Remember the old days of “settled law”? Remember when conventional wisdom complacently assured us that while abortion rights were systematically being chipped away, there was no possible way Republicans or the Supreme Court actually would overturn Roe v. Wade? When we were assured abortion rights were secure and no way could the right in America become so extreme and so powerful as to undo them? We know how that turned out.
Well buckle up, because now they’re coming for birth control, just as Justice Clarence Thomas instructed in his concurrence in the decision that struck down abortion rights. The House Republicans’ funding bill for the Labor and Health and Human Services departments completely eliminates all of the funding for clinics in the five-decades-old Title X Family Planning Program—the program that provides free and subsidized contraception and health care for millions of low-income Americans.
Title X clinics—think Planned Parenthood—have been in Republican crosshairs for years now in the abortion wars. Most recently, in 2019, the Trump administration forced a gag rule that banned doctors in the Title X program from telling people how they could safely and legally access abortion. Planned Parenthood and other clinics withdrew from the program as a result, and according to the Guttmacher Institute, that reduced the program’s national family planning network’s patient capacity in half. President Joe Biden ended that gag rule in his first year in office and the clinics have been rebuilding since, which is why Republicans are now escalating the fight to simply eliminate them altogether.
The clinics still exist and are still providing abortions in states where it's still legal, with the critical support of federal funds. It’s not only abortion and contraception services they provide, it’s comprehensive health care: wellness exams, cancer screenings, education, and STD and HIV testing. A study in 2016 found that 60% of the people who received contraceptive care from program clinics were using the clinics for primary care. They hadn’t seen another doctor in the previous year.
This is another wholesale attack on people’s health care, but mostly it’s about taking away birth control and taking away the fundamental right of Americans to plan their families and their future. It’s not “pro-life” or preventing abortions, it’s about control. The Republicans make that clear because along with zeroing out Title X, they plan to also completely defund the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program.
It’s worth noting as well that this isn’t coming from the whack-jobs in the Freedom Caucus—it’s the full committee’s bill. This is the official policy of the Republican House, the same Republicans who jeopardized national security and military readiness on Thursday when they nearly unanimously voted to stop allowing service members to travel out of the states where they’re stationed to receive reproductive health care.
This is who they are, and they are clearly not going to stop at abortion. Not after getting the green light from the Supreme Court to take on birth control. We’re in the middle of a full-on attack on reproductive freedom, and the other side is playing for keeps. For the millions of men and women who rely on clinic health care and reproductive freedom, the 2024 stakes could not be higher.
Republished with permission from Daily Kos.
