If Supreme Court Restricts Abortion Pills, Birth Control Could Be Next

By Mike Ludwig / Truthout

Last week, the Supreme Court hears oral arguments over whether to restrict access to the abortion medication mifepristone — a drug that became crucial for reproductive freedom after the court’s conservative majority threw out the right to abortion in 2022. Meanwhile, Republicans across the country are thwarting efforts by Democrats to enshrine the right to use birth control and other methods of contraception.

If the Supreme Court offers a broad ruling against Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approvals for mifepristone, such a ruling could invite further legal challenges to other medications that are used by millions of people but remain controversial on the right, including Plan B emergency contraception, birth control pills, vaccines and gender-affirming hormone therapy.

The Supreme Court is considering a challenge from an anti-abortion group of doctors to decisions made by the FDA in 2016 and 2021 to make abortion pills available for use at up to 10 weeks of pregnancy and allowing physicians to prescribe the medication remotely. Abortion medications are typically used at home and are considered a safe way to end early pregnancy by major medical associations. Anti-abortion idealogues are attempting to convince the Supreme Court otherwise.

The FDA approvals allowed patients to receive abortion pills in the mail, and now 63 percent of abortions in the U.S. are medication abortions. If the Supreme Court sides with the anti-abortion plaintiffs, the ruling could devastate mutual aid networks that help patients in states with abortion restrictions access the medication.

Many anti-abortion groups also oppose the use of contraceptives due to religious teachings and work to wrongly stigmatize drugs such as birth control and Plan B as a form of abortion. Legislation regularly introduced in red states would declare that life begins at the moment of conception, which is widely seen as the first step toward banning birth control and Plan B.

Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress and multiple states have rejected Democratic legislation that would codify the right to access contraceptives such as birth control pills, condoms and IUDs. Now that abortion is banned in 14 states, and abortion pills are under attack in the nation’s highest court, reproductive rights advocates warn that the anti-abortion movement has contraception in its sights, despite claims by nervous Republicans to the contrary.

Restrictions on contraception are extremely unpopular with voters, but Republican politicians remain under intense pressure to curtail contraception from the Christian nationalists and anti-abortion groups in the party’s base. Stephanie Schriock, a Democratic Strategist and former president of the pro-choice EMILY’s List, said the anti-abortion movement has always opposed contraceptives, even though it focused primarily on abortion until Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

“They want to end all of it,” Schriock said in an interview. “That has been the case for the Susan B. Anthony Foundation, the Heritage Foundation and National Right to Life; they have all been seeking to restrict access to contraception the whole time, it just got underneath the effort to restrict abortion access.”

In 2022, just weeks after the Supreme Court threw out the right to abortion and greenlit bans and restrictions on pregnancy care in red states that have put pregnant people in danger, 195 House Republicans voted down a bill that would have codified the right to access Plan B, birth control, condoms, and other methods of contraception.

While blue states codified the right to abortion, bills to establish the right to contraception failed to gain traction in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, Iowa, Mississippi, Nevada, North Carolina, Tennessee and Wisconsin. Only Virginia passed a Right to Contraception Act, and now Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, must decide whether to sign it.

In Tennessee, GOP lawmakers recently rejected a pair of bills written to clarify that the state’s harsh post-Roe abortion ban does not criminalize contraception and in vitro fertilization for families faced with infertility, the latter being under threat after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled last month that frozen embryos in storage have the same rights as people.

Tennessee Republicans said the bills were obsolete because there are no prohibitions on the books, but Democrats pointed to a 2022 ProPublica investigation revealing that anti-abortion groups in the state privately raised the prospect pressuring lawmakers to restrict contraception and in vitro fertilization after the abortion ban went into effect.

Arizona Senate Majority Leader Sonny Borrelli recently made national headlines for suggesting that women put aspirin “between the knees” to prevent pregnancy as fellow Republicans voted unanimously to block the Right to Contraception Act. Borrelli later apologized for his misogynist comment, but Arizona Democrats say access to birth control and Plan B remains under threat as long as the GOP controls the legislature.

“This has been the case for years and years … that these Republican men in particular just didn’t know how birth control pills work, that you take one every single day, that there are actually lots of reasons why women take birth control pills that are not to prevent reproduction” said Schriock, who added that birth control is also used to treat migraines, for example.

