Is Trump Taking Taxpayer Dollars for Contraception and Spending it on Erectile Dysfunction, Porn Addiction, and Faster Sperm?
The only federal program dedicated to family planning for poor women has gotten a "pro-life" MAHA makeover.
I have a piece out today in the New York Times (gift link, enjoy!) about the Trump administration’s stunning attempts to quietly dismantle Title X, the federal program that has funded contraception for low-income women for nearly 60 years. The administration initially tried to simply end the program by not including it in the White House’s proposed budget. That failed. So now they seem to be wildly revamping their funding priorities — away from contraception and toward things like natural family planning, male sexual dysfunction, and pro-marriage programming.
Trump appointed an anti-abortion (and it seems anti-contraception) doctor to the Health and Human Services role in charge of Title X. And in guidance HHS just released, the department is clear that they aren’t particularly interested in funding the most effective methods of contraception. They want women to get pregnant — and they want to spend more on making men better able to get women pregnant.
I hope you’ll read the piece itself to understand exactly what this new guidance says and what it means. Here, I wanted to add a little more context about why this is happening. And the answer is mostly: The anti-abortion movement generally opposes contraception, and wants it to go the way of legal abortion in the United States.
It may seem odd that a movement ostensibly dedicated to ending abortion would oppose the tools that are the most effective at ending abortion. But the anti-abortion movement is not, in fact, a movement dedicated to ending abortion. It is a movement dedicated to ending women’s equality.
To be clear, not every pro-life person opposes gender equality; America has lots of people who adopt political positions for lots of reasons, and there are millions of self-identified pro-lifers who just think abortion sounds wrong, but have no deep hostility to women’s rights.
The organized anti-abortion movement is a different thing, and I frankly hate the term “anti-abortion movement” because it really does not encompass what the movement is about. The anti-abortion movement wants to ban abortion, of course. But most of the movement is also intensely hostile to contraception. Most major “pro-life” groups in the US oppose not just abortion but contraception; even most of those who claim not to oppose contraception back court cases and policies that allow for the cutting-off of contraception access. Some groups are at least honest and say that they would like contraception outlawed. Others stay publicly quiet, while backing legal challenges to contraception access. None are enthusiastic advocates for contraception, despite contraception being the top driver for decreased abortion rates.
Still others do something more nefarious: They conflate contraception with abortion. They do this in the hopes that the public won’t notice and judges won’t understand. They do it so they can ban or curtail access to contraception without having to pass any new laws or get any kind of public buy-in.
This strategy started with the “morning-after pill,” a contraceptive that prevents pregnancy after sex. And you can see how this would be low-hanging fruit: Americans are not exactly the most sexually literate bunch, and I think a lot of people assume that the order of things is “egg released / sex happens / sperm finds egg / girl you’re pregnant.” How, then, could a post-coital contraceptive even work? For the better-informed, we understand that the egg is often released after sex happens, and is fertilized by the sperm that are still hanging around. The morning-after pill works largely by preventing that egg from being released; it does not (and cannot) end an established pregnancy.
No matter. The anti-abortion movement spread the lie that emergency contraception as an “abortifacient” — which led to a spate of pharmacists refusing to fill emergency contraception prescriptions for rape victims.
They’ve done the same thing with IUDs and increasingly birth control pills: Claimed these tools are “abortifacients,” sowed doubt and fear around them, and gone to court to fight for the rights of health workers to turn women away. They succeeded at the Supreme Court in the Hobby Lobby decision, which allows private secular businesses to refuse to include certain forms of contraception in employee health plans if the company’s owner morally objects.
Some anti-abortion groups will at least just admit that they believe sex should always be for baby-making, or at least open to baby-making, and that closing the reproductive door is immoral. The more politically savvy among them realize this is not exactly a popular position in a country where roughly nine in 10 women will use contraception at some point in her life, and where the overwhelming majority of people believe birth control is a good thing. Those groups and individuals aren’t trying to make a moral argument in order to persuade people to choose as they do (that, to me, is fine — choose your choice); they are making wildly untrue scientific and factual arguments to confuse and hand-wave and ultimately remove contraception access without any democratic process.
I am strongly on the “more information + more choices” train when it comes to contraception. I am someone for whom hormonal contraception has not been ideal. I’ve used it for many years of my life, and thank god (and science) I was able to decide for myself when and whether to have children. Hormonal contraception is partly to credit for that. But I’ve also experienced not-great side effects — nothing awful, but I don’t like the way it makes me feel, and getting an IUD inserted and removed was among one of the most acutely painful experiences of my life. Women deserve lots of options! I wish I had more. I really wish men had more, and that they could take on more of the responsibility for preventing pregnancy in ways that weren’t less comfortable and pleasurable (condoms) or invasive and potentially permanent (vasectomy). So this is not an argument that health workers should ignore natural family planning and other non-hormonal options. It is an argument for accurate information and a plethora of options, all of which are accessible.
The truth is that the IUD fails less than one percent of the time; some women with IUDs get pregnant, but the numbers are absolutely tiny. By contrast, someone relying on natural family planning has between a 12 and 24 percent risk of getting pregnant in a year of typical use (other estimates put failure rates as high as 33 percent; the pull-out method is more effective). That isn’t to trash natural family planning — fertility tracking is a good way to maximize one’s chances of getting pregnant, and using it for pregnancy prevention can be helpful and does decrease the risk of pregnancy. But it doesn’t decrease it the way modern contraceptives do, and women deserve that information (and access to effective contraception methods).
It’s also fine to deeply believe that sex should always be open to childbearing. That is not my personal belief, nor one I am ever going to adopt. But it’s a religious view held by millions and millions of people around the world. If they want to write books making that argument, teach their kids their own moral values, tweet about it, whatever, great — speak your mind, make your moral arguments, persuade who you can. But in the US, your religious view doesn’t get to dictate everyone else’s healthcare. And it’s particularly sneaky — and I would say immoral — to intentionally mislead the public about the facts and your intentions.
Stripping away access to contraception has been a multi-decade project of the anti-abortion movement. They have made common cause with some on the MAHA fringes, as the idea that contraception is unnatural and toxic to fertility has taken hold (there is no evidence that hormonal contraception damages future fertility; in fact, using contraception to space out pregnancies makes for healthier pregnancies, babies, and mothers). It’s these overlapping ideologies that we are now seeing take over HHS. And it’s the anti-abortion and MAHA movements that are taking money from contraception for poor women and suggesting it would be better spent on things like increasing sperm motility, treating erectile dysfunction, and fighting porn addiction.
Please do read the whole piece, and let me know what you think in the comments.
xx Jill
Trump and company to be blunt are solely doing it out of desiring control of women, nothing less and nothing more imo: it’s 100% evil, they know it, but it boils down to that alone to me. It’s not at all even remotely a good faith effort, and it’s too kind to assume that there’s much more to it than that.
It’s clearly imo in part to prevent the population from becoming more nonwhite as that segment is growing, but in also part for to be blunt a goal of absolute domination of women by evil men not in good faith, in tandem.
They figure they need more Caucasian children with especially the Hispanic population growing born to maintain racial “purity” to offset it so namely more “white” babies born which is why this sinister plan is there in truth, as especially Hispanics growing in number to maybe become narrowly the majority of the US population by 2050 is not politically favorable to them long term.
Fascists desire control of women just as much as they desire the demonizing of those nonwhite, immigrants, homosexual, trans, disabled, etc. Less access to contraceptives or abortifacients is the absolute goal, to that sinister end, for women who need them.
Thank you for surfacing this next under the radar attack on human rights and sensible governance. Women are being used as a tool to promote a deeper agenda of nativist birth rates without any caring for the consequences to women, children or men. Just one more reason to make sure we take over Congress in January 2027. We need an empowered Congress to support grassroots movements and throw every obstacle possible in this administration's way until they are gone in January 2029.