Mainly – Women are just too mouthy (see above). They need to shut up and have babies.
The right to Contraception is yet another climate-critical action that Republicans, the Party of Big Oil, oppose.
Reminder: If elected, Donald Trump could appoint as many as three more Supreme Court Justices in the mold of Clarence Thomas.
Justice Clarence Thomas argued in a concurring opinion released on Friday that the Supreme Court “should reconsider” its past rulings codifying rights to contraception access, same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage.
The sweeping suggestion from the current court’s longest-serving justice came in the concurring opinion he authored in response to the court’s ruling revoking the constitutional right to abortion, also released on Friday.
Universal access to quality education for all children, and access to voluntary family planning services for women, girls, and couples, are essential human rights and cornerstones of gender equality. Family planning generates numerous benefits for maternal and child health, nutrition, and economic development, and contributes to gender equality, climate adaptation, and resilience. Family planning is one important aspect of a comprehensive suite of sexual and reproductive health services within the larger health services context.
Access to education can lead to improved livelihoods, better economic opportunities, delayed onset of marriage, and delayed childbearing. Education, and particularly education around climate change, can help to encourage sustainable consumption choices and spur climate action and the creation of green jobs. When accompanied by quality sexual and reproductive health services, including family planning, it can contribute to significant declines in maternal and child morbidity and mortality rates, unintended pregnancies, and unsafe abortions.
Of course, Senate Republicans, aware that contraception access is overwhelmingly popular even with their own voters, pretended their “no” votes were meaningless. “This is a show vote. It’s not serious. It doesn’t mean anything,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. More than 20 GOP senators signed a statement from Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., declaring “There is no threat to access to contraception… and it’s disgusting that Democrats are fearmongering on this important issue to score cheap political points.” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., baselessly claimed the bill could be applied to protect access to abortion pills. He also scoffed at the notion that Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that struck down state criminal bans on the sale of birth control to married couples, is in danger. “Nobody’s gonna overturn Griswold,” he said. “No way.”
Hawley knows full well that the conservative legal movement sees Griswold as the “judicial activism” undergirding Roe. When Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his Dobbs concurrence that Griswold also should be overturned, he wasn’t freelancing. Christian right activists and legal scholars have long disparaged the right recognized in Griswold as the corrupt foundation of Roe v. Wade, and of later cases protecting LGBTQ rights. In this conservative legal world, Griswold became known as “the bad case that started it all.” In 2017, while he was directing then-President Donald Trump’s selection of judicial nominees, Leonard Leo delivered a speech lambasting the “creation of rights found nowhere in the text or structure of the Constitution,” citing Griswold, Roe, and Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision legalizing same-sex marriage.
The right’s strategy is to chip away at access to birth control in federal and state policies, while working toward an even more extreme conservative Supreme Court majority that would find a way to overturn Griswold or otherwise eviscerate this crucial right. After Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court went up in flames nearly 40 years ago, in part over his virulent criticism of Griswold, right-wing activists launched a network of conservative advocacy groups to prevent future defeats. These groups set out to ensure both that future Supreme Court nominees would not get tripped up by questions about Griswold, and that nominees who expressed any support for the decision would not advance.
Republican lawmakers in Missouri blocked a bill to widen access to birth-control pills by falsely claiming they induce abortions. An antiabortion group in Louisiana killed legislation to enshrine a right to birth control by inaccurately equating emergency contraception with abortion drugs. An Idaho think tank focused on “biblical activism” is pushing state legislators to ban access to emergency contraception and intrauterine devices (IUDs) by mislabeling them as “abortifacients.”
Since the Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion two years ago,far-right conservatives have been trying to curtail birth-control accessby sowing misinformation about how various methods work to prevent pregnancy, even as Republican leaders scramble to reassure voters they have no intention of restricting the right to contraception, which polls show the vast majority of Americans favor.
The divide illustrates growing Republican tensions over the political cost of the “personhood” movement to endow an embryo with human rights, which has also animated the debate around in vitro fertilization.Mainstream medical societies define pregnancy as starting once an embryo has implanted in the wall of the uterus. But some conservative legislators, sharing the views of antiabortion activists, say they believe life begins when eggs are fertilized — before pregnancy — and are conflating some forms of birth control with abortion.
“Folks are trying to redefine when life begins, but it’s just not scientifically supported,” said Courtney Joslin, who leads public policy research on issues pertaining to women and families for the R Street Institute, a center-right think tank. “There’s just been a crowding-out effect where some far-right legislators have undermined Republicans’ ability to talk about birth control in a sensible and rational way.”
