Republicans Don’t Want to Ban Contraception

National Review Online

Friday, June 07, 2024

 

Contraception is widely available and widely used in the United States, and there are, to a first approximation, zero people who wish to use government policy to change that. Democrats and much of the media are inventing a phony controversy about the matter to score political points and accomplish other policy objectives. That is the meaning of the Democratic push for a “Right to Contraception Act.”

 

The core right to contraception found by the Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) and Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) is under no threat whatsoever. Pretending that it is has required Democrats to misread and then magnify stray remarks. In his concurrence in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), the case that overruled Roe v. Wade (1973), Justice Clarence Thomas said that Griswold should be overruled. But that does not mean that the Court will ever hear a case calling for an overruling; Thomas has only one vote; and even he went on to suggest that a right to contraception might be derived from the Constitution in a different way than Griswold did.

 

And even if — per impossibile — Griswold were overturned, no state would try to ban contraception. That’s because the vast majority of Americans have no moral objection to it, and even the minority that does has no interest in prohibiting it. That extremely wide popular consensus is why the Democrats think this issue is so advantageous to them.

 

Republicans are not voting against the Democrats’ bill out of a desire to ban contraception. They are voting against it because it overrides conscience rights, for example forcing doctors who do not wish to perform sterilizations to do so; because it would require governments to fund Planned Parenthood as a contraceptive provider even as it conducts more abortions than any other organization in the country; and because it blocks any state law to require parental involvement in the dispensing of contraception to (or even the sterilization of) minors. Even Senator Susan Collins (R., Maine), who voted to bring the bill to the floor, says it would have to be amended to win her support.

 

The bill is a bait and switch. It attempts to use the broad support for a right that isn’t threatened to cover the advance of liberal policies that can’t win such support on their own. Republicans should reject it and expose the deception that underlies it.