This week the U.S. House of Representatives is expected to take up the Right to Contraception Act. The bill, introduced by Rep. Kathy E. Manning, a Democrat from North Carolina, establishes a federal right to contraception — meaning women would have the right to use birth control and medical providers and pharmacies the right to provide it.
This bill would put into law a right that the Supreme Court addressed three times over the past half-century, when it granted married couples the freedom to use birth control in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965, then in two other cases when the right to contraception was extended to unmarried people and then to minors.
Contraception is recognized internationally as preventive healthcare and an essential tool for women to plan the course of their lives. But as we have learned in the last month, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court has no problem overturning precedents. Alarmingly, Justice Clarence Thomas, in his concurrence in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, urged the court to reexamine Griswold as well as the 2015 Obergefell decision granting same-sex couples the right to marry and the 2003 Lawrence decision that overturned laws prohibiting gay sex. Given that the court just overturned Roe v. Wade, it’s impossible to disregard the possibility that these other essential freedoms are now at risk.
