The GOP’s Birth Control Problem

Republican are fighting over contraception—and voters need to know

Republicans know they have a great big abortion problem: Americans are more pro-choice than ever, and the post-Roe horror stories just keep coming. The GOP’s strategy of ignoring the issue didn’t work, nor did trying to convince voters that bans aren’t really ‘bans’ but ‘reasonable restrictions.’ After all, Americans are watching in real time as those supposedly-moderate policies prevent a desperate woman from ending her doomed pregnancy and allow another to be prosecuted for how she handled her miscarriage. 

But a small contingent of conservative women believe they have the answer to the GOP’s woes: birth control. This week, a group of strategists—led by former Donald Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway and armed with new polling—have been lobbying Republicans to offer full-throated support for contraception. 

Their primary message, POLITICO reports, “is that Republicans need to talk more about what they are for and less about what they oppose.”

The problem, though, is that many Republicans don’t support birth control. In fact, conservative legislators and activists have spent years laying the groundwork to ban contraception. So Conway’s plan wasn’t exactly well-received. Since news of her lobbying efforts broke, there’s been a swift and intense backlash from the Right—making clear that Republicans don’t just have an abortion problem: They have a very big, and growing, birth control problem. 

If the American public catches wind of the fact that the GOP can’t even agree that contraception should be legal, any defensive maneuvering from Republicans on abortion rights will be pointless. 

That’s why there’s never been a better moment for Democrats to swoop in, point out that Republicans never planned to stop with abortion, and, most importantly, shine a spotlight on the infighting. After all, the GOP bringing in a group of female strategists to plead with mostly-male lawmakers to support birth control—just to be attacked for doing so—is a damn compelling story.

It doesn’t just remind voters how extreme Republicans are on reproductive rights, but exposes the deep and unfixable misogyny of lawmakers who expect women to hold their hands through these issues and still end up doing the wrong thing.

Because remember, while Conway is best known for her work with the Trump administration, ten years ago she was the strategist brought in to teach Republican men to stop saying stupid things about rape. For most of Conway’s career, she’s been trying to get bad men to stop admitting how bad they are. That’s why it makes sense that one of her partners in this birth control push is Heather Higgins, CEO of Independent Women’s Voice (IWV). Higgins tells POLITICO that, “Republicans are like your uncle, who really loves you and loves the women in his family, but he’s bad about showing it.”

“It’s just not in their natural vocabulary. And we’re trying to help them learn how to make this be more part of their vocabulary and tell them that they need to talk about these things that their constituents all support, and be more visible and vocal.”

In other words: Republican men need to be taught how to not publicly hate women. 

Higgins is also known for slick talking points that downplay Republican extremism. In a 2015 speech, for example, she bragged about being an expert in “taking a conservative message and packaging it in a way that will be acceptable.” And last year, The Washington Post reported on internal memos showing that IWV’s strategy is to diminish the impact of abortion bans as much as possible—even using feminist rhetoric to do so. (You may remember this absolutely bonkers ad that the group released after Roe was overturned.)

Higgins has been pushing contraception as Republicans’ cure-all for a while now, releasing polls that show overwhelming support for birth control among GOP voters—and claiming those numbers prove that it’s a “harmful hoax” to suggest Republicans want to ban contraception. 

But it’s not so easy to convince voters that Republicans don’t want to ban birth control when lawmakers refuse to get behind meaningful legislation on the issue, and when conservative activists are aghast at the mere suggestion that Republicans support birth control. 

When POLITICO came out with their story about Higgins and Conway, for example, one of the first responses was from Michael New at the Charlotte Lozier Institute—the ‘research’ arm of the powerful anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. 

New wrote that instead of cowing to pressure around birth control over the years, “pro-lifers have wisely realized that greater access to contraception often results in more sexual activity, more unintended pregnancies, and more abortions.” Instead of advocating for contraception, he says, politicians should simply direct voters to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers.  

This is a representative from one of the nation’s most significant anti-abortion groups—an organization that holds tremendous sway with GOP lawmakers—explicitly saying that they believe birth control is harmful.

Reporter Haley Strack also blasted Conway and Higgins’ campaign in the National Review, insisting that birth control is bad for women and that it can cause “depression, heart attacks, anxiety, blood clots, stunted fertility, and embryonic deaths.” 

It’s that last bit that’s important. For years now, anti-abortion groups have been working to redefine certain types of birth control as abortifacients. That way, when they try to ban the morning after pill or IUDs, they can maintain that they’re not banning contraception—but abortion. It’s also why Lauren Baldwin of the Conservative Partnership Institute tweeted in response to the POLITICO article that “cowtowing to the Left by promoting abortifacients isn’t a winning GOP strategy.” 

But conservatives’ strategy doesn’t just seek to redefine contraception as abortion. As I reported in September, legislators are also implementing a multi-million dollar gag rule on contraception using funding for anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers—ensuring that real reproductive health clinics are replaced with religious groups that have a policy against talking about birth control.

That’s to say nothing of the broad and insidious cultural campaign working to convince young women that birth control is dangerous. This summer, for example, speakers at Turning Point USA’s Young Women’s Leadership conference urged women and girls in the audience not to use hormonal birth control. The group even had a mirror made for selfies that was made to look like a magazine cover with a headline reading, “Birth control is so last year.”

This comes in tandem with supposed ‘health influencers’ spreading misinformation about contraception on social media, and a disinformation campaign to stop colleges from installing Plan B vending machines on campuses. I could go on; there are countless quiet initiatives to slow or stop access to birth control.

All of which is to say: Any effort to promote birth control—even by Republicans—gets in the way of a very expensive, years-long strategy to end access to contraception. That’s why any campaign like Conway’s will never work for the GOP. But it could work for us. 

Voters already see Republicans as extremists on reproductive rights, and are perfectly primed for a message that drives the point home: The groups pulling the GOP’s strings will never allow them to support birth control. And when Republican women try, they’re boxed out or forced to water down their stance. That’s how much they hate us.

This past August, for example, The New York Times reported that some Republican women lawmakers were focusing on contraception as a way to win back voters upset over abortion bans. But, as Abortion, Every Day pointed out, the legislation these GOP women proposed ended up adopting anti-abortion movement language that defines pregnancy as beginning at fertilization rather than implantation. (That distinction is what conservatives rely on to falsely assert that IUDs and emergency contraception end pregnancies.)

Similarly, when Republicans across multiple states tried to pass exceptions for women’s health and lives, they were stopped by anti-abortion groups that hold an enormous amount of influence over state legislators. We know who is in control here.

Maybe Conway will be able to successfully convince a few Republicans to take a stronger pro-contraception position in the interest of not losing voters. Anything is possible. But I’d put my money on the powerful organizations, activists and donors who spent millions of dollars and years of work to stop anything like that from happening.

Voters are smart, it’s time to connect the dots for them. Or, at the very least, point out the obvious: They are fighting over birth control. They will never support contraception—or us.

---

If you appreciate columns like this one and want to support independent feminist media, consider subscribing!