GOP State Sen. Kevin Lundberg of Colorado
Remember that
Colorado program that offered birth control to low-income women and reduced the state's teen birth rate by 40 percent and abortions by 35 percent while saving the state millions of dollars? It's possible that all that will come to a stop—mostly because the program was the result of a grant that's ending and Republicans control the state senate.
Nick Baumann has the details:
A bipartisan pair of legislators in the Democrat-controlled state House have introduced a bill to use state money to continue the program. But in the state Senate, where the GOP holds a one-vote majority, abortion politics—and the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision—may scuttle the plan.
At issue are some abortion foes' beliefs that IUDs can cause abortions—the same belief that led to the Oklahoma-based hobby chain's lawsuit against the Obama administration's requirement that employers provide insurance that covers contraception or pay a fine. Most scientists say IUDs primarily work by preventing fertilization. But some IUDs can occasionally prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in a woman's uterus. Fertilized eggs often fail to implant, even without birth control, so most doctors define abortion as the termination of an already implanted pregnancy.
But many conservatives who believe human life begins at conception consider preventing implantation akin to abortion.
It's the
Hobby Lobby slippery slope. Now GOP lawmakers like Sen. Kevin Lundberg are using the Supreme Court ruling to justify ending a program that reduced both the teen birth and abortion rates. Here's Lundberg:
"In Hobby Lobby, this was really the point there. They had no objection to contraceptive materials being funded through their insurance. But they had significant objections when it was an abortifacient."
That's a fancy word for something that causes an abortion. And Hobby Lobby did, in fact, object to birth control—that's what IUDs are. But through rulings like
Hobby Lobby, anti-abortion activists are slowly but surely blurring the line between birth control and abortion. Of course, the people who will most suffer the consequences of their crusade are low-income women, who might be deprived of access to this very successful program.
But Democratic State Sen. Morgan Carroll is still hopeful that several senate Republicans will come to their senses and vote to extend the program.
"Contraception used to be an area of common ground," [Carroll] says. "I can recall days when we were all fighting together to reduce teen pregnancy, to reduce abortions."
Not anymore. In the war on women, Republicans like Lundberg now aim to kill access to birth control too. Carroll thinks it's a losing issue for them.
"I am entirely convinced that they are on a terribly losing side of this issue," she notes. "We so often have this position of Republican men mansplaining our lady parts and how they work, like we're too dumb to understand science and make our own decisions."
Sing it, sister!