The Anti-Birth Control Movement

A recent trend in anti-choice activism is rearing its ugly head again.

In July, Vogue reported that Missouri lawmakers had recently debated restricting Medicaid coverage of birth control and curbing payments to Planned Parenthood. This attempt didn’t work, but it troublingly came on the heels of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene conflating Plan B with abortion pills in response to veterans getting access to birth control through their health care in June. According to Refinery 29, she stated, “Equal Access to Contraception for Veterans Act is not contraception, it’s providing with taxpayer dollars the ability for women to have an abortion.”

These events harken back to a comment Brett Kavanaugh made during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 2018, when he referred to some forms of birth control as “abortion-inducing drugs.”

The conflation of contraception and abortion was politically established before either Kavanaugh or Taylor Greene’s comments, however.

“The groundwork was laid in 2010, when the Tea Party fought Obamacare by saying IUDs, Plan B, and contraception itself were, as they called it, the biggest expansion of abortion in the nation,” Robin Marty, the author of The New Handbook for Post-Roe America, told Vogue. “The reason this is no longer undercover,” Marty continued, is because of the Supreme Court’s 2014 Hobby Lobby decision; the Court ruled that employers could refuse to pay health insurance that would fund their employees’ birth control.

The conflation of contraception with abortion is not only dangerous, but scientifically inaccurate. The Guttmacher Institute laid out the differences between the two in a 2014 report. “A contraceptive method, by definition, prevents pregnancy by interfering with ovulation, fertilization or implantation,” the report states. “Abortion ends an established pregnancy, after implantation. This scientific definition of pregnancy—which reflects the fact that most fertilized eggs naturally fail to implant in the uterus—is also the legal definition, and has long been accepted by federal agencies and by U.S. and international medical associations.”

The core, inaccurate idea here is one of the most common in the anti-choice movement: that life begins at conception. Like the phrase “abortion-inducing drugs,” the idea that life begins at conception inherently implies an inaccurate definition of abortion and pregnancy. Rewire News explained that the phrase “confuses simple biological cell division both with actual pregnancy and with actual, legal personhood, which are all very different things.”

Thankfully, contraception is still legal, though it may still be difficult for people in marginalized communities to acquire, according to Planned Parenthood. But language that obfuscates the true purpose of birth control is a tactic used to conceal much more concrete attempts to limit women’s reproductive freedom. As the Guttmacher Institute stated, “When organizations whose core mission is to ban abortion say that some contraceptives are abortion, then their obvious intent is to eventually ban these methods. They are not neutral on the issue of contraception, despite their protestations to the contrary.”

Ironically, as Vogue explained, the rising threat to contraception came from an administration led by Donald Trump, a known adulterer who was pro-choice before it became politically expedient to change his opinion. Renee Bracey Sherman, a reproductive justice advocate, told Vogue that hypocrisy can flourish in the anti-choice movement because the movement is not about the sanctity of life; it’s about power.

“Politicians who are anti-abortion are also anti–birth control and anti-queer and anti-Black because at the end of the day, they only support a way of life in which they — wealthy white people — are in charge and they are the sole dictators of when, how, and with whom we have sex, procreate, and build our families,” she told the magazine. “It’s about maintaining white patriarchal power and control. It always has been. And anything that allows people to determine their own futures — such as birth control and abortion — is a threat to that.”