Obama to Corrupt America with The Pill!
Emboldened Conservatives Wage All War Against The Pill. Will Take a Brave Last Stand for Freedom, Just Like that Custer Guy.
The Republican War on Contraception
Not satisfied with restricting abortion rights, the GOP is now coming after your birth control.
Last year was not a great one for abortion rights. First, congressional Republicans attempted to deny statutory rape victims access to Medicaid-funded abortions (twice). Then GOP-dominated state legislatures pushed record numbers of laws limiting abortion rights, including proposals that could have treated killing abortion providers as "justifiable homicide."
Yet in the past six months, social conservatives have widened their offensive, and their new target is clear: Not satisfied with making it harder to obtain legal abortions, they want to limit access to birth control, too.
"Contraception is under attack in a way it really wasn't in the past few years," says Judy Waxman, the vice president for health and reproductive rights at the National Women's Law Center. "In 2004, we could not find any group-the National Right to Life Committee, the Bush campaign, anyone-that would go on the record to say they're opposed to birth control," adds Elizabeth Shipp, the political director for NARAL Pro-Choice America. "We couldn't find them in 2006 either, and in 2008 it was just fringe groups. In 2010, 2011, and this year, it's just exploded."
The first sign of the new assault came last October, when Mississippi activists and congressional Republicans pushed legislation on the state and federal level, respectively, that would have treated zygotes-a.k.a. fertilized human eggs-as legal "persons." If the definition of legal personhood is changed so that it begins when sperm meets an egg, hormonal birth control or barrier devices that prevent zygotes from implanting in the uterine wall could become illegal, making using an IUD tantamount to murder. Yet some 40 percent of House Republicans and a quarter of their allies in the Senate back bills that would do just that.
That's not all. Earlier this year, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a rising conservative star who's considered a possible pick for the 2012 GOP vice-presidential nomination, introduced a bill that could cut off birth control access for millions of women by allowing even non-religious employers to refuse birth control coverage as long as they cite a religious reason. In other words, if your boss doesn't want to cover birth control in the company health plan because he says it would offend his religious beliefs, he wouldn't have to-even if his Cialis was still covered. Rubio's bill could also allow states to refuse to provide birth control through Medicaid, which provides family planning services to millions of poor women.
The Republican presidential candidates also have come out against birth control. Mitt Romney has slammed President Barack Obama for requiring most employers to offer insurance that provides birth control at no cost to women who want it, even though Romney himself maintained a similar rule as governor of Massachusetts.
Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who won the non-binding Missouri primary as well as the Minnesota and Colorado caucuses on Tuesday, has also slammed Obama's decision. But he's also gone farther than that, suggesting that any form of birth control is immoral. "Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that's okay, contraception is okay," Santorum, a devout Catholic, said in October. "It's not okay. It's a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be." As Salon's Irin Carmon has documented, Santorum thinks Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court decision that said states can not deny married couples access to contraception, should be overturned.
Even previously uncontroversial ideas about contraception are now being questioned. As I explained in this story about Obama's birth-control policy, most of the administration's recently-issued rule requiring companies to provide birth control to their employees has been widely accepted federal law for a decade. Requiring employers to provide birth control if they provide other preventative services was so uncontroversial that most employers-even Catholic universities like DePaul, in Chicago-simply changed their policies and offered birth control to avoid being sued. The percentage of employers offering birth control coverage tripled in a decade. The national controversy only erupted after Obama issued the new rule in January.
NARAL's Shipp thinks the battlefield has definitely shifted. "First, everyone thought it was all about abortion access and abortion rights," she says. "But they decided to move the goalposts, and it's been kind of stunning how far to the right they've gone. These are people who have never, ever approved of birth control, and they saw an opportunity to take it one step further."
The White House probably isn't entirely unhappy with all the fighting over contraception. As the Washington Post's Sarah Kliff wrote, the birth control issue gives Obama's reelection campaign "a chance to widen the reproductive health debate beyond abortion" and energize young, secular abortion-rights supporters who might not otherwise vote.
