as a possibility.
All that said, let’s assume against all expectations that the Griswold decision is rendered a smoking ruin by Thomas and his colleagues sometime soon. Where in these United States would a serious Republican official propose to restore Connecticut’s Comstock law that was at issue in that 1965 case and prohibit anyone from using “any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception”?
Even if Republicans are quietly harboring an intention to do this, they’d be swiftly and decisively rebuked by voters if they ever tried to act on it, and that’d be the end of the war on contraception.
Again, though, all that is theoretical, not to say utterly fantastical. In reality, even the Trump administration spent roughly $1.8 billion on domestic family planning in fiscal year 2020.
The source of the GOP opposition to the Democratic contraception legislation is sincere and doesn’t reflect any secret agenda. Republicans consider the bill, correctly, a Trojan horse (no pun intended, really) for radical measures that couldn’t pass on their own. The legislation would wipe away conscience protections, make it impossible to cut off contraception funding to organizations like Planned Parenthood that provide abortions, and define contraception so broadly that it could cover abortifacients.
With Senate Democrats desperate to make the most of their post-Dobbs political advantage on abortion and related issues, there’s no room for good-faith objections. No, it’s all demagogy, all the time. “Thanks to Donald Trump and the right-wing MAGA Supreme Court, Americans now have to question whether or not they’ll have access to something as basic and widely supported as birth control,” Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said.
Of course, they don’t have to question any such thing, but Democrats want them to question it, based on innuendo and shoddy, politically motivated reasoning.
Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.
(c) 2024 by King Features Synd., Inc.