Here's How They Ban Birth Control

7.31.25

Click to skip ahead: Attacks on Birth Control reports on conservatives’ plan to implement a backdoor contraception ban, along with updates on the $10 million of birth control the White House wants to burn. Care Crisis flags a new study showing that Idaho has lost 35% of its OBGYNs. In the States, news from Virginia, Ohio, Texas, Iowa, and more. In the Nation, Trump’s strategy behind ‘defunding’ Planned Parenthood and more on attacks on abortion pills. Stats & Studies has the latest Gallup polling on young people. Finally, WTF, WaPo? looks at the confounding editorial the paper published on Planned Parenthood.

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Attacks on Birth Control

Not gonna lie, I really hate that this section keeps getting longer by the day!

A Washington church just got the green light to continue challenging a state law requiring employers to cover contraception. Hidden in that years-long lawsuit? Conservatives’ primary strategy for enacting a backdoor ban on birth control.

Some background: In 2019, the Cedar Park Assembly of God sued over Washington’s Reproductive Parity Act, which mandates employers cover abortion and birth control if they also cover maternity care. Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF)—the conservative legal powerhouse responsible for the end of Roe—represents the church, and claims that they’re simply trying to make sure that religious employers don’t have to cover abortions.

But that’s a lie: the real target here is birth control. And I know this because of one very telling term that shows up fifteen different times in the lawsuit: “abortifacient contraceptives.”

If you’ve been reading Abortion, Every Day for a while, you know that Republicans have been working for years to redefine certain kinds of birth control as ‘abortifacients’. Most often that means IUDs and emergency contraception, but they’ve also been known to target any type of hormonal birth control as ‘abortifacients’. The idea here is to give Republicans plausible deniability: they can claim they’re not banning birth control while redefining it as abortion to justify taking it away. It’s bad science, and incredibly sneaky politics.

Enter ‘abortifacient contraceptives’. I first flagged the term back in 2023, when Oregon Right to Life brought a near-identical suit challenging an Oregon law mandating that employers cover birth control. Just like now, the anti-abortion group sought an exception from the law—claiming that emergency contraception and certain kinds of IUDs aren’t birth control at all, but abortifacients.

This latest suit in Washington from ADF goes even further. Check out this language:

”Because of its religious beliefs…Cedar Park offers health insurance coverage to its employees in a way that does not also cause it to pay for abortions or abortifacient contraceptives, including, inter alia, emergency contraception and intrauterine devices.” (Emphasis mine)

“Including, inter alia” is doing some interesting work there: it means they’re not only talking about IUDs and the morning-after pill—but other kinds of contraception, too.

In other words, ADF—one of the country’s most powerful conservative legal groups—is trying to get a legal precedent that says birth control is actually abortion.

And as absurd as it may sound, this tactic is already having an impact. Consider what happened in 2023 in Indiana, when a group of bipartisan lawmakers introduced legislation to increase contraception access for low-income Hoosiers. Republicans ended up removing all language referring to IUDs, because they were successfully lobbied by local anti-abortion activists who claimed IUDs were abortifacients. Republican Rep. Cindy Ledbetter said the bill was changed because “we are a strong pro-life state.”

That’s how they implement a backdoor ban. Republicans don’t need to pass a law that says contraception is illegal, they just need to make it impossible to get—whether it’s keeping some kinds of contraception out of family planning programs, allowing pharmacists to deny patients their prescriptions, exempting employers from requirements to cover contraception, or stripping minors of their ability to access birth control.

Is contraception really legal if you can’t get your hands on any?

Keep An Eye On: Increased funding for “fertility awareness” programs. Republicans aren’t just redefining birth control by claiming some are ‘abortifacients’, they’re also adding the 'rhythm method’ to state- and federally-funded programs for contraception—claiming that it’s just as effective and acceptable. It’s not.

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We’re not done with Republicans’ war on contraception quite yet! Because while most of their tactics are quiet, some are a whole lot louder.

The Guardian reports that France is under pressure to stop the incineration of nearly $10 million in birth control. Remember, the Trump administration would rather spend $170,000 to destroy the contraceptives than give them to women who need them abroad.

The contraceptives are being stored in Belgium, and are reportedly set to be burned in France. After an understandable outcry, the French health ministry said they’re following the situation and “we support the will of the Belgian authorities to find a solution to avoid the destruction of contraceptives.”

Last night, The Daily Show took on the story, with host Desi Lydic asking, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

Finally, a male birth control pill is undergoing trials right now. I remember the last time they tried this, they couldn’t get men to stick around long enough in the trials because they couldn’t take the side effects. *laughs in weight gain, mood changes and acne*

Care Crisis

File this one under: No shit, Sherlock. A new study published this week shows that Idaho lost 35% of its practicing OBGYNs after Roe was overturned—confirming what local reporters and medical associations have been screaming from the rooftops for the past three years.

