Republicans have seen by now that opposing abortion is a losing strategy. So going into the 2024 elections, the party is scrambling to come up with a way to frame their ghoulishness that doesn’t totally alienate voters. By the looks of it, that mission is already failing.
Donald Trump mouthpiece-turned-Fox News personality Kellyanne Conway is part of a group working to convince lawmakers that their messaging needs to shift away from banning abortion and start focusing on what hasn’t been banned (yet)—namely, contraception.
Conway, along with lobbyist Susan Hirschmann and Independent Women’s Voice CEO Heather Higgins spent last month lobbying Republicans on Capitol Hill. According to Politico, they met “with GOP members and staff in the House and Senate, as well as the Republican campaign arms fighting to hold the House and flip the Senate, to warn that if they don’t talk about birth control and work to make it more accessible, they risk losing voters and confirming arguments from the left that the party that outlawed abortion in much of the country is coming next for contraception.”
They came prepared with “fresh polling data” that was commissioned by Higgins’ group and conducted by Conway’s consulting firm because what good is this kind of garbage take if it’s not also politically and financially self-serving?
This idea to shift the focus away from the party’s work to deprive us of our reproductive rights and onto the scraps they’ve left on the table reeks of desperation. As Vanity Fair’s Bess Levin accurately puts it, this is an attempt to “make their campaign slogan something like, ‘Yeah, we took away your reproductive rights, but, hey, we’re letting you keep contraception, and that’s something!’”
On top of being an obvious move of desperation, this message is a big ol’ lie. On both an individual and party level, Republicans have consistently fought against access to birth control. As Planned Parenthood laid it out in a recent press release:
The truth is, House Republicans completely eliminated funding for Title X in their Labor HHS appropriations bill. Title X is the only federal program dedicated to providing sexual and reproductive health care services to people with low incomes — this includes birth control. In their State and Foreign Operations appropriations bill, they cut funding for international family planning programs by nearly 25%. And, they banned funding for the UN’s sexual and reproductive health agency (UNFPA), which provides access to care, including birth control, in some of the most challenging settings around the world.
This approach is so disingenuous that not even the women who came up with it can make it sound reasonable.
In an interview with Politico, Heather Higgins tried out a terrible analogy, saying, “Republicans are like your uncle, who really loves you and loves the women in his family, but he’s bad about showing it.”
She continued: “It’s just not in their natural vocabulary. And we’re trying to help them learn how to make this be more part of their vocabulary and tell them that they need to talk about these things that their constituents all support, and be more visible and vocal.”
Someone should probably tell Higgins that we all despise that uncle, we dread having to spend the holidays with him, and we’re sick to death of being expected to coddle him while he posts rants on Facebook advocating for the elimination of our basic rights.
(featured image: Araya Doheny/FilmMagic)
