To The Eagle:

Republicans have started to blur the lines between birth control and abortion in the hopes of making it harder for American women to obtain either. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Missouri statehouse, where lawmakers debated whether they needed to restrict Medicaid coverage of birth control and limit payments to Planned Parenthood. It was a tricky play, attacking birth control as a way to attack abortion, and it didn’t work. This time. “Anti–birth control sentiment has been building for over a decade,” says Robin Marty, author of The New Handbook for Post-Roe America.

“The moment abortion advocates have always warned about, is here,” says Renee Bracey Sherman, executive director of We Testify, an organization dedicated to representation of people who have abortions.

“It’s always been here. Politicians who are anti-abortion are also anti–birth control and anti-queer and anti-Black, because at the end of the day, they only support a way of life in which wealthy white people are the arbiters of when, how, and with whom we have sex, procreate, and build our families. It’s about maintaining white patriarchal power and control. It always has been. And anything that allows women to determine their own futures, such as birth control and abortion, is a threat to that.”

Republicans are smart(ish), so they’re not going to take away your birth control pills, they’re just going to continue to blur the line between abortion and birth control. Abortion is not about life for these Republicans. These are the people who argued that your grandmother should be willing to die for the Dow Jones Industrial Average when it came to Covid lockdowns. They believe in the death penalty. This isn’t about life, it’s about power. Republicans want to blur the line between birth control and abortion because they want the power to control women and their very personal choices, in other words, their very lives.

JB Bouchard

Puget Island