The Republican war on reproductive freedom includes contraception

Iowa is no longer paying for emergency contraception for rape victims:

The Iowa Attorney General’s office is not currently covering the cost of emergency contraception or abortions for Iowans who are victims of rape or sexual assault, Natalie Krebs reported for Iowa Public Radio on April 7.

Iowa law requires the state’s victim compensation fund to pay for a sexual assault victim’s medical examination “for the purpose of gathering evidence,” as well as any treatment “for the purpose of preventing venereal disease.” Under longtime Attorney General Tom Miller, that fund also covered the cost of abortion services or Plan B, medication that prevents ovulation and therefore pregnancy if administered soon enough following unprotected sex.

In a statement provided to Iowa Public Radio, spokesperson Alyssa Brouillet said Attorney General Brenna Bird “is carefully evaluating whether this is an appropriate use of public funds” as part of a broader review of victim assistance programs. Payment of “pending claims will be delayed” until Bird completes her review.

CLU of Iowa executive director Mark Stringer said in a written statement, “It is beyond cruel for the state to take away much-needed sexual assault medical care from Iowans.” He called it “unconscionable” for the Crime Victim Assistance Division to stop funding care “as part of some bureaucratic review,” and said Bird “needs to resume this emergency care now before more women are hurt as a result.”

Meanwhile, this framing is Not Helpful:

This suspension of payments for Plan B, specifically, is a move against contraception. And this isn’t a minor point — the Republican strategy is to get access to contraception women have control over restricted or banned by falsely labeling them “abortifacients.” This is a war that, logically and in practice, goes well beyond abortion (which is horrible enough.) Focusing on whether the Court explicitly says that Griswold is overruled is ultimately missing the point — there’s more than one way to strip people of sexual autonomy, and it’s critically to be clear about what Republicans are doing.

And no one should be confident that this majority is done with its work. The right Roe and Casey recognized does not stand alone. To the contrary, the Court has linked it for decades to other settled freedoms involving bodily integrity, familial relationships, and procreation. Most obviously, the right to terminate a pregnancy arose straight out of the right to purchase and use contraception. See Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965); Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972). In turn, those rights led, more recently, to rights of same-sex intimacy and marriage. See Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003); Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015). They are all part of the same constitutional fabric, protecting autonomous decisionmaking over the most personal of life decisions. The majority (or to be more accurate, most of it) is eager to tell us today that nothing it does “cast[s] doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” Ante,at 66; cf. ante, at 3 (Thomas, J., concurring) (advocating the overruling of Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell). But how could that be? The lone rationale for what the majority does today is that the right to elect an abortion is not “deeply rooted in history”: Not until Roe, the majority argues,did people think abortion fell within the Constitution’s guarantee of liberty. Ante, at 32. The same could be said, though, of most of the rights the majority claims it is not tampering with. The majority could write just as long an opinion showing, for example, that until the mid-20th century, “there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain [contraceptives].” Ante, at 15. So one of two things must be true. Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure. Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.