Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh says a 1973 Supreme Court decision that established a constitutional right to an abortion is an “important precedent” that has “been reaffirmed many times.” (Sept. 5)
AP
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, already vehemently opposed by abortion-rights advocates, further alienated that demographic during his Senate testimony Thursday when he referred to some forms of birth control as “abortion-inducing drugs.”
Kavanaugh made the remark after Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz asked him about his dissent in a 2015 case involving Priests for Life, a Catholic group that Kavanaugh said was being forced to provide health coverage for contraceptives “over their religious objection.”
He said they would have been required to fill out a form that would “make them complicit in the provision of the abortion-inducing drugs” that they objected to.
Reproductive rights groups pounced on Kavanaugh’s conflation of birth control with abortion as evidence that his confirmation poses a threat to women’s access to abortion.
“Kavanaugh referred to birth control – something more than 95 percent of women use in their lifetime – as an ‘abortion-inducing drug,’ which is not just flat-out wrong, but is anti-woman, anti-science propaganda,” Planned Parenthood’s Dawn Laguens told HuffPost. “Women have every reason to believe their health and their lives are at stake.”
NARAL Pro-Choice America said in a tweet that Kavanaugh’s comment was an “anti-science lie” and an “anti-choice extremist phrase that shows that our right to access abortion and contraception would be in SERIOUS danger if he is confirmed.”
The Center for Reproductive Rights called Kavanaugh’s remark “straight out of the anti-choice, anti-science phrase book used to restrict women’s access to essential health care.”
A 2014 report from the Guttmacher Institute said groups opposed to abortion rights have long worked to “stigmatize contraception by blurring the lines between contraception and abortion.”
Democratic senators also went after Kavanaugh for the remark.
“Newsflash, Brett Kavanaugh: Contraception is NOT abortion,” tweeted Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. “Anyone who says so is peddling extremist ideology – not science –and has no business sitting on the Supreme Court.”
Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., called it a “red-alarm moment.”
“If you didn’t believe to before, believe it now – a woman’s constitutional right to abortion AND birth control are both 100% at stake,” he tweeted.
California Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein called it “further proof of Kavanaugh’s hostility toward women.”
Kavanaugh has said he considers the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which said women had a constitutional right to abortions, to be settled law.
But Democrats have pointed out that settled law can be overturned by another Supreme Court decision, and they argue that Kavanaugh’s record indicates he would vote for such a change if a case challenging the precedent came before him.
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