Republicans in at least 17 states have blocked largely Democratic-led attempts to pass laws assuring the right to birth control since 2022, according to a Washington Post examination of legislation. Most recently, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) vetoed a bill meant to ensure access to contraceptives, saying that while he personally supports such access, he was loath to “trample on the religious freedoms of Virginians,” including medical providers.
Former president Donald Trump recently suggested in a TV interview that he was open to restricting access to contraceptives. “We’re looking at that, and I’m going to have a policy on that very shortly,” Trump told KDKA News in Pittsburgh when a political editor asked whether he supported any restrictions on a person’s right to contraception. Pressed further, Trump said, “Things really do have a lot to do with the states, and some states are going to have different policy than others.”
The climate crisis does not affect everyone equally. Women and girls face disproportionate impacts from climate change — largely because they make up the majority of the world’s poor, who are highly dependent on local natural resources for their livelihood.
Particularly in rural areas, women and girls are often responsible for securing food, water, and firewood for their families. During times of drought and erratic rainfall, rural women work harder, walk farther and spend more time securing income and resources for their families. This can also expose them to increased risks of gender-based violence, as climate change exacerbates existing conflicts, inequalities, and vulnerabilities.
When extreme weather disasters strike, women and children are 14 times more likely to die than men, mostly due to limited access to information, limited mobility, decision-making, and resources. An estimated 4 out of 5 people displaced by the impacts of climate change are women and girls. Acute disasters can also disrupt essential services, including sexual and reproductive health care, compounding the negative impacts for women and girls.
Given their position on the frontlines of the climate crisis, women are uniquely situated to be agents of change— to help find ways to mitigate the causes of global warming and adapt to its impacts on the ground.
Reminder: Joe Biden could solve half the fascism & ecological crisis by nominating more Supreme Court justices & roping all the Democratic Senators, Bernie, & 1 other independent into confirming them, but refuses to. Why?
It might take bribing, bullying, blackmail, or extortion, but the future of the US & the world likely depends on it so maybe it’s time Biden & the other right wing, corporate, oligarchic, & wishful Democrats gave up thinking the Republicans are redeemable, capable of compromise, or have any interest in democracy or survival of civilization.
There are only 2 possibilities here; either the Democrats don’t understand that (& climate science) or they do. Which is worse?
I don’t think Biden et al think that Republicans in the main are redeemable, but they are definitely part of the playing field. A significant part of the problem is that the Electoral College and the Senate are anti-democratic. Perhaps they are concerned about the backfire when/if Republicans win control of the Whitehouse, and there is a tit-for-tat war.
We have 7/8 of the last POTUS elections’ popular votes being for Democrats, but Trump and Shrub getting in because of the rural bias of the EC. My vote for HRC in Texas didn’t mean squat.
Likewise, Republicans are more popular in rural states (Wyoming has a lower population than Washington, DC, but still gets 2 senators), so they have a great advantage in the US Senate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_elections_by_popular_vote_margin
Drawdown makes some invalid assumptions that vastly overstate the importance of population solutions, vastly understate the importance of offshore wind, & separate various solutions into parts, making them appear smaller & thus making the separate population solutions seem bigger, thus more important & worthy of attention. (Solar technologies, forest & land use solutions are among the minimized solutions.)
Although people in underdeveloped countries contribute a small fraction of GHGs, I think that the women in those typically patriarchal countries (and in some of our undeveloped states) are most in need of birth control. First as an escape from the social limitations imposed on them by only giving them value as baby-makers (and not worth educating), and second as a resilience response to catastrophic climate change, where the cost and difficulty of feeding and protecting children is increasing.
A large swath of the US population are influenced by Biblical thinking, specifically the Old Testament. The selected* “values” incorporated in the 613 commandments they prefer are related to social behavior and patriarchal structures. Patriarchy only works if there is a male head of household calling the shots, and the distinction between male and female (only worth half as much) is critical. This is why same-sex marriage and transsexualism are repugnant to conservative Christians (and Jews and Muslims).
Democracy itself is antithetical to these king-oriented believers, too.
As for contraception, the only version of that in the Bible was abstinence. The deep “moral” objection to abortion, though, was created out of whole cloth in later centuries. Causing a miscarriage in a woman (or girl) was considered a property crime against the husband, and of course there is that magical recipe described in Numbers 5:11-31 which would only induce abortion if the woman (girl) was an unfaithful wife. 🙄
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*Since there are myriad self-contradictions in Christan scripture, all Christians are cafeteria Christians. Plenty of “10 Commandments” Christians wear mixed fabric, eat shellfish and pork, and have tattoos, for example.