Republicans who support abortion rights have warned their fellow GOPers that picking a fight over contraception could be a disaster. But even that hasn't slowed down the onslaught-on Wednesday, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio), warned that he would soon push forward legislation that would allow employers to refuse to provide birth control to their employees. Boehner's Senate counterpart, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), noted that several Republican senators have already introduced bills on the subject. One of those bills is Rubio's aforementioned Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
"I'm a little bit stunned with how far they have gone on birth control with absolutely no regard for the political consequences," Shipp continues. "Whether it's Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney-I don't think Newt Gingrich-if any of these guys think they're going to be able to come back to the middle after the attacks they've made on birth control, they're sadly mistaken, because the general public thinks they're just whack-a-doodle."
GOP Ripe For Splits In Assault On Birth Control Rule
Congressional Republicans’ pledge to mount a legislative push against the Obama administration’s requirement that health insurance plans cover birth control comes with a risk: Alienating their members who have previously pushed or voted to mandate contraception coverage.
Back in 2001, six Republican senators sponsored legislation decreeing that health insurance plans may not “exclude or restrict benefits for prescription contraceptive drugs or devices approved by the Food and Drug Administration.” In other words, they would be required to provide birth control. The bill never made it out of committee, but that wasn’t for a lack of effort from the GOP.
The measure’s lead sponsor was Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and cosponsors included Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME); the other four have since left Congress. Counterpart legislation in the House was introduced by former Rep. James Greenwood (R-PA) and cosponsored by 14 others Republicans including incumbent Rep. Todd Platts (PA) and now-Sen. Mark Kirk (IL).
Spokespersons for Snowe and Collins did not respond to TPM’s requests for comment by press time, and the two senators have not weighed in on the controversy thus far.
Republicans have fueled the religious firestorm over the administration’s rule, and said Wednesday that they intend to act to roll it back legislatively if the White House does not reverse course. And while Democratic leaders have sought to downplay their own divisions and portray the GOP push as an attack on women’s health, the controversy has split off some key allies of President Obama including Tim Kaine and fourth-ranking Dem Rep. John Larson (CT).
Behind the political haze is a new poll showing that a majority of the public - including self-identified Catholics - favors the birth control rule when told what it actually entails. It exempts churches and houses of worship that primarily employ persons of the same faith and grants religious nonprofits that employ and serve persons of different beliefs one additional year to begin complying.
Senate GOP leaders took turns bashing the decision Wednesday. “It violates our First Amendment to the constitution,” said Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH). “This is not a women’s rights issue. This is a religious liberty issue.” But Ayotte’s state of New Hampshire already has the same mandate without a religious exemption, and she hasn’t expressed concerns with it. Twenty-seven other states have the same requirement.
For now Republicans have stuck together without any divisions spilling out. But that could change if members are forced to take votes as GOP support for contraception mandates have even been backed by staunch conservatives in the past.
A Republican-led appropriations bill in 2001, passed by a GOP Congress and enacted by President Bush, included a mandate that federal employee health insurance plans include contraception and birth control coverage. The legislation cleared the Senate by a voice vote and passed the House 334-94, winning the votes of incumbent Republicans including House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (VA) as well as Sens. Rob Portman (OH), Lindsey Graham (SC), Roger Wicker (MS), Kirk and others.
“The Administration believes that all federal employees should have access to a wide range of health care insurance options, including access to prescription drugs such as contraceptives,” the Bush White House said in a statement at the time, noting that it did not ask for the contraception mandate but wouldn’t object to it either.
Federal employee health plans requirements are, of course, a different animal than mandates for religiously affiliated entities, but enactment of the bill goes to show strong prior GOP support for expanding access to birth control for women.
With the White House struggling to explain its decision and said to be weighing a compromise, Republicans could still gain from the issue in the short-run. But as pro-choice Republicans and GOP strategists warn, the public is becoming more socially liberal and stoking culture wars could ultimately be a bad move for the party.
