Tweet Share Share Comment This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.
“Republicans are like your uncle, who really loves you and loves the women in his family, but he’s bad about showing it.” —Heather Higgins, CEO of Independent Women’s Voice, in an interview with Politico
On Wednesday, Kellyanne Conway and Higgins, the leader of an anti-feminist group, tried to make the urgent case to Republicans that their future depends on supporting birth control. The duo, accompanied by a lobbyist, brought data from their own polling that showed how profoundly unpopular, even among conservative women, making it harder to obtain contraceptives would be. And remarkably, given how long Republican talking points around birth control have invoked individual choice, Conway and Higgins came prepared to pitch the idea that Republicans in power should ensure access to birth control, regardless of cost. That’s two GOP stalwarts promoting birth control as a public good—a plainly anti-libertarian argument.
Invoking emotionally detached uncles, then, was Higgins trying to get Republicans to see that they must present themselves as a party that proactively supports women. “It’s just not in their natural vocabulary,” she told Politico. “And we’re trying to help them learn how to make this be more part of their vocabulary and tell them that they need to talk about these things that their constituents all support, and be more visible and vocal.”
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This is an ambitious goal: Republicans have taken a huge beating in the past two election cycles over abortion, and there’s no question that their long-standing position on women’s reproductive rights is a losing one. Since the 2022 midterms—the first national elections after the Supreme Court brought down Roe v. Wade—Republican pundits have tried to manage the narrative in different ways, sometimes even insisting, ahistorically, that extreme bans were new and fringe, or going so far as to claim that Democrats were lying about Republican bans to frighten voters. (Since Dobbs, 21 states have banned or dramatically restricted abortion.) Some previously hard-line figures have embraced more humane exceptions to the bans. Others, such as Nikki Haley, have proposed abandoning abortion as a major cause for the party. The campaign to soften the party’s tone on abortion is on.
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During a debate in August, Haley, too, saw supporting contraceptives as one way to do that. “Can’t we agree that contraception should be available?” she asked.
So Conway and Higgins aren’t the first Republicans to make this pivot. In July, GOP Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks introduced the Orally Taken Contraception Act of 2023, which was meant to get the FDA moving and “encourage sponsors of oral contraceptive drugs to submit applications” for the approval of over-the-counter birth control. She and other Republican women presented it as an effort to expand access. And one of her co-sponsors supported an amendment on a separate piece of legislation that would help military families afford birth control.
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Read More But any closer examination shows how weak their movement is. The OTC Act would be a conventional market-based reform—not a particularly bold stance. (The bill hasn’t gone anywhere.) And it would define the start of pregnancy as the point of fertilization, rather than implantation, meaning they’re adopting the definition often used by religious groups opposing abortion. That’s important because that definition would slot certain kinds of birth control—Plan B, for example—into the medically incorrect “abortifacient” category, ultimately threatening contraception more.
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Both elements of that bill point to just how much Republicans are still concerned about the religious groups. And the reception to the Politico article shows just how reluctant some very influential Republicans would be to the idea of rallying behind birth control. A roundup from the right-wing Daily Signal quoted conservative women who claimed Conway was selling them out for political purposes. A National Review writer argued that “a culture that treats unborn children as disposable begins by treating sexual partners as disposable.” (In June, an executive for the sister organization to Higgins’ wrote in the New York Times that widespread contraception use “has created mass confusion, pain and regret.”) Other conservatives on social media quoted in the Daily Signal story claimed that young people were turning away from hormonal birth control because of its “health risks.”
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Luckily for these objectors, Republicans don’t seem that committed to birth control. Miller-Meeks and the OTC bill’s other supporters joined their GOP colleagues in Congress to block legislation that would have enshrined birth control access. They are set to vote on bills that would gut funding for family planning programs, too. And House Speaker Mike Johnson has long fought against access to birth control, connecting it with abortion. So Conway’s pitch may not have much of a future. As long as “religious freedom” campaigns include protections for religious employers and other actors who want to morally object to providing contraceptives, it’s unlikely that Conway will have an easy time convincing her party to rally behind birth control.
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- Totally Normal Quote of the Day
The Republicans Freaked Out About Abortion Bans Have a New Policy They’re Getting Behind. Good Luck.
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14.12.2023
Tweet Share Share Comment This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.
“Republicans are like your uncle, who really loves you and loves the women in his family, but he’s bad about showing it.” —Heather Higgins, CEO of Independent Women’s Voice, in an interview with Politico
On Wednesday, Kellyanne Conway and Higgins, the leader of an anti-feminist group, tried to make the urgent case to Republicans that their future depends on supporting birth control. The duo, accompanied by a lobbyist, brought data from their own polling that showed how profoundly unpopular, even among conservative women, making it harder to obtain contraceptives would be. And remarkably, given how long Republican talking points around birth control have invoked individual choice, Conway and Higgins came prepared to pitch the idea that Republicans in power should ensure access to birth control, regardless of cost. That’s two GOP stalwarts promoting birth control as a public good—a plainly anti-libertarian argument.
Invoking emotionally detached uncles, then, was Higgins trying to get Republicans to see that they must present themselves as a party that proactively supports women. “It’s just not in their natural vocabulary,” she told Politico. “And we’re trying to help them learn how to make this be more part of........
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