“Republicans Should Be Banned From Obtaining Health Insurance, Because They Have A Special Form of Cooties. Of Course, I’m Not A Doctor.”
By Jon Chait recently observed that the recent practice is for Republican politicians to conclude their climate change trooferism gibberish with the punchline “I’m not a scientist.” This works for the medical profession too. Let’s say you’re a Republican politician, and are not surprisingly a hateful misogynist so you want to prevent some forms of birth control from being covered by insurance plans, especially the effective ones. Of course, such a policy is unpopular, so it’s convenient to use abortion as a pretext. Only IUDs generally don’t work as abortifacients even if you subscribe to the utterly nutty idea that causing a fertilized egg not to implant is causing an abortion; they prevent fertilization. Now you have a way out!
The anti-choice movement has been claiming for awhile that hormonal contraception works this way, despite having no real evidence for that contention, so there were immediate concerns that HB 351 would be a back door way to ban insurance coverage of the pill. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. John Becker (R), hastily tried to put those fears to rest by assuring hearing attendees that he wasn’t out to ban birth control pill coverage and would be happy to amend the bill to clarify that point. No, there’s another contraception he’s eyeballing for the chopping block, one that just happens to be both the single most effective contraceptive method available: the IUD.
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Becker claims IUDs should be considered abortion because they prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg. No big surprise, but he’s wrong, and not just because preventing implantation is not considered “abortion” by medical science. It’s also because IUDs work by preventing sperm from reaching the egg. Mirena also stifles ovulation. They may have a secondary effect of preventing implantation, but, as with the pill, the evidence shows that non-contraception users “kill” a lot more fertilized eggs by callously menstruating them out.
Becker addressed his lack of knowledge about science thusly: “This is just a personal view. I’m not a medical doctor.”
Expect to hear a lot more of this.