North Carolina's Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, now running to be governor of the Tar Heel State, rose to fame in the GOP by channeling the id of the typical MAGA voter. His speeches and social media presence channel a D-list shock jock mentality, filtered through a Christian nationalist lens, that's grown in popularity in the Trump era. He calls LGBTQ people "filth," "maggots," and "flies," insisting they should be forced to "find a corner outside" rather than be allowed to use public restrooms. He's denounced women's suffrage and argued that once a woman is pregnant, her body belongs to "the daddy." And before Tucker Carlson was embracing Holocaust denialism, Robinson was raving that it was "hogwash" to believe the Nazi genocide of Jews was precipitated by mass gun confiscation.
So it's no surprise that another clip of Robinson being the worst has emerged. This time Robinson is caught on camera in a 2022 church appearance, going on a tirade about how women don't need birth control because — as he gestures to his crotch for emphasis — they need to "get this under control" instead.
"You don’t lay down and act like you’re making a baby til you’re ready to have a baby," he declared in a video first published by HuffPost. He explicitly sneered at the idea of birth control. "You don’t have what you do to make a baby until you’re ready to have that baby.” He followed up by insisting the only way to be "responsible with your body" is to reserve sex for procreation.
Robinson's campaign hasn't responded to HuffPost's requests for comment, but it's safe to say he hasn't changed his opposition to birth control in the past two years. On August 26, Robinson was recorded ranting yet again about the evils of contraception, a service that has been used by over 99% of sexually experienced women. Robinson insisted birth control is "being forced on very young ladies" and agreed that women who use it are "more inclined to be promiscuