Trump & Co. ARE quietly going after Birth Control and Abortion….

Millions of Americans who receive federally-backed family planning servicesare likely to feel the impact of such a policy shift. And there is real political risk as well. Birth control remains overwhelmingly popular in the United States: Only 8 percent of Americans say using contraception is morally wrong, according to Pew Research Center polling. (More Americans object to drinking alcohol, getting a divorce or being extremely rich).

Given widespread support for birth control, it’s no surprise that politicians have long been reluctant to zero in on it. So, what’s changed?

The unwieldy political coalition that sent Trump back to the White House in 2024 is clamoring for action. For different reasons, an alliance of MAHA adherents, social conservatives and pronatalists are eager to go after birth control. With Trump sinking in the polls and his coalition fracturing, he may want to deliver for his core supporters. But regardless of whether he succeeds, the administration’s move signals a major transformation in America’s culture war: Contraception has gone from being politically untouchable to a real target on the right….

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The new assault on contraception is a result of the shifting political, cultural and legal landscape in the Trump era, and of key factions in the Trump coalition uniting on the issue.

The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to throw out Roe was a monumental victory for social conservatives, but it angered much of the public. Since then, polls and election results have made it seem costly for conservatives to further curb access to abortion. At least so far, the Trump administration has slow-walked changes on mifepristone, the abortion pill that anti-abortion groups are targeting, and ignored social conservatives’ calls to use the Comstock Act, a 19th century obscenity law, to ban the mailing of abortion drugs.

The Trump administration’s seeming reluctance to take further steps on abortion has frustrated social conservatives, who have threatened to decrease campaign spending in the midterm or just tell their voters to stay home. Attacking contraception may strike Republicans as an alternative way to placate the social conservative base. After all, anti-abortion groups have long framed certain birth control methods like emergency contraceptives and the pill as abortifacients, an argument that helped secure a win in the Supreme Court in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), a challenge to the contraceptive mandate of the Affordable Care Act.

In recent years, abortion opponents have also repackaged their arguments to reach a broader audience. They insist that Americans can’t trust drug companies to tell them the truth about how birth control drugs work….

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Then there is the rising influence of pronatalists, who want to see more babies being born and blame contraception in part for declining birth rates. In 2024, the U.S. birth rate hit a record low of 1.6 children per woman (largely echoing declining fertility rates across the world, and especially in developed countries where more women receive a higher education and fewer teenagers are getting pregnant).

While most Americans don’t seem concerned about falling birth rates, pronatalism has increasingly appealed to a conservative cohort claiming that birth control, combined with lower birth rates and an aging population, could short-circuit economic growth and threaten national security. For this group, anything that prevents more births, like contraception, is a hurdle to overcome.

Meanwhile, anti-immigration conservatives, another key part of the Trump coalition, are also convinced that the only way to address the country’s declining population is not for more people to move to the United States but for Americans who are already here to have more children….

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Again, that hardly means an anti-contraception campaign is risk-free for Republicans. Polls show that more than 90 percent of Americans support access to contraception. Even the conservative super-majority on the Supreme Court hasn’t shown an interest in revisiting the idea of a right to contraception. And being somewhat unhappy with current contraceptive choices is a far cry from supporting new policies that would hamper access to the most effective family planning solutions.

But whether or not the Trump administration can effectively wage war on contraception, the apparent political consensus of the last 60-plus years is a thing of the past. One of the nation’s oldest culture war battles is raging once again….

More…

Note….

Democrats thought abortion rights would be important in the 2024 election….

It was NOT….

America’s population grown IS tied to immigration….

Something Trump and Stephen Miller are working against….