A Texas law requiring that minors must have parental consent before obtaining birth control was upheld in federal court by a panel of three judges on Tuesday. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed with President Joe Biden and his administration and ruled that the Texas law did not violate Title X, a federally funded pregnancy health program. “Title X’s goal (encouraging family participation in teens’ receiving family planning services) is not undermined by Texas’s goal (empowering parents to consent to their teen’s receiving contraceptives),” Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan wrote on behalf of the panel. “To the contrary, the two laws reinforce each other.”
In post-Roe America, women have little autonomy over their bodies. In 2021, Missouri Republicans tried to ban common forms of birth control from being paid for by the state’s Medicaid program, reducing access to birth control for low-income areas. Some governors and religious organizations have declared that IUDs (intra-uterine devices) cause abortions. Young women also struggle to find doctors who will perform voluntary sterilization (tubal ligation, hysterectomy, etc.).
The National Women’s Law Center reports that “those who are attacking birth control are deliberately using tactics that hide their true motives. They lie and conflate birth control with abortion–falsely conflating emergency contraceptives and intrauterine devices with abortion or listing these methods of birth control alongside abortion in legislation that restricts or bans it. They hide their attempts to go after birth control, using purposely vague or misleading language. And at the same time, some policymakers are undertaking a frontal assault on the constitutional right to birth control.”
Representative Matt Rosendale (R-MT) went on the record saying, “Let me be clear, drugs like Plan B and ella are not contraception, they are abortifacients,” an abhorrently false claim. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) made similar scientifically incorrect claims about Plan B working as an abortifacient.
Minors are going to have sex, and many feel that they cannot talk to their families about contraception or family planning. Requiring parental consent for minors to have access to birth control takes away their autonomy and will lead to increasing numbers of teen pregnancies. Restricting access to free birth control is cruel to those who cannot afford it. Misleading information surrounding birth control is rampant on social media platforms, such as TikTok, with influencers telling their audiences that birth control is harmful and poisonous to the body.
Your right to choose was already stolen from you, and now they are coming for birth control. Women are not baby factories, but Republicans seem to view us as such.
