Claire McCaskill Dunks On SCOTUS Birth Control Decision: Doesn't GOP Want Fewer Abortions?

By Aliza Worthington — July 8, 2020

The Supreme Court handed down a decision Wednesday morning that freed employers from having to offer insurance to their employees that covered birth control.

According to NPR:

Under the ACA, churches and synagogues were automatically exempted from the birth control insurance mandate. Not automatically exempt, however, were nonprofits like religiously affiliated universities, charities and hospitals, which employ millions of people who want their health insurance plans to cover birth control for themselves and their family members.

Well, kids, now these employers ARE exempt. And not only for religious reasons, but for simply moral ones. This applies now not just to non-profit organizations, but FOR-profit ones, too.

Claire McCaskill had the most concise take on the absurdity and misogyny of this ruling when talking to Ayman Mohyeldin. Here's how she responded when he said this decision potentially leaves 126,000 women out in the cold on birth control coverage.

MCCASKILL: Yeah. And, you know, what we need to focus on here is what this decision says is that in America you might have to ask your boss permission to get birth control covered in your health insurance. And that is just fundamentally wrong. And here's the weirdest thing about this, Ayman, is that we know that unwanted pregnancies have dropped since the ACA passed. What everyone wants is fewer abortions. That's what — the Republicans spend an inordinate amount of time about preventing abortions. What prevents abortions? Family planning prevents abortions, easy access to affordable birth control prevents abortions. So what they really have done here is they have just put another step in a process for women to easily get birth control and frankly politically they probably have given more weight to the idea that we need a public option for people. They shouldn't have to ask their boss whether or not their insurance would pay for their pill. That's not right. And we need to have a different system where people can opt into a public system where they can easily get birth control access. Family planning access.

Let's take it down to brass tacks, here. The Republican Party has never been comfortable with the notion that women can and do enjoy sex. The notion that women might like to enjoy consequence-free sex in the same way men get to is an anathema to them, assuming they could even wrap their brains around the concept.

I know, of course, that women take birth control for health reasons, too, and that's super important. It's a powerful and critical argument for considering birth control medical treatment like any other. Same with abortion. But that should not be the only justification for women having access to birth control in the same way they have access to antibiotics should they get strep throat.

As many on Twitter are pointing out, these same institutions, employers, politicians, and SCOTUS justices are just fine having an employer's insurance cover their employees' treatment for erectile dysfunction — the consequences of which, if left untreated, are not nearly as dire as those for women who cannot access birth control.

I keep saying if women can't have full control of their bodies then stop providing millions of funds to men using viagra to fix their broken dicks. God broke your dick deal with it.

— 👑 Black Professor 👑 (@WonderKing82) July 8, 2020

Seriously. God might have broken your d*ck for a reason.

And just for sh*ts and giggles, let's go all the way back to 2016, and see what happens when I try to "sidewalk counsel" people against using Viagra. Take a wild guess how many people want to hear why I thought it was my business what they did with their d*cks.