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And not what they are against. From at least 2015, Republicans have embraced the idea that the most important way to embrace Pro-Life tenets is to make abortion rare … by supporting safe and easily available contraception.
Post-Dobbs, when abortion was correctly returned to state-level, the amount of mercenary hysteria from the pro-abortion side has (with the eager willingness of a complicit media) has drowned out all rational discussion of how to actually help both women and children. The important discussion of contraception — the prevention of pregnancy in the first place — needs to be resumed by Republicans.
Kellyanne Conway is going to Capitol Hill on Wednesday with a message for Republicans: promote contraception or risk defeat in 2024.
The former senior counselor and campaign manager for President Donald Trump is part of a group set to brief Republicans on how they might get ahead of Democrats’ attacks that the GOP is anti-woman by talking more about protecting contraception and less about banning abortion. (snip)
And several prominent conservatives have implored Republicans in the post-Roe era to focus on issues such as contraception and maternal care to improve perception of the GOP’s approach to women’s health as Democrats have wielded the issue to notch several election wins.
And while the radical pro-abortion lobby, the ones that put America in the Red China sphere of allowing abortion on demand up to labor (and even further by denying medical care to born-alive infants of botched abortions) has been controlling the narrative of Women’s Rights post-Dobbs, they have framed it either abortion or women-as-slaves. Yet contraception — safe, cheap and easily available — has overwhelming public support, even among Repubicans and Pro-Life citizens.
And while the Politico reporter highlights the spokeshole for pro-abort EMILYS List dismissing this as an effort to rebrand Republicans, efforts like making The Pill over-the-counter goes back to, at least, 2015. Democrats put a stop to it because nothing was going to be allowed to interfere with Obamacare and those who profited from it.
Conservatives have had a real issues when grappling with reproductive issues. The more libertarian wing is not only pro-choice (if not pro-abortion) but also anti-public funding. The “Yes, go get The Pill but don’t make me pay for it.” And that has played into the Democrat framing that non-Leftists are anti-woman.
Yet, especially at this time, it should be quite evident on several issues, that Democrats have abandoned women in favor of men-who-wear-dresses and pushed back the rights of women to actually be recognized as women to their detriment. Whether it is sports, prisons or gym locker rooms, women are not really the concern of the Left. Even their abortion-on-demand stance has more than a whiff of exploitation in it. How many women feel pressured into delaying motherhood or having an abortion because they are warned on what it will do to their job or career?
Providing women easier access to contraception will definitely help with the pro-life/pro-abortion question. But the larger issue that will need to be addressed is the packaging of women’s reproduction as a commodity. Whether it’s to keep women from choosing to pause their work when starting a family or pushing women into “renting” their wombs …
— George Alexopoulos (@GPrime85) December 12, 2023
… women are facing some real fundamental decisions on their rights. Indeed, on their very humanity. We know how Democrats really feel about women. Republicans and conservatives have to articulate how we do. Now, more than ever.
featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license
Mad Celt says: Contraception are easily obtainable. That’s not the issue. The issue is what role does government have in manipulating social standards? None, zip, nata, zero. That is not one of the Constitutions 8 enumerated powers.
A reader says: Seriously?! You’re going to pontificate about how “pro-woman” you are now?
I noticed that ZERO of the bloggers here have mentioned either Kate Cox or Brittany Watts. Unless all of you have been living under giant boulders or playing at being ostriches, those are very real cases that show, unequivocally, that Conservatives hate women. Cox is a Texas woman who now likely has a bounty on her head after first trying, and then eventually failing, to receive an abortion exception in Texas. So she has left the state to receive care. She is about 20 weeks pregnant, and her fetus has Trisomy 18, she has been back and forth to the hospital with cramping, is leaking amniotic fluid and her future fertility is in jeopardy. She was told that due to the specific abnormalities that her fetus has, the fetus will not live. Now, I’m sure someone will jump in to say that not all Trisomy 18 cases end in immediate death, and while that’s technically true, the vast majority of them do. Not to mention that there’s nuance: full Trisomy 18, which Cox’s fetus has, basically always ends with either a stillborn fetus or one that doesn’t survive past the first year, with most surviving only a few days at most. Mosaic and Partial Trisomy 18 have better survival rates, still with disabilities, but they are much more rare. If people don’t believe me, go read the stories on the Trisomy 18 Foundation’s website. Beside that, the vast majority of the parents on that site chose to continue with their pregnancies, the key word being “chose.” Kate Cox doesn’t have choice and she is an example of how Republicans statements about exceptions for the life of the mother are crap.
Brittany Watts is a black woman in Ohio who developed PPROM. (Preterm premature rupture of membranes.) if you don’t know what this is, look it up. Basically, at about 22 weeks she started losing amniotic fluid which is very dangerous as it can lead to pregnancy termination, hemorrhaging and infection. She visited the hospital twice, was sent home both times, and ended up giving birth on the toilet. She left her fetus in the toilet and ended up hemorrhaging and going back to the hospital which led the police to discovering the dead fetus. Now, it should be noted that a forensic pathologist testified that the fetus was already dead when it was delivered and there were no signs of injury to the corpse. It also begs the question of why on earth a hospital would send her home when she’s experiencing PPROM and active labor. I know a woman who had PPROM back in 2021 at around 22 weeks and she wasn’t sent home. She delivered safely in a hospital. I wonder if this is because of those wonderful anti-abortion laws you all support and the hospital being scared of charges if the fetus was born alive and then being charged with a crime when it died or something. In any case, she’s being charged with Abuse of a Corpse, which is tragedy upon tragedy. One wonders how the many women who have had miscarriages on a toilet are feeling about this.
