For the umpteenth time of the Trump presidency, women have been warned by an increasingly hysterical media that Mitch McConnell is coming for their birth control. The thrice-married womanizer in the White House supposedly wants to impose a Handmaid’s Tale-style theocracy upon our free republic. This time, the villain du jour is not a man but a woman who might be chosen to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s vacant Supreme Court seat, Amy Coney Barrett.
Fast out with the fearmongering was Vice, which warned that Barrett is not just “conservative,” but one of those pernicious Catholics who believes in “life from conception.”
“It’s possible that doctor appointments to get IUDs will spike,” Hannah Smothers writes. “As sources told both the Lily and Refinery 29, and as people say online, appointments are already being made, even though the Supreme Court term doesn’t begin until October and the Court is unlikely to make any decisions until next summer. That it’s become rote for certain political events (or even deaths) to prompt personal health decisions is disturbing. But calling for everyone to get an IUD and protect themselves now, before federal-level abortion protections go away, misunderstands the current reality for handfuls of states, and doesn’t do anything to help those who are most vulnerable under a new Supreme Court.”
This and the rest of the piece are wrong on so many levels that it requires a whole list to explain.
First of all, if you are having sex and do not want to have children, you should be using some form of birth control. Are we supposed to view it as a bad thing if people are taking that basic idea seriously? IUDs are probably the most effective option for birth control, given their near-zero failure rate. If it took an octogenarian’s death to make you take control of your own body, then you are the problem.
Second, the latent threat here is that conservatives have any interest in removing choice before conception. Although the conservative legal movement has taken fault with Obamacare’s contraception mandate as a violation of religious liberty, the overwhelming majority of the country, including the overwhelming majority of Catholics, agree that legalized birth control is morally acceptable. In 2019, Gallup found that 92% of adults espouse this view. Even as far back as 2012, 82% of Catholics said that birth control is morally acceptable. As Slate’s Will Saletan deduced from that poll, it indicates that 3 out of 4 poll respondents who deem abortion morally wrong also believe that birth control is morally acceptable. And that was almost a decade ago!
Finally, even if Trump took another step toward Gilead to get Barrett on the court and it overturned Roe, it is simply not correct that abortion would suddenly become illegal. A handful of states might ban it, but in many of those, abortion clinics are already few and far between, anyway. Missouri, for example, has just one abortion clinic. If it suddenly had zero, more liberal states such as nearby Illinois would not ban the procedure.
This incitement to panic is a partisan one, but it’s also one that ultimately detracts from the media’s ability to advance women’s health. All of the energy spent trying to equate women’s health with abortion access distracts from the crisis of our extraordinarily high maternal mortality rate, our lag time in diagnosing disorders such as endometriosis, and our soaring sexually transmitted disease rate.
The media ought to be sounding a six-fire alarm over the fact that we inexplicably have one of the highest maternal mortality rates among the world’s richest countries. We could be pointing out to readers that our increase in completely preventable STDs could create a fertility crisis — mind you, the sort that paves the way to the theocratic takeover featured in the fictional Handmaid’s Tale.
Instead, the media have decided to exert their energy with bogus warnings that we’re about to face a massive IUD backlog as Vice President Mike Pence shuts down abortion clinics in Los Angeles.
