Abortion Is a Losing Issue for Republicans. Birth Control Might Not Be.

Contraception has a PR problem—and the White House is exploiting it

Donald Trump doesn’t want to talk about abortion. He’s well-aware that the issue is a loser for Republicans, and our felon president really doesn’t like losing. That’s why, much to the annoyance of the anti-abortion movement, the Trump administration hasn’t enforced the Comstock Act—which would make mailing abortion pills a federal crime. It’s also why the FDA has slow-walked its ‘safety study’ of abortion pills, and why Trump himself is so intent on pretending to be reasonable on the issue.

Abortion is just too popular to pick any big public fights over.

That doesn’t mean the White House plans to leave women alone—they like fucking with us far too much for that. Instead of attacking abortion rights, the Trump administration is going after what they believe is a far easier target: birth control.

That’s right, they’re skipping past abortion and going straight for contraception.

Law professor Mary Ziegler first floated this idea in a Boston Globe column a few months ago, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. Ziegler wrote that “the Trump administration may find it easier to change policy on birth control than on abortion.” After all, contraception has a serious PR problem right now: conservatives have flooded young women’s algorithms with disinformation about the Pill, women on social media are sharing their (very real) stories of painful IUD insertions, and many American women feel ignored or dismissed by the medical professionals tasked to care for them.

As a result, criticism of birth control is no longer purely seen as misogynist drivel. The rise of MAHA has created an opening for Republicans to attack contraception under the auspices of “protecting women.” And that’s exactly what they’ve been doing since Trump returned to office.

Last year, the White House froze more than $65 million in grants for Title X—the nation’s family planning program. Then, just a few months ago, the administration issued new guidance for how those federal dollars should be spent: instead of helping low-income Americans access contraception, the administration directed programs to promote “natural family planning methods.” Contraception is only mentioned once in the entire 67-page document, and only to state that it’s “overprescribed.”

With this guidance—through just one document—the Trump administration changed a long-standing federal program that helps people afford birth control into one that “assist[s] clients in achieving healthy pregnancies.”

A few weeks ago, the White House made similar changes to the nation’s Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program. After cutting $67 million from programs that focused on contraception, the administration published two “notices of funding opportunities” instructing new grantees to teach teenage girls period tracking instead. They’re calling it “body awareness.”

If the goal is to reduce teen pregnancy, why recommend a notoriously ineffective method—especially for teens, whose periods are often irregular? Well, the idea of “menstrual cycle classes” for students came from Emma Waters—Gen Z’s Phyllis Schlafly—who advises the Trump administration on how to increase the nation’s birth rate. It makes sense, then, that the administration’s sole mention of birth control in those funding documents is a prompt to teach students about the downsides of “ovarian suppression compared to approaches that address root causes.”

Republicans have even tried to sugar-coat the defunding of Planned Parenthood and other clinics—which put over one million women at risk of losing contraception access over the last year. Conservatives want us to believe that the country’s most-trusted reproductive healthcare providers are actually predatory or unnecessary.

Even with federal funding restored, the damage has been incalculable. So what’s supposed to fill this massive healthcare gap? How does the White House want to fix the reproductive and maternal healthcare deserts their policies created? Crisis pregnancy centers—which not only can’t prescribe birth control, but won’t.

The administration has propped up these fake clinics as reasonable replacements for the real clinics their policies have shuttered, directing American women to sketchy data collection tools and even laying the groundwork to funnel Title X funding to the religious groups. I warned about this strategy in 2023:

The GOP’s Plan to Ban Birth Control (Part II)

Let’s recap: the administration is stripping away information about birth control from teens, affordable contraception from poor people, and clinics from everyone else.

On the off chance Americans are able to learn about contraception, afford it, or find a place that will prescribe it, the White House has one more hoop for women and girls to jump through: extremist pharmacists and healthcare providers, who can refuse to prescribe or dispense birth control if it goes against their “moral” beliefs. You see, the Trump administration just restructured its Office for Civil Rights (OCR) to include a division for Conscience and Religious Freedom.

In other words: if your local pharmacist refuses to give you your birth control pills because he doesn’t think women should have sex before marriage, he now has an entire federal office backing him up.

For the most part, these attacks have been exactly as I’ve predicted: bureaucratic, under-the-radar, and slow-rolling. I’ve long warned that Republicans won’t introduce a law that straight out bans birth control—not yet, anyway. Instead, they want to chip away at access without anyone noticing, and lay the groundwork for broader, more obvious attacks down the line.

But here’s what worries me most: even when this administration is explicit about their war on birth control, few people seem to be taking them seriously. Close to a year ago, I flagged that the federal government was classifying IUDs, birth control pills, and hormonal implants as “abortifacient birth control.” The news was buried six paragraphs into a New York Times article about the Trump administration’s plan to incinerate a multi-million dollar stockpile of contraception.

As I tracked the story over the next few months, I was shocked that no one was covering it: the federal government was calling America’s most commonly-used contraceptives ‘abortions’—surely that should be a front page story! But it continued to be a side note in all the stories about this contraception stockpile.

This week, we finally got a bit of substantive coverage from The Washington Post, after reporters obtained emails from administration officials discussing the decision. But the article makes it appear that calling birth control ‘abortion’ was a mistake made by idiotic staffers who don’t understand women’s health. And while I’m sure a good deal of stupidity was involved, I can assure you this was not a random oopsie.

Remember, multiple federal agencies made the “abortifacient birth control” claim—not just one rogue employee. The term comes from the anti-abortion playbook: it’s appeared in multiple lawsuits by powerful conservative legal groups arguing that employers shouldn’t have to cover their workers’ contraception. It’s also not an accident that the administration worked to save condoms in the stockpile from being destroyed; it aligns with the ‘abortifacient birth control’ classifications used by groups like Students for Life, which say condoms are an acceptable form of birth control.

In other words, this was not an error—but part of a long-standing, growing, and powerful tactic. After all, conflating birth control with abortion gives Republicans the ability to claim that they’re not restricting contraception at all!

The GOP’s Plan to Ban Birth Control (Part I)

If we’re not willing to call out the most obvious and egregious attacks on contraception, why would the Trump administration feel anything other than emboldened? How long until deaths by a thousand cuts becomes a straight up knife in the back?

We’re getting closer. Just a few months ago, the EPA put birth control on a list of federal water contaminants, bolstering the lie that hormonal contraception is dangerous and toxic. I suspect the next major attack will be on teenagers—who are often the canaries in the coal mine. Already, Republicans are preventing teens from getting gender-affirming care by claiming that hormones are dangerous for their growing bodies.

You know what else is a hormone? Birth control.

I don’t say any of this to frighten or to make people feel hopeless—the truth is that I think all of these attacks give us a powerful opportunity. Despite its bad PR at the moment, contraception is still incredibly popular. That’s why it’s so important that the administration isn’t allowed to make these attacks under the cover of darkness.

None of this is accidental. Not the Title X rewrite, not the period-tracking curricula, not the fake clinics, not calling birth control abortion. It’s all a strategy—one that bets on voters never believing they’d take it that far.

AT A GLANCE: Trump’s Attacks on Contraception

• Teen sex ed: Stripped birth control info from the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, replaced with “period tracking”

• Title X: Redirected the nation’s family planning program away from affordable birth control and to “natural family planning”

• Clinics: Shuttered reproductive healthcare providers through federal and state defunding

• Pharmacists: Empowered to refuse to dispense contraception on “moral” grounds

• Employers: Pushing for ‘conscience’ protections to refuse birth control coverage