Republicans Want to Ban Abortion Pills and Cut Food Aid to Poor Children

Sounds like a parody of "pro-life" cruelty. It's not.

Photo by Ricardo IV Tamayo on Unsplash

If anything encapsulates the anti-abortion Republican right, it’s this: As an all-male panel of anti-abortion leaders convened to discuss imposing the death penalty on women who have abortions and as a Nebraska court was sentencing a terrified teenager to jail for self-inducing an abortion, conservative Republicans in Congress began pushing a spending bill that would ban mailing Mifepristone, an abortion-inducing medication, while also cutting billions of dollars in food aid to needy families. And they seem willing to hold the entire country hostage to do it.

Congress needs to approve a 2024 spending bill by the end of September; if they don’t, we all face the threat of a government shutdown. Unfortunately for just about everyone, conservative Republicans have decided that, since they cannot win on abortion at the ballot box, they will impose minority rule on all of us by throwing massive hissy-fits and refusing to fund the basic functioning of government until they get their way and fewer people can access safe abortion care. If you’re wondering, “whatever happened to the long-standing GOP position on abortion, which was that states, not the federal government, should determine the legality of abortion?” I have some bad news for you, which is: That was always a lie.

Republicans have already rammed through a defense bill that strips abortion access from women in uniform. As it stands, the defense department will cover expenses for military women to travel out of state if they need an abortion, if the procedure is illegal where they live. The Republican bill takes aim at those women, and tries to force them to have children against their will. It also bans gender-affirming care — and this is for adults old enough to fight and die for the United States, but apparently not entitled to determine their own identities and health care plan. In other words, Republicans took what is typically a bipartisan bill and injected right-wing ideology into it.

Now, they’re doing a repeat. The Republican spending bill would reverse an FDA decision allowing Mifepristone to be prescribed through ten weeks of pregnancy, and mailed like many other prescriptions. There is no medical reason to restrict Mifepristone, which is an astonishingly safe drug. There are only political reasons.

These heavy-handed top-down anti-abortion tactics are among the only tools Republicans have to criminalize abortion, given that significant majorities of Americans do not want abortion restricted: 70% of Democrats, 41% of Independents, and even close to one in five Republicans, say they would vote yes on a ballot initiative in their state protecting abortion rights without limitation. Americans are increasingly clear: Get the government out of reproductive decision-making.

Republicans, though, want to get deeper in.

At the same time as Republicans in Congress want to force more women to have babies those women don’t want and often can’t afford, Republicans are also trying to cut food aid to needy families — in the same bill. The GOP spending bill would decrease food stamp funding by $23 billion.

It would also bar the department of health and human services from setting limits on how much nicotine can be in cigarettes, because I guess why not really lean into being the party that makes life worse by every measure.

This is just the beginning. Republicans know they cannot win on abortion if voters have a say, which is a running theme when it comes to a lot of their preferred policies. And so they are grabbing power, and trying to force their agenda on the whole country.

I’m a broken record on this, but if you want to see where the anti-abortion movement is going, look at the groups that are broadly influential but not sophisticated and politically connected on the federal level. Groups like Operation Rescue and Operation Save America are terroristic entities that pioneered the bounty-hunter strategy of anti-abortion activism — a strategy that was eventually made law in Texas. They have, over and over again, told us where the broader movement is headed, and their positions are absolute and maximal. And earlier this month, they were convening to discuss “equal protection” laws, which claim to protect a fetus and a pregnant woman equally. What those laws actually do is give a fetus far greater rights than any born person, and treat a pregnant woman who has an abortion as a murderer. These laws could make abortion potentially punishable by death. One was already introduced in Georgia, and radical anti-abortion groups have been pushing for them in a half-dozen conservative states. There’s little indication that the big national groups stand in strong opposition.

These guys are also pretty clear that their anti-abortion ideology is tied up in a broader ideology of patriarchal control and misogyny. Fundamental to it is the idea that men should lead and women should submit. According to reporting from the Missouri Independent, one speaker at the event said:

“If you look at a country, and the best they can come up with for a president is a woman, there’s something wrong about that. That doesn’t mean women aren’t smart or capable, I believe that, but if the very best — the crème de la crème — is a woman, that tells me something about the men when it comes to positions of authority and leadership.”

Anti-abortion groups always tell on themselves. These guys are telling us their motivations: They don’t believe women should be in power; they do believe that men should exert their authority over women. These guys are telling us their goals: Abortion not only criminalized, but treated as murder. And they have the ear of too many Republican politicians, who are also clear: They’ll force women to have babies those women can’t afford to feed, and then tell them: That’s your problem.

xx Jill