U.S. Senator Katie Britt on Tuesday signed onto a GOP statement denouncing Democrats’ Right to Contraception legislation to protect the right to access, use, and prescribe contraception, falsely claiming the bill infringed on religious liberties and would provide “condoms to little kids.” On Wednesday, the freshman Republican from Alabama, who insists she supports contraception, chose to not even vote.
At least eight in ten Americans support the Democrats’ bill, including 90% of Democrats, 75% of Republicans, and 70% of independents, according to Navigator Research.
In total, twenty-six Senate Republicans signed onto that statement, which was put out by U.S. Senator Rick Scott (R-FL). Sen. Scott is running to replace Republican Leader Mitch McConnell when he retires. Senator Scott’s published positions are so extreme even Senator McConnell denounced them.
Senator Britt is likely best-known for delivering the Republicans’ official response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address. Fact-checkers had a field day with her “highly misleading” speech, destroying her suggestion President Biden’s policies were responsible for a woman who became a victim of sex-trafficking, which began in 2004, and happened in Mexico, not the U.S.
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In a Senate floor speech this week before the failed vote, Britt accused Democrats of using “scare tactics” while falsely claiming the right to access, use, and prescribe contraception is not at risk.
“The goal of my Democrat colleagues right now is to scare the American people, to scare women across our great nation,” she declared, according to the text of her speech on her government website. “It’s not that they believe there is a problem they’re truly trying to solve. They’re prioritizing their own short-term partisan political interests. Sadly, this only does a disservice to the very families and the very women we should be trying to find common ground to help. We saw the false fearmongering with the MOMS Act. We’ve already seen it with issues like IVF. Just like with nationwide access to contraception, I want to make it clear that Republicans support continued nationwide access to IVF.”
But contraception is at risk.
In his 2022 concurring opinion on the Supreme Court decision stripping women of the constitutional right to abortion, Justice Clarence Thomas issued a call for cases to challenge a landmark ruling, Griswold v. Connecticut, which found a constitutional right to contraception. Justice Thomas targeted all rulings that found a right to privacy, which the far-right justices believe does not exist in the Constitution. Should he be successful, the Court theoretically would strike down settled decisions that include the right to contraception, the right to same-sex intimate relations, and the right to marriage for same-sex couples.
“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” Thomas wrote in 2022. “Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous,’ we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents.”
And according to the Guttmacher Institute, “12 states allow some health care providers to refuse to provide services related to contraception.”
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In her speech, Senator Britt mentioned the “MOMS Act,” her bill to help mothers, including those needing pre- and post-natal care. In a speech announcing her bill last month, Britt said her “legislation is especially important for Alabama because our state is in critical need of a strengthened support system for moms. Over a third of our state’s 67 counties are classified as maternal care deserts. And Alabama has the highest maternal mortality rate in the entire nation. The status quo is totally unacceptable, and I’m not going to stop working in this arena to advance meaningful solutions.”
What Britt neglected to mention is women’s access to prenatal care is rapidly diminishing in states with bans on abortion, because OB-GYNs are terrified of being arrested for providing necessary medical care.
On Thursday, calling Britt’s “condoms to little kids” claim a “weird lie,” Salon‘s Amanda Marcotte wrote: “Republicans use two big, interlocking lies to conceal an anti-contraception agenda from the public. First, they deny they intend to take birth control away, by limiting their definition of “birth control’ to condoms and the rhythm method. To justify that shell game, they lie about how the most popular and effective forms of birth control work, claiming they are ‘abortion.’ They ping-pong between these two lies, so that the fact-checkers can never keep up. ”
In her Senate floor speech Senator Britt said, “I want to be absolutely, 100% clear, that I support continued nationwide access to contraception.”
Sen. Britt, who calls herself a “proud champion for life,” does not appear to have ever defined what supporting continued nationwide access to contraception actually means.
Overall, nine Republicans and one Democrat (Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey) abstained from casting a vote on the Right to Contraception Act. The procedural vote needed 60 votes to move forward, It failed, 51-39. All no votes were from Republicans, except the no vote from Majority Leader Schumer, required to allow him to bring the bill again for a vote. All other Democrats who voted, voted “yea.” Only two Republicans, Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, voted yes with the Democrats.
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