To the editor,
Have you been paying attention? In the United States Senate the “Right to Contraception Act” failed to pass for the second time in two years.
Passage of this legislation would have prevented states from passing laws that limit access to contraception, including hormonal birth control, intrauterine devices and other “methods that prevent pregnancy.”
Republicans blocked passage. Supporters – 51 votes / Opposed -39 votes / Didn’t vote – 10. Procedural vote required 60 votes to advance the bill.
The attempt to limit “individual reproductive rights” is not stopping with citizens losing the federal right to an abortion. In his concurring Dobbs v. Jackson opinion in 2022, Justice Clarence Thomas encouraged the Supreme Court to “reconsider” Griswold v. Connecticut and other privacyrelated decisions.
A growing number of Republican lawmakers have recently declared that Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 Supreme Court decision establishing a constitutional right to birth control, was wrongly decided. Griswold relies on the same legal right to privacy that justified Roe.
It was in Griswold v. Connecticut that married women could finally have the right to receive contraception from their doctors. The case focused on a Connecticut law that prohibited the use of contraceptives by all, including married couples. Plaintiffs in the case argued that the Constitution implied the protection of privacy as part of one’s individual liberty and that married couples’ family planning was inherently a matter of privacy.
Birth control, including emergency contraception, prevents ovulation (when an egg is released) and fertilization (when egg and sperm meet). Pregnancy actually begins when a fertilized egg attaches to the lining of the uterine wall, a process called implantation. Many fertilized eggs never implant.
Yet for a few highly motivated religious zealots of the anti-abortion movement, pregnancy starts not at implantation but at conception, and human personhood begins then too, not at birth. These “fetal personhood” activists want to endow fetuses, embryos, and fertilized eggs with full rights and legal protections and thus frame any effort to prevent implantation — be it through discarding embryos from IVF or taking a daily birth control pill — as a form of killing unborn children.
Emergency contraception is a type of birth control, not an abortion. Emergency contraception pills like Plan B and Ella, prevent sperm from reaching and fertilizing an egg.
So the individual’s right to responsibly prevent a pregnancy and family planning, is now being threatened by conservative zealots who personally view contraception as abortion.
David J. Neuendorff
Bowling Green
