A New Attack on Birth Control
Antis will use any excuse to try to ban contraception
For years, anti-abortion activists and legislators have been laying the groundwork to try to ban birth control. And now, just a few days after Donald Trump took office, they think they may have found a way to do it.
Anti-birth control groups are seizing onto a new small study that shows the active ingredient in the emergency contraceptive Ella could end a pregnancy if paired with misoprostol.
The study, which looked at just 133 women, is too small to be definitive or to change anything about the way patients use the drug. But conservatives are weaponizing the research to mislead Americans and threaten birth control in a moment when when women are already dying from lack of reproductive healthcare.
In the New York Times, Students for Life spokesperson Kristi Hamrick said that the group is “absolutely” considering bringing a legal challenge against Ella. “We’ve been arguing for years that Ella acts as an abortifacient,” she says.
But here’s the thing: The study did not find that Ella causes abortion. You cannot take Ella, or its active ingredient ulipristal acetate, to end a pregnancy.
What researchers did find was that women could end a pregnancy by taking twice the dose of ulipristal acetate found in Ella, followed by misoprostol—which is a drug that can induce abortion on its own. (As one source put it to me, “Miso and a pretzel can cause an abortion.”)
To suggest that Ella can end a pregnancy–especially in a moment when those in anti-choice states are desperate to access abortion—is irresponsible bordering on dangerous. Conservatives know that their lie could cause women to seek out Ella to end their pregnancies. They also know that it won’t work, which could further delay or squash women’s ability to get real abortion care.
But anti-contraception activists don’t care about the truth, and they certainly don’t care if their talking points send women on wild goose chases that prevent them from being able to end their pregnancies. To these people, it’s all about stopping women and girls from accessing any kind of reproductive health care.
And that’s the thing: Groups like Students for Life don’t actually care about the science behind these drugs because they oppose all contraception. In fact, the only forms of birth control the group doesn’t want made illegal are sterilization, condoms and other barrier methods.
But these groups know that birth control is way too popular for them to publicly oppose: 99% of American women of reproductive age have used it! Instead, they call contraception ‘abortion,’ a lie that allows them to pretend they never opposed birth control at all.
If that sounds confusing, it’s because they mean it to be. As I’ve outlined here and in my book, anti-abortion and anti-contraception organizations have worked hard to confuse Americans over the difference between birth control and abortion—especially when it comes to emergency contraception.
In 2023, for example, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America attacked campus vending machines stocked with Plan B by insisting they were dispensing abortion medication. The group knew that 73% of Americans wrongly believe that emergency contraception can end a pregnancy, and they played on that confusion and ignorance in an attempt to ban a safe form of birth control.
We can expect to see the same thing happen now with Ella. It won’t take long for conservatives to start claiming that ‘abortion pills’ are available on pharmacy shelves for anyone to buy. But Ella—which, again, doesn’t cause abortion—is only available with a prescription. (It’s the other kind of emergency contraception, Plan B, that people can buy over-the-counter.)
These groups will use any opportunity to conflate and confuse; and their efforts are sure to increase in the coming months. Not just because of this study, or because they’ve been newly empowered by the Trump administration—but because they have the backing of censorship-happy social media companies. Just yesterday I reported that Meta was blocking and blurring content on abortion medication. How long do you think it will be before one of these groups convinces a social media platform to do the same for emergency contraception?
We’ve also seen what their bad science can do in the courts: Fake studies on mifepristone—research that ended up retracted by their publisher—made it all the way to the Supreme Court! We should plan to see similar misrepresentations in legal briefs about emergency contraception.
That’s why it’s more important than ever that we’re demanding media outlets tell the full truth about abortion, contraception, and the research around them. I was disappointed, for example, that The New York Times quoted Students for Life without mentioning that the group opposes birth control—a critical piece of information for readers.
The Times also allowed a representative from the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG)—a group that wants to ban life-saving abortions—to claim that doctors are giving patients emergency contraception to end their pregnancies. Donna Harrison said, “After years of denying ulipristal acetate’s potential to end the life of an embryo, abortion advocates are now starting to use it as a substitute for the abortion drug mifepristone.” That’s not true, but the Times published it anyway.
Here’s the truth: Americans support birth control, and because of Republican attacks on reproductive health, it’s more needed than ever. Ella, in particular, is an important contraceptive. Unlike Plan B, Ella is effective for five days after unprotected sex, and is also more effective for people with larger body sizes. And while I hope that the drug behind Ella could be used in abortion care—the more medication we have the better—there’s just not enough evidence for that yet.
As Dan Grossman, director of Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) at the University of California, San Francisco, told me, “The results are promising, but not sufficient to change clinical practice.” Grossman, who wrote an editorial about the study in the same journal where it was published, emphasized, “we don’t know if it’s superior to using misoprostol by itself.”
It’s a depressing state of affairs when conservatives will use any opportunity—and jump on any small study—to try to ban birth control. But I agree with law professor Mary Ziegler, who tells the Times she thinks the move “could backfire.”
Right now, women are mad—young women especially. Coming for contraception—no matter how they spin it or what they call it—will be a losing battle. And as big as Republicans’ lies about birth control are, they’re not bigger than women’s rage.
Support Abortion, Every Day by signing up for a paid subscription or donating to the newsletter directly:
Willful ignorance plagues this country. Devotees of evangelicalism and Catholicism accept that everything they’re told in their churches, and from people they’ve decided to trust, is the absolute truth.
They don’t require empirical truths, nor will they listen to experts in a given field of study. Going along with their chosen tribes is more important than knowing the truth. About almost anything.
When daddies have to marry off their 14-year-old daughters to the bad boy who impregnated them, they’ll have their consciences to deal with. Especially if she dies due to a pregnancy-related event.
Just wrote to Emily Bazelon at NYT with a link to your response. Thank you as ever.