An over-the-counter birth control pill is here. Where's the pro-life movement?

The anti-abortion movement is curiously uninterested in preventing abortions.

Some very good news on the reproductive health front: The FDA has approved Opill, the first contraceptive pill to be available without a prescription in the United States. The over-the-counter pill will be available in 2024, and any person who wants it will be able to walk into a pharmacy and purchase it, the same way they can purchase contraceptives like condoms.

This is great news, and important in our post-Roe era, when millions of Americans live in states where abortion is a crime. Preventing unwanted pregnancies does not end the need for abortion, but it does decrease it. And barriers to contraception access, including the requirement to see a doctor and get a prescription, lessen contraceptive use.

The Opill, though, is not a solution to America’s contraceptive access problem. The first issue is cost — still an unknown. Under the Affordable Care Act, prescription contraceptives are free, but an over-the-counter pill will not be. If Opill is cheap, it may be more widely used. If it’s pricey, that’s going to make it much harder for women to access it. That will be especially true for the women who would most benefit from an over-the-counter pill in the first place: Low-income and rural women who may be working multiple jobs, or balancing work with the demands of child-rearing, or who may be uninsured, or who may not have reliable transportation, making every doctor’s visit all the more difficult.

Luckily, pro-choice Democrats have thought of this. Sen. Patty Murray of Washington State has introduced legislation that would require insurance companies to cover over-the-counter birth control pills the same way they cover prescription ones. The Senate bill has 26 co-sponsors. All of them are Democrats.

Which raises the question: So where are the pro-lifers?

One place they’re not: Advocating to broad access to the contraceptives that would make abortion far less necessary. Instead, they’re either silent or opposed.

The country’s major anti-abortion groups have stayed mum. As Opill was making its way through the FDA approval process, the Washington Post reported that:

Asked about over-the-counter birth control, the National Right to Life organization said it “does not take a stance on anything that prevents fertilization.” Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America said its focus is on “advancing laws that protect unborn children and their mothers from abortion, especially from dangerous mail-order abortion pills.”

Various anti-abortion Catholic groups took a stronger view, and wrote to the FDA opposing over-the-counter contraception. In the New York Times, Hadley Heath Manning of the conservative Independent Women’s Forum wrote that she supports over-the-counter pills, but women should have to pay for them because “widespread use of contraception has in my view come with a cost, facilitating a culture of cheap sex that has created mass confusion, pain and regret in the world of dating and family formation.” In other words, she’ll concede that women should have the right to contraception, but it should be costly and difficult because the government and society should discourage casual sex (as if the only time women want to prevent pregnancy is when the sex is casual), and because “Just as there’s no such thing as sex without consequences, there’s no such thing as freedom without responsibility.”

No word on whether drugs like Viagra should be costly and difficult to access. Free boners without responsibility are, of course, entirely necessary.

This over-the-counter contraceptive pill is an innovation that could prevent millions of abortions, at a time when abortions are harder to get than ever, and when abortion opponents have unprecedented power to achieve their stated aim of ending abortion in America. But that will only be true if women can easily and affordably get their hands on it. And yet the anti-abortion movement, and anti-abortion Republicans, only seem interested in punishing abortion providers and intimidating women (or forcing them to have babies). Helping women to prevent pregnancies they don’t want really isn’t on the agenda.

The truth is that the “pro-life” movement generally opposes contraception and has already taken steps to limit access to it, but the savvier national organizations — National Right to Life, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Americans United for Life — refuse to state any position on contraception, because they realize that Americans will see through the incredible hypocrisy of claiming to oppose abortion while simultaneously opposing the most effective tools to prevent much of the need for abortion. Americans generally do not believe contraception is abortion, because contraception isn’t abortion. But the anti-abortion movement has gone to great lengths to conflate the two, because the anti-abortion movement is less concerned with preventing abortion than with reestablishing traditional gender roles and ensuring that women’s freedoms are radically scaled back. It’s not about preventing abortion. It’s about putting women back in their place.

The war against birth control is already being waged. In Iowa, for example, political leaders suspended the provision of emergency contraception to rape victims because of “pro-life” politics; Republican leaders in Idaho said they wanted to do the same. A Louisiana bill that thankfully failed would have criminalized IUDs and emergency contraception. It has been conservative “pro-life” groups that have challenged the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate, making it easier for employers of all kinds to refuse to include contraception coverage in their employee insurance plans.

At a national level, support for contraception remains hugely divisive in the Republican Party, and very few Republicans support increasing contraception access. The anti-abortion groups that are not savvy national players but are highly influential generally oppose contraception. Students for Life, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the American Life League, and others claim that IUDs and any form of hormonal birth control are “abortifacients” (this is factually untrue, but that has never stopped the anti-abortion movement).

Watch what happens with over-the-counter contraception. It will tell you a lot about the anti-abortion movement, and where they’re headed next. And it’s not going to be good.

xx Jill