Pro-Choice GOP Warns Party That Contraception Fight Will Be A Disaster
Pro-choice Republicans are begging their party to drop this fight over contraception before it’s too late. Turning to a discussion about access to birth control will be nothing short of a disaster, they say.
The new and unexpected war over contraception may not end up as only a battle between the White House and the Republican party. It could end up as a fight between the GOP and itself. As we saw during the 2011’s push to defund Planned Parenthood - when some Republican Senators rebuked their colleagues in the House for attacking the organization - Republicans on Capitol Hill do not speak with one voice on matters of women’s health. Now, as Speaker John Boehner seemingly prepares to turn the House GOP’s attention to contraception, pro-choice Republicans are warning that the GOP may become the next Komen For The Cure.
“I think this week’s outrage over the Komen decision should be a warning to the Republican party about how quickly there was a mass outrage over further and further attacks on general women’s health,” Kellie Ferguson, executive director of Republican Majority for choice, told me Wednesday. “You could see the same backlash on attacks on contraception.”
Ferguson calls the Republican rhetoric on contraception “crossing the line” - taking the discussion away from choice issues (where Republicans can find some broader, if still national minority constituency) and into the realm of the fringy extreme.
“For the last number of years, we in the pro-choice community in general - and we specifically as Republicans - have been saying as this pandering to a sort of social conservative faction of voters continues, you’re going to see the line pushed further and further and further,” she said. “And we’re now crossing the line from discussion of when we should regulate abortion to when we should now regulate legal doctor-prescribed medications like birth control, which is woven in the fabric of society as an acceptable medication.”
She pointed to widely-reported polling showing that a majority of Americans - and a majority of Catholics - support the White House policy and urged her party to take a step back before it’s too late.
A high-profile debate over contraception will only serve to alienate voters and deny Republicans the White House in the fall, Ferguson suggested.
“There’s a big leap between people who vote at a Republican caucus and the majority that will vote in a general election,” she said. “I think pigeon-holing the party as against women’s health in general not only hurts the party, but it hurts our key candidates.”
The Republican War on Contraception
Not satisfied with restricting abortion rights, the GOP is now coming after your birth control.
Last year was not a great one for abortion rights. First, congressional Republicans attempted to deny statutory rape victims access to Medicaid-funded abortions (twice). Then GOP-dominated state legislatures pushed record numbers of laws limiting abortion rights, including proposals that could have treated killing abortion providers as "justifiable homicide."
Yet in the past six months, social conservatives have widened their offensive, and their new target is clear: Not satisfied with making it harder to obtain legal abortions, they want to limit access to birth control, too.
"Contraception is under attack in a way it really wasn't in the past few years," says Judy Waxman, the vice president for health and reproductive rights at the National Women's Law Center. "In 2004, we could not find any group-the National Right to Life Committee, the Bush campaign, anyone-that would go on the record to say they're opposed to birth control," adds Elizabeth Shipp, the political director for NARAL Pro-Choice America. "We couldn't find them in 2006 either, and in 2008 it was just fringe groups. In 2010, 2011, and this year, it's just exploded."
The first sign of the new assault came last October, when Mississippi activists and congressional Republicans pushed legislation on the state and federal level, respectively, that would have treated zygotes-a.k.a. fertilized human eggs-as legal "persons." If the definition of legal personhood is changed so that it begins when sperm meets an egg, hormonal birth control or barrier devices that prevent zygotes from implanting in the uterine wall could become illegal, making using an IUD tantamount to murder. Yet some 40 percent of House Republicans and a quarter of their allies in the Senate back bills that would do just that.
That's not all. Earlier this year, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a rising conservative star who's considered a possible pick for the 2012 GOP vice-presidential nomination, introduced a bill that could cut off birth control access for millions of women by allowing even non-religious employers to refuse birth control coverage as long as they cite a religious reason. In other words, if your boss doesn't want to cover birth control in the company health plan because he says it would offend his religious beliefs, he wouldn't have to-even if his Cialis was still covered. Rubio's bill could also allow states to refuse to provide birth control through Medicaid, which provides family planning services to millions of poor women.
