Senate Republicans kill federal birth control protections

Republicans in the Senate voted down a bill Wednesday to protect access to contraception at a federal level.

The bill, sponsored by Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, would have curbed potential Republican-led states’ attempts to attack contraception access, including IUD devices, hormonal birth control, or Plan B.

Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska were the sole GOP aye votes, leaving Democrats 8 votes shy of overcoming a filibuster on the matter, which would have codified the right to contraception access in Griswold v. Connecticut. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer changed his vote to a ‘no’ at the last minute, a procedural swap that allows the chamber to take up the vote again at a later date.

Griswold, less than a decade older than the now-overturned Roe v. Wade, could be the next target of the conservative Supreme Court justices, who’ve signaled that they aren’t friendly to existing protections on reproductive healthcare. In Clarence Thomas’ concurrence on the decision which killed Roe, he wrote that the court should “reconsider all of this Court's…precedents, including Griswold.”

Democrats argue that the right to contraception is a deeply popular, but vulnerable, one. A FiveThirtyEight poll pegged support of legal birth control in all or most cases at 89%. Democratic lawmakers say that Roe, and the popularity of abortion rights before its overturn, should serve as a warning.

“We must protect the right to contraception before [right-wing extremists] have a chance to roll back decades of progress in reproductive health care and personal autonomy,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois wrote in an op-ed.

The vote comes as part of a slew of reproductive rights bills that Schumer plans to take up in the chamber in an effort to force Republican lawmakers to express their overwhelmingly unpopular positions on access to birth control, abortion, IVF and other issues.

“Senate Republicans showed us who they are today: they showed that they’re not willing to stand up and protect access to contraception, something 90% of Americans support,” Schumer wrote in a post to X.