It is infuriating and alarming that the United States Senate on Wednesday failed to pass the Right to Contraception Act, a simple bill that would guarantee the federal right to safe and legal contraception.
The bill needed 60 votes to pass, but it only received five, all but two coming from Democrats and independents who are part of the Democrats. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), a strong supporter of the bill, changed his vote to “no” to allow him to raise the bill again.
Americans should be dismayed that nearly half of the people elected to represent them in the Senate are so cowardly that they cannot vote for something as simple as the right to contraception, which 90% of women have used at some point in their lives. their lives and is considered basic preventive health care.
Only two Republicans, Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), voted in favor. Good for them. His Republican colleagues, on the other hand, variously bragged about the bill being a political measure, too broad or unnecessary.
That's ridiculous. There is clearly a movement among anti-abortion activists to wrongly redefine contraceptives as abortifacients. And any of your constituents should think carefully before voting for a senator who will not support your right to contraception. If it were enshrined in federal law, states could not override it with restrictions. If the Supreme Court were to overturn its own precedents protecting the right to contraception, federal law would still protect it.
And that is not ruled out. The Supreme Court has voted three times in favor of the right to contraception over the decades, but is anyone willing to bet that the justices will uphold this precedent? The court also guaranteed the right to abortion in Roe v. Wade (and confirmed it in a later case) before overturning it in the Dobbs decision two years ago.
Ominously, that abortion decision also contained a concurrence written by Justice Clarence Thomas suggesting that the court revisit the landmark 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which gave married couples the right to birth control. So there is every reason to fear that the Supreme Court could withdraw its support for birth control.
The Senate contraception bill does not require anyone to provide contraceptives. It allows women to access it and health professionals to provide it. This bill is also not a slippery slope to tolerating abortion, as its opponents claim.
Contraceptives are not abortifacients. “The medical definition of pregnancy is an embryo implanted in the wall of the uterus,” says Daniel Grossman, a professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at UC San Francisco. “No contraceptive terminates an established pregnancy: they prevent pregnancy from occurring.”
So why would Senate Republicans block a bill supporting the right to contraception? Aren't these the same people who, for the most part, don't want women to have abortions? How do you think reproduction works? Or is it about taking away women's right to control their own bodies to curry favor with far-right anti-abortion groups that also have problems with contraception?
We should all work to ensure that legislators who do not support the right to control your own body are not re-elected.