The Republican presidential candidates also have come out against birth control. Mitt Romney has slammed President Barack Obama for requiring most employers to offer insurance that provides birth control at no cost to women who want it, even though Romney himself maintained a similar rule as governor of Massachusetts.
Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who won the non-binding Missouri primary as well as the Minnesota and Colorado caucuses on Tuesday, has also slammed Obama's decision. But he's also gone farther than that, suggesting that any form of birth control is immoral. "Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that's okay, contraception is okay," Santorum, a devout Catholic, said in October. "It's not okay. It's a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be." As Salon's Irin Carmon has documented, Santorum thinks Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court decision that said states can not deny married couples access to contraception, should be overturned.
Even previously uncontroversial ideas about contraception are now being questioned. As I explained in this story about Obama's birth-control policy, most of the administration's recently-issued rule requiring companies to provide birth control to their employees has been widely accepted federal law for a decade. Requiring employers to provide birth control if they provide other preventative services was so uncontroversial that most employers-even Catholic universities like DePaul, in Chicago-simply changed their policies and offered birth control to avoid being sued. The percentage of employers offering birth control coverage tripled in a decade. The national controversy only erupted after Obama issued the new rule in January.
NARAL's Shipp thinks the battlefield has definitely shifted. "First, everyone thought it was all about abortion access and abortion rights," she says. "But they decided to move the goalposts, and it's been kind of stunning how far to the right they've gone. These are people who have never, ever approved of birth control, and they saw an opportunity to take it one step further."
The White House probably isn't entirely unhappy with all the fighting over contraception. As the Washington Post's Sarah Kliff wrote, the birth control issue gives Obama's reelection campaign "a chance to widen the reproductive health debate beyond abortion" and energize young, secular abortion-rights supporters who might not otherwise vote.
Republicans who support abortion rights have warned their fellow GOPers that picking a fight over contraception could be a disaster. But even that hasn't slowed down the onslaught-on Wednesday, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio), warned that he would soon push forward legislation that would allow employers to refuse to provide birth control to their employees. Boehner's Senate counterpart, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), noted that several Republican senators have already introduced bills on the subject. One of those bills is Rubio's aforementioned Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
"I'm a little bit stunned with how far they have gone on birth control with absolutely no regard for the political consequences," Shipp continues. "Whether it's Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney-I don't think Newt Gingrich-if any of these guys think they're going to be able to come back to the middle after the attacks they've made on birth control, they're sadly mistaken, because the general public thinks they're just whack-a-doodle."
GOP Ripe For Splits In Assault On Birth Control Rule
Congressional Republicans’ pledge to mount a legislative push against the Obama administration’s requirement that health insurance plans cover birth control comes with a risk: Alienating their members who have previously pushed or voted to mandate contraception coverage.
Back in 2001, six Republican senators sponsored legislation decreeing that health insurance plans may not “exclude or restrict benefits for prescription contraceptive drugs or devices approved by the Food and Drug Administration.” In other words, they would be required to provide birth control. The bill never made it out of committee, but that wasn’t for a lack of effort from the GOP.
The measure’s lead sponsor was Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and cosponsors included Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME); the other four have since left Congress. Counterpart legislation in the House was introduced by former Rep. James Greenwood (R-PA) and cosponsored by 14 others Republicans including incumbent Rep. Todd Platts (PA) and now-Sen. Mark Kirk (IL).
Spokespersons for Snowe and Collins did not respond to TPM’s requests for comment by press time, and the two senators have not weighed in on the controversy thus far.
Republicans have fueled the religious firestorm over the administration’s rule, and said Wednesday that they intend to act to roll it back legislatively if the White House does not reverse course. And while Democratic leaders have sought to downplay their own divisions and portray the GOP push as an attack on women’s health, the controversy has split off some key allies of President Obama including Tim Kaine and fourth-ranking Dem Rep. John Larson (CT).
