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What Will Americans Do When Birth Control is Illegal?
Are Republicans warming up the jail cells they want to put American women into who have the temerity to continue using birth control after the GOP’s bans take effect?
Last year, all three candidates in the Republican race for Michigan Attorney General proudly confirmed that they believed the 1965 Supreme Court case Griswold v Connecticut was “wrongly decided” on privacy grounds and that it was an infringement on a state’s right to imprison women, regardless of marital status, who use birth control.
Yes, birth control.
Each described himself as a “Christian” and implied his opposition to Griswold was grounded in his religious faith.
Evernote link to profile of Alan Sears (in The New Yorker, not The Atlantic)A few weeks ago, David D. Kirkpatrick wrote an in-depth piece for The Atlantic profiling Alan Sears, the head of the rightwing culture-wars juggernaut Alliance Defending Freedom. The group reportedly has a $100 million a year budget, over 70 lawyers, and has won 14 Supreme Court and other cases including:
— Overturning Roe v Wade,
— Letting employers refuse to pay for health insurance that covers birth control,
— Allowing a baker to refuse to make a cake for a same-sex wedding,
— Blowing up some pandemic-related masking, vaccine, and other requirements,
— Eviscerating federal transparency requirements for nonprofit donors,
— Gutting federal regulations on religious organizations’ use of federal money, and
— Outlawing the abortion pill, Mifipristone (this one is being appealed).
The most startling part of the article, though, is when Sears tells Kirkpatrick:
Earlier this year, the Republican Attorney General of Iowa, Brenna Bird, suspended payments for emergency contraception for rape victims.“We are on a winning trajectory. It may be that the day will come when people say the birth-control pill was a mistake.”
Two years ago, Republicans in the Idaho legislature made it a crime for people working in state-funded student health centers in that state’s colleges to discuss abortion with their patients or distribute Plan B emergency contraception.


















