GOP Now Refuses to Support Your Right to Contraceptives
June 2024 - Two years ago, after voting with the Supreme Court majority to eliminate an American woman's Constitutional right to abortion services, Justice Clarence Thomas suggested in his concurring opinion that Americans also may not have a Constitutional right to use contraceptives.
While the Supreme Court has ruled many times that contraceptive use is Constitutional, Justice Thomas suggested that the current Court revisit the 1965 case of Griswold vs. Connecticut, which was the first case to establish the right of Citizens to access birth control. In so doing, he argued it would allow today's Court to "correct the error" the Court made at that time.
 (Thomas image from Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
The position taken by Justice Thomas may sound ridiculous to most Americans (a 2023 Gallup poll showed 88% of Americans found birth control to be morally acceptable) but, unfortunately, today's Republican Party seems to agree with him. Here are some of the reasons we're saying that:
- Since Mr. Thomas' wrote his opinion in 2022, Republicans in at least 17 states have blocked what were largely Democratic-led attempts to pass laws confirming a Citizen's right to birth control. (This is per a study of various states' contraceptive-related legislation performed by the Washington Post.)
- In at least two states that we are aware of (Idaho and Oklahoma), Republican state legislators already have been discussing making illegal some types of contraceptives.
 (Images of contraceptives from Business Insider)
- Consequently, in order to ward off any attempts by states to follow through on Justice Thomas' suggestion that birth control can be made illegal, Democrats in the U.S. Senate proposed legislation earlier this month that would codify into federal law the right for Americans to obtain and to use contraceptives.
Unfortunately, in a procedural vote that required 60 yes votes to move the bill forward for a final Senate vote, the far right was able to intimidate enough Republican Senators to keep this legislation from potentially becoming the law of the land. Only two Republicans (Susan Collins R-Me and Lisa Murkowski R-AK) supported the bill, while thirty-eight Republicans voted "no" and
nine others chose not to vote at all.
This whole situation is reminiscent of another silly time in our nation's past. Remember when, a hundred years ago, a small number of extreme conservatives were able to intimidate the U.S. Congress into making alcohol illegal? It took FDR and the Democrats to get us out of that mess by repealing those unwarranted/impractical Prohibition statutes and it looks like we'll have to rely on the Dems once again to keep us out of a potential contraceptive mess, too.
 (Image of eliminating alcohol from CNN)
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