Behind the political haze is a new poll showing that a majority of the public - including self-identified Catholics - favors the birth control rule when told what it actually entails. It exempts churches and houses of worship that primarily employ persons of the same faith and grants religious nonprofits that employ and serve persons of different beliefs one additional year to begin complying.
Senate GOP leaders took turns bashing the decision Wednesday. “It violates our First Amendment to the constitution,” said Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH). “This is not a women’s rights issue. This is a religious liberty issue.” But Ayotte’s state of New Hampshire already has the same mandate without a religious exemption, and she hasn’t expressed concerns with it. Twenty-seven other states have the same requirement.
For now Republicans have stuck together without any divisions spilling out. But that could change if members are forced to take votes as GOP support for contraception mandates have even been backed by staunch conservatives in the past.
A Republican-led appropriations bill in 2001, passed by a GOP Congress and enacted by President Bush, included a mandate that federal employee health insurance plans include contraception and birth control coverage. The legislation cleared the Senate by a voice vote and passed the House 334-94, winning the votes of incumbent Republicans including House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (VA) as well as Sens. Rob Portman (OH), Lindsey Graham (SC), Roger Wicker (MS), Kirk and others.
“The Administration believes that all federal employees should have access to a wide range of health care insurance options, including access to prescription drugs such as contraceptives,” the Bush White House said in a statement at the time, noting that it did not ask for the contraception mandate but wouldn’t object to it either.
Federal employee health plans requirements are, of course, a different animal than mandates for religiously affiliated entities, but enactment of the bill goes to show strong prior GOP support for expanding access to birth control for women.
With the White House struggling to explain its decision and said to be weighing a compromise, Republicans could still gain from the issue in the short-run. But as pro-choice Republicans and GOP strategists warn, the public is becoming more socially liberal and stoking culture wars could ultimately be a bad move for the party.
Pro-Choice GOP Warns Party That Contraception Fight Will Be A Disaster
Pro-choice Republicans are begging their party to drop this fight over contraception before it’s too late. Turning to a discussion about access to birth control will be nothing short of a disaster, they say.
The new and unexpected war over contraception may not end up as only a battle between the White House and the Republican party. It could end up as a fight between the GOP and itself. As we saw during the 2011’s push to defund Planned Parenthood - when some Republican Senators rebuked their colleagues in the House for attacking the organization - Republicans on Capitol Hill do not speak with one voice on matters of women’s health. Now, as Speaker John Boehner seemingly prepares to turn the House GOP’s attention to contraception, pro-choice Republicans are warning that the GOP may become the next Komen For The Cure.
“I think this week’s outrage over the Komen decision should be a warning to the Republican party about how quickly there was a mass outrage over further and further attacks on general women’s health,” Kellie Ferguson, executive director of Republican Majority for choice, told me Wednesday. “You could see the same backlash on attacks on contraception.”
Ferguson calls the Republican rhetoric on contraception “crossing the line” - taking the discussion away from choice issues (where Republicans can find some broader, if still national minority constituency) and into the realm of the fringy extreme.
“For the last number of years, we in the pro-choice community in general - and we specifically as Republicans - have been saying as this pandering to a sort of social conservative faction of voters continues, you’re going to see the line pushed further and further and further,” she said. “And we’re now crossing the line from discussion of when we should regulate abortion to when we should now regulate legal doctor-prescribed medications like birth control, which is woven in the fabric of society as an acceptable medication.”
She pointed to widely-reported polling showing that a majority of Americans - and a majority of Catholics - support the White House policy and urged her party to take a step back before it’s too late.
A high-profile debate over contraception will only serve to alienate voters and deny Republicans the White House in the fall, Ferguson suggested.
“There’s a big leap between people who vote at a Republican caucus and the majority that will vote in a general election,” she said. “I think pigeon-holing the party as against women’s health in general not only hurts the party, but it hurts our key candidates.”