How the anti-choice movement selectively conflates contraception and abortion

It’s no secret that some anti-choice extremists believe, counter to the scientific facts, that some forms of birth control actually cause abortion. But traditionally mainstream anti-choice groups have tended to stay away from such claims.

For example, many have sat out the fights over personhood amendments, likely out of a recognition that, as state electorates have shown time and time again, Americans do not actually want their birth control criminalized. However, as a new Guttmacher policy brief explains, these same groups are happy to conflate contraception and abortion in order to undermine access to both when they think they can get away with it:

Yet, these same mainstream antiabortion groups have not shied away from asserting in other contexts that certain methods of contraception are actually methods of abortion. They have in effect selectively embraced the core “personhood” argument—that U.S. policy should in some circumstances recognize pregnancy as beginning at fertilization—as a way to undermine access to birth control. That strategy reached a new high water mark when it featured centrally in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the high-profile 2014 U.S. Supreme Court case that granted certain for-profit employers an exemption from the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA’s) contraceptive coverage guarantee. During this debate, leading organizations dedicated to banning abortion unequivocally endorsed the view—in legal briefs, press statements and elsewhere—that emergency contraceptives and IUDs constitute abortion.

The contrast between these two policy debates highlights something critically important but often overlooked about much of the antiabortion movement. Birth control is very much in the movement’s crosshairs, and antiabortion advocates are working to stigmatize contraception by blurring the lines between contraception and abortion. Yet, the movement is doing this in a strategic and deceptive way. Rather than applying the claim that some contraceptive methods in effect cause abortion consistently to all aspects of their advocacy, antiabortion groups ignore and often contradict their positions when it might hurt them politically. Taking the antiabortion movement at face value by consistently treating some forms of contraception as abortifacients—including under federal and state law—would expose how radical their agenda truly is and would have far-reaching implications for women who obtain contraceptive services and providers who offer them.

The Guttmacher analysts note that if we all took these anti-choice groups’ position seriously — asking, for example, why they’re not pushing for mandatory waiting periods and biased counseling before women access emergency contraception or shaming all the “baby-killers” who gush about how much they love their IUDs — it would “quickly expose just how extreme they truly are.” After all, not only do most Americans not believe that IUDs and emergency contraception constitute abortion, we’re also pretty into being able to control our reproduction — since that tends to enable a whole host of good things — “which is why [these anti-choice groups] are cynically hiding their anti-birth control agenda by conflating contraception with abortion.”

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