So yeah, spare me on your “pro-woman” stance now, especially since one of your fellow writers was literally celebrating the Texas law that allows for bounties on women’s heads if they have abortions in or out of the state. This is what the reality looks like. And unless and until you really start caring about women in all situations and not just for political gain, their suffering will be on your heads.
American Human says: Dear A. Reader, you mention two cases as if they need to be international news to include marches (or riots) for the protection of their rights. Have you ever met a person born to a woman as a result of a rape? I have and strangely, they are real people with spouses and families and jobs where they support them.
It’s always the one case here or there that must overturn all of society’s standards and generations
I have compassion for the women you name, but what about the 99.9% of aborted babies from regular women with no medical problems who just “decided” to have their babies aborted because they were just so darn inconvenient.
Save your sanctimonious arguments for elsewhere.
GWB says: Based on what I recall about those cases, they were certainly not all as presented here by you. But I’m not going to get into an argument about that.
No, your primary issue seems to be that women need abortion in all cases because of the small number that actually defy convention.
And unless and until you really start caring about women in all situations
That’s not really what you want. You just want them to endorse your desires based on the bad cases. You’re hysterical.
Cameron says: Histrionics don’t make a good argument. But you be you.
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Mad Celt says: Their premise should be we cherish life and believe all lives are deserving of certain protected rights. To kill someone, even a fetus, is the ultimate violation of God’s Law and the US Constitution. A disbelief in God does not invalidate the foundational law of our nation, the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Stephen J. says: The electoral-tactics value of supporting contraception access as compensation for abortion restrictions seems straightforward, but there are weaknesses in the argument.
From the pro-choice side, the problem is that in practice, no contraceptive method (with the exception of permanent surgical sterilization) is reliably effective enough that users are willing to go without abortion access as the necessary “failsafe backup”. As the character of Roz on Frasier once complained after becoming unexpectedly pregnant, in a classic funny-because-it’s-true joke, “The best birth control in the world is only 99% effective — I can’t beat odds like that!” To this mindset, allowing contraception but not abortion is like using only one blade of a pair of scissors — it might technically still do the job, but it’s too much effort for too unreliable a result.
From the pro-life side, the problem is the reality (as implied by Roz’s joke above) that the consequence-free sexual freedom trumpeted today as indispensable to a happy life — the promiscuity which both contraception and abortion are needed to enable for the vast heterosexual majority of people, which no-fault divorce was instituted in part to allow an easy return to, and for which pornography has become so popular as a substitute — is in itself anti-woman, anti-family, and anti-society in a way no political party is willing to risk losing votes by admitting. Study after study has shown that the commodification of sexual gratification as a right (and one with no inherent duties except that of obtaining consent in the moment) encourages the treatment of sexual partners as disposable objects, emotionally damages both men and women over the long haul (but women moreso, because they are both more prone to forming and more dependent on sustaining the bonds sex naturally facilitates), and weakens the ability to sustain family bonds, thus paving the way for divorces that do lifelong damage to children as well. It’s not just the physical saving of infant lives via abortion that is important, it is the overthrowing of this entire mentality of libertinism that is critical. To flip the scissor analogy above on its head, if the problem is that the scissors are being used to cut what should not be cut, then allowing even one blade to be sold is still permitting too much damage; abortion destroys defenseless lives, but contraception destroys the belief that those lives are worth saving in the first place.
Like so many issues of social morality, the problem boils down to being unable to eat one’s cake and still have it too. Either we celebrate procreation as the whole point and justification of sexual intimacy, or we treat procreation as an inconvenient cost of obtaining it, but we can’t do both at once.
GWB says: no contraceptive method (with the exception of permanent surgical sterilization) is reliably effective
None of them, except abstinence, of course. But that’s anathema to the hedonists of Progressivism. (It’s 100% effective, minus a single person in history. And that took, literally, an act of God.)
And, an excellent summation of the real issue.
GWB says: promote contraception or risk defeat in 2024
Or, you know, we could promote the idea that it isn’t any of the federal gov’t’s business.
Promoting contraception is also a very Progressive stand. It supports hedonism more than anything else.
GWB says: making The Pill over-the-counter
I’m not sure this is a good idea, though I’m almost always against the national gov’t regulating things as it does.
(The primary reason I have issue with it is I know how variable women’s response to hormones at different points in their lives can be. Any hormonal medication should be taken only with a doctor’s advice, IMO. I would be open to debate on it.) Pushing to change the way stuff is regulated to make America freer (at the national gov’t level) is something I’m all for.
GWB says: We know how Democrats really feel about women. Republicans and conservatives have to articulate how we do.
And returning to a Christian worldview and set of morals would actually do a world of good – in terms of general well-being and in terms of winning elections that actually have good consequences for our country and for our freedom.
No, I’m not talking about the Handmaid’s Tale bullcarp view of Christianity, but the real one that accentuates who does what best and how the relationships should work and how we should value each other.
Mike says: The left pushes abortion so hard because it normalizes the taking of unwanted human life. Remember that when our number comes up on their list.
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