Lead author Dr. Edward McEachern said the findings “provide a stark picture of a rapidly declining maternal health workforce in our state.”

You know the story by now: OBGYNs are fleeing anti-abortion states, and Idaho has been one of the hardest hit. Hospitals have shut down maternity wards because they can’t recruit—or keep—the doctors they need. Whole swaths of the state have become maternal health deserts, leaving pregnant women with nowhere to go when things go wrong.

Maybe this firm evidence of an exodus will finally lead Idaho politicians to do something, but I’m not holding my breath.

In the States

Virginia’s Republican gubernatorial nominee, Winsome Earle-Sears, still won’t say whether she’d ban abortion if elected. In an interview with CNN, Earle-Sears, currently the lieutenant governor, refused to tell reporters whether she’d support an abortion ban—again. Because remember, she was on board with Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s 15-week ban that he insisted “wasn’t a ban”—a political strategy that failed miserably.

Her refusal to give a straight answer shouldn’t be a surprise: Earle-Sears wouldn’t give an answer about abortion back in May, and it wasn’t so long ago that The Guardian unearthed audio of the Republican candidate saying that women who consent to sex are automatically consenting to pregnancy.

Women who have sex “already made a choice” about pregnancy, she said. “We need to make our choices before we’re pregnant, not, you know, after.” Earle-Sears has also called abortion “genocide,” and said she wanted a total abortion ban with just an exception for women’s lives.

Meanwhile, Ohio is seeing a massive uptick in out-of-state patients. In fact, one reproductive health care organization, Preterm, says that they’re helping twice the number of out-of-state patients.

Executive director Bethany Lewis told Spectrum News most of their out-of-state patients are from the South, with folks coming from states like Florida, Georgia, and Texas. Three of Ohio’s five border states also have abortion bans: Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia.

It’s great that abortion-seekers are able to travel to Ohio for care. But leaving your state for an abortion doesn’t come without costs—financial, emotional, and physical. “It can mean that you're being forced to get care further and further down the line in your pregnancy,” Lewis said.

Over in Texas, yet another county—the ninth in the state—has passed a local ordinance banning so-called abortion ‘trafficking.’ (Be warned that this link to the news is from an anti-abortion site.) We wrote about these kinds of ordinances less than a week ago, if you need a refresher.

Finally, the Iowa Abortion Access Fund says that a year into the state’s 6-week ban, the cost of helping patients has grown significantly. IAAF Chair Lyz Lenz says that before the ban, the group would see one or two abortions a quarter that cost more than a thousand dollars. “Now, we are seeing 2 to 3 a month where their bills are in the thousands,” she says.

Quick hits:

• The Nevada Independent says that the ruling reinstating a defunct parental notification mandate is proof that zombie laws need term limits;

• The Daily Beast with more on the Texas Republican who authored the state’s ban but is accused of paying for multiple abortions;

• Some local Ulster County coverage of the New York county clerk being sued by Texas’ attorney general for upholding the state’s shield laws;

• Finally, columnist Abdul Hakim-Shabazz at Indiana’s Courier & Press writes about the irony of abortion restrictions leading to more abortions.

In the Nation

Over at Slate, law professor and author Mary Ziegler writes that ‘defunding’ Planned Parenthood was the White House’s way of giving something to the anti-abortion movement—which is increasingly pissed off that the Trump administration isn’t trying to use the Comstock Act to stop the shipping of abortion pills.

“Defunding Planned Parenthood seemed like a better fit for an administration interested in slashing certain types of spending…but including a defunding provision wasn’t obviously smart politics.”

The whole piece is worth a read to understand the nitty gritty politics and legal stakes.

Speaking of Ziegler—she weighed in recently about the New York-Texas legal battle over the shipping of abortion pills and said what we’re all thinking: “I think sooner or later, this is going to end up in federal court, and then will probably eventually make it to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

If you read yesterday’s newsletter, you know that the attacks on abortion medication are ramping up by the day. In addition to multiple suits targeting abortion providers who ship the pills across state lines, fake science attacks on mifepristone, and a lawsuit claiming Planned Parenthood lies about the safety of abortion pills—we also just found out that sixteen Republican attorney generals are calling on Congress to end shield laws.

It’s a lot! Today, Reproductive Freedom for All condemned the AGs letter to national lawmakers, calling it “an aggressive and dangerous escalation in their coordinated campaign to ban abortion nationwide and punish providers, helpers, and patients.”

President Mini Timmaraju said, “These attacks are another step toward a national backdoor abortion ban.” (FYI, if you missed my livestream conversation with Mini last week, you can watch it here.)