Kimberly Inez McGuire, executive Director of URGE: Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity, a youth-led rights group, said she used abortion medication after having a miscarriage last month to protect her health and ability to have children in the future. McGuire took misoprostol, the drug prescribed with mifepristone to end pregnancy.

“These pills, mife and miso, are essential, life-saving medications used by people all over the globe,” McGuire said during a rally outside the Supreme Court on Tuesday. “Yet right now inside that building, anti-abortion extremists are arguing a case based on junk science, busybody doctors, and plain old misogyny.”

Right-wing opposition to contraception puts Republicans between an electoral rock and a hard place. Polls consistently show that about 90 percent of voters support the right to birth control and contraception, including the vast majority of Republicans. Support for Republicans in Congress plummets when pollsters tell participants they opposed a national Right to Contraception Act.

“This is a gigantic problem for the Republican Party in every election to come,” Schriock said. “They are already on thin ice because of their abortion bans.”

Why would Republicans choose to put themselves in this position? Schriock said some in the GOP fear being primaried from the extreme right, but the extreme right has also gone mainstream within the party. The anti-abortion movement has built enormous power in the Republican Party, which benefited from consolidating the evangelical vote.

Before 2022, Republicans could virtue signal to the anti-abortion movement without considering the consequences that actually banning abortion would have on pregnancy care. That all changed after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and red states banned abortion with few exceptions. Decades after abortion became a partisan issue, GOP is now full of ideologues such as House Speaker Mike Johnson who sincerely oppose abortion and contraception due to deeply held religious beliefs, according to Schriock.

With a conservative majority that is clearly hostile to abortion rights, Schriock said it’s unclear how the Supreme Court will rule on abortion pills. It will depend on whether the court sides with the anti-abortion plaintiffs or the government, and how broad or narrow the ruling will be. In oral arguments on Tuesday, justices questioned whether the anti-abortion doctors have standing to challenge the FDA the first place. A ruling is expected in June.

“I would think they would be very, very careful on overruling the FDA on anything, because not only would it open to [challenges to] other forms of birth control, but where would it stop after that,” Schriock said. “I can’t imagine them wanting to open this all up, but also couldn’t imagine them getting rid of Roe.”

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By Zehra Imam / Mondoweiss

As Palestinians are slaughtered by the thousands in Gaza and violently attacked during night prayers in the al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel, the West Bank endures massacres that at times go unnoticed during this holy month. I have spent my Ramadan in conversation with a friend from Jenin. 

Much has changed since I visited Aseel (not her real name) in August 2023. There are things I saw in Jenin that no longer exist. One of them is my friend’s smile and her spark.

Usually, they say Jenin is a small Gaza. During Ramadan, because the attacks generally happen at night, people are an easy target because they are on the streets late at night. In the past, it was rare for the IOF to enter during the day. Now, they attack during the day; their special forces enter, and after people discover them, their soldiers come within minutes. 

Every 2-3 days, there is a new attack in Jenin. In our minds, there is a constant ringing that the IOF may come. We don’t know at what time we will be targeted or when they will enter. There is no stability in our lives.

Even when we plan for something, we hedge it with our inshallahs and laugh. There are a lot of ifs. If they don’t enter the camp. If there are no martyrs. If there is no strike.

On the second day of Ramadan, they attacked my neighborhood again. We thought it was a bombing because it started with an explosion, but the house was shaking. We were praying fajr, and everyone was screaming outside. The sound of the drone was in our ears. “No, these are missiles,” we realized.

There was panic in the streets. Women fainted. People had been walking back from praying at the mosque, and some were still in the street. Alhamdulillah, no one was hurt, we say.

The balcony to the room at my uncle’s house where we slept had fallen. It no longer had any glass, and a bullet entered my uncle’s bedroom and reached the kitchen. The drone hit the trees in front of our house. The missiles destroyed the ceiling, and the rockets reached my neighbor’s house on the first floor, exactly in front of our house.

Since October 7, Jenin has become a target. There is a clear escalation in the camp and the city. The IOF has used many different weapons to kill us here. They have even been aggressive toward the infrastructure, as though every inch of our city was resisting them.

They destroyed much of the camp, and there is no entrance now. The arch is gone, and there is no sign reminding us that Jenin refugee camp is a temporary place. There is no horse. Only the street is left. You have the photographs. You were lucky. They changed the shape of the camp, and everything has been destroyed.”Aseel

The first time Aseel and I met in person was in Nablus at the Martyrs Roundabout. As we caught up, we ate a delicious concoction of ice cream, milk, nuts, and fresh fruit that was a perfect balm to the heat. She took me to some of her favorite places nestled within the old city of Nablus. A 150-year-old barber’s shop that felt like you had entered an antique store where plants reached the ceiling and where the barber was a massive fan of Angelina Jolie. A centuries-old house now called Tree House Cafe looked like a hobbit home from Lord of the Rings, where we hid away as she sipped her coffee and I drank a mint lemonade. We visited one of the oldest soap factories in the world with ingredients such as goat’s milk and olive oil, jasmine and pomegranates, even dates and Dead Sea mud.

We happened to chance upon a Sufi zawiya as we walked through a beautiful archway decorated with lanterns, light bulbs, and an assortment of potted plants, after which we saw a cobalt blue door on our left and an azul blue door with symmetrical red designs, and Quranic ayat like incantations on our right as doors upon doors greeted us.

The air was welcoming yet mingled with the memory of martyrs whose memorials took over the landscape, sometimes in the form of larger-than-life portraits surrounded by complex four-leafed magenta-white flowers; posters above a water spout next to a heart-shaped leaf; a melted motorcycle that, too, was targeted in the neighborhood that hosted the Lions’ Den. We stopped to pray at a masjid, quiet and carpeted.

After a bus ride from Nablus to Jenin, on our walk before entering Jenin camp, Aseel showed me the hospital right outside the camp. She pointed out the barricades created to keep the occupation forces from entering specific streets. This is the same hospital that the occupation forces blocked during the July 2023 attack, which now seems like a lifetime ago. 

What caught my eyes again and again were the two Keys of Return on top of the entrance of Jenin Camp that symbolized so much for Palestinians.

“This is a temporary station,” Aseel read out loud to me. “That’s what it says. We are supposed to return to our homes.”

“Netanyahu said he is planning another big attack, so the resistance fighters are preparing because it can happen any day,” she had told me that evening as we shared Jenin-style knafeh, baked to perfection. Then she stopped, looked at the sky, and said humorously, “Ya Allah, hopefully not today!” And we both laughed because of its potential reality. 

Dinner on the terrace at her uncle’s home was a delicious spread of hummus, laban, fries, cucumbers pickled by her aunt, and arayes — fried bread stuffed with meat. Then we moved the furniture to sleep on mattresses in a room that extended to the rooftop terrace with a breeze, overlooking Jenin Camp and the rest of Jenin City. We could hear gunshots in the distance. The drones were commonplace, and the heat did not relent. Temperatures soared, and the electricity was out when we woke up at 5 a.m. I heard her pray, and later, as we sipped on coffee and had wafters in the early morning at her home, my eyes went to a piece of tatreez, or embroidery, of a bird in flight framed on the wall. Her eyes followed mine and when I said I loved it.

“It used to be my grandfather’s,” she told me. “Of course it’s beautiful — the bird is free.” 

Unexpectedly, Aseel’s mother gifted me a Sprite bottle full of olive oil beholding the sweet hues of its intact health, which I would later ship secretly from Bethlehem all the way to Boston. And then Aseel came to me with a gift, too: a necklace that spoke succinctly about the right to return and live on this earth. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was held together with intricate calligraphy carved in the shape of Palestine’s landscape, and I was completely overwhelmed. 

“You are in Palestine, my dear,” she had smiled. “And you are now my family. This is your country, this is your second home, really.”

When I ask her about what brings her hope these days, Aseel tells me about her eight-year-old nephew.

He wanted to eat two meals. I told him that in Gaza they don’t have food. He was complaining about the food, and I told him, they don’t have water. And he heard me because he said, “today, we will only have one meal.” 

I’m amazed at how mature he is. He even said, “We won’t make a special cake on Eid because of the Gazans.” For me, this is a lesson to be learned. He is only eight years old, but he knows. 

We have lost a lot of people in Gaza, but here in the West Bank, we are succeeding because our new generation knows a lot. Ben Gurion would not be happy. He said of Palestinians, “the old will die and the young will forget.” No, the young ask even more questions. The new generation brings us hope. Hope is the new generation.

/sp

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