Quick hits:

• Sen. Elizabeth Warren wants Mike Stuart—Trump’s appointee for general counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services—to answer questions about his anti-abortion beliefs;

• The Contrarian writes that “the degradation of democracy and abortion rights go hand in hand”;

• Ms. magazine spoke to the directors of Plan C about attacks on abortion pills and what comes next;

• Finally, the AP-NORC poll we told you about a few days ago wasn’t just about abortion—it also shows that only about 2 in 10 Americans have “a great deal” of confidence in the Supreme Court.

Stats & Studies

A recent Gallup poll shows that young people continue to lead the pro-choice charge. Pollsters asked whether certain behaviors or issues were “morally acceptable”—including abortion, premarital sex, divorce, birth control, and having children outside of marriage.

When it came to 18-34 year-olds, 59% agreed that abortion was “morally acceptable.” (48% of 35-54 year olds agreed, as did 43% of those over 55.) I suppose it shouldn’t come as a surprise—despite conservatives best efforts to indoctrinate young people, they continue to be the most pro-choice demographic in the country.

One interesting anomaly: when it came to birth control, 90% of younger respondents said contraception was morally acceptable—and 92% of those over 55 did. I wonder if there were folks in the poll who remember what it was when birth control wasn’t legal.

“Legislation that treats viability as a fixed, knowable point ignores that it’s a moving target, influenced by resources, geography, and sheer luck. When you’re poor, when you’re Black, when you’re young and don’t have reliable health care: Everything takes longer. You find out you’re pregnant later. You spend weeks scraping together money. You wait for appointments because there’s just one clinic left in your entire region. You navigate mandatory waiting periods and parental consent laws. And then, suddenly, you’re staring down a viability deadline.”

- Imani Gandy, Rewire

WTF, WaPo?

After a federal judge blocked Trump’s budget law from defunding Planned Parenthood this week, Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post offered up a truly confounding message from its editorial board.

The board goes beyond disagreeing with the ruling—which, by the way, prevents an estimated one in four abortion clinics from shutting down. They went a step further: comparing Judge Indira Talwani, who issued the ruling, to Texas judge Matthew Kacsmaryk—the anti-abortion extremist best known for his repeated efforts to ban abortion pills, his insistence that abortion is murder, his opposition to birth control and same-sex marriage, and his hostility to women’s right to divorce.

Planned Parenthood called the comparison “eyebrow-raising”:

“There is so much to pick apart here that one doesn’t know exactly where to start, but some gems from the Post include comparing Judge Talwani to Judge Kacsmaryk, and that singling out and ‘defunding’ Planned Parenthood is somehow fine because it’s a conservative effort.”

Planned Parenthood also corrected flat-out misinformation in the editorial—like the false claim that Congress is subsidizing Planned Parenthood. In reality, the organization’s health centers receive reimbursements from Medicaid for the services they provide, like birth control, cancer screenings, and STI testing—which is the case for all health providers.

So who came up with this nonsense? The piece was penned by editorial board members Mary Duenwald, Stephen Stromberg, James Hohmann, Megan McArdle, and Eduardo Porter.

Hohmann, for example, used the days after Roe fell to lecture Democrats about needing to “get a grip,” railing against the idea of invoking the filibuster to restore abortion rights—all while abortion bans across the country quickly devastated women and children’s lives. Porter’s past coverage appears to focus more on tech, business, and antagonizing immigrants than abortion. Duenwald gets a shout-out in a piece from former columnist Ruth Marcus about why she left the Post; Marcus said she left shortly after Duenwald told her a column she’d written criticizing Bezos was not fit to run.

Then there’s McArdle, whose voice seems to feature most prominently in the editorial. What to say about her?! When a 10-year-old rape victim was forced to leave Ohio for an abortion, not only did McArdle suggest the story was false—she also claimed that only a few girls that age get their periods, so why were we making such a big deal out of it anyway?

McArdle has accused pro-choice advocates of simply wanting to shirk the responsibility of parenting, as if irresponsibility is the only reason one would object to forced pregnancy. She’s critiqued Roe v. Wade for polarizing the abortion “debate,” calling for Democrats to “let Roe go.” She’s argued that before abortion bans, anti-abortion activists used to be “flexible” and push reasonable restrictions—as if such a thing exists. And she’s pushed the abject lie that the nation is evenly split on abortion, even as, overwhelmingly, about 80% of voters don’t believe the government should intervene in pregnancy.

We could go on, but too many column inches have already been wasted on McArdle’s beliefs.

All of which is to say: If you were curious about how the Post’s editorial board could arrive at such a warped conclusion, take a look at who wrote it. (And, of course, interrogate whether billionaires determined to cozy up to Trump should own the biggest newspapers in the country.)

As Planned Parenthood wrote in their short response to the editorial:

“A word to the Washington Post Ed Board: Democracy does die in darkness, so we’re not going quietly. That’s why we’re suing the Trump administration and fighting this unconstitutional effort to ‘defund’ Planned Parenthood… That’s the democratic legitimacy we’ll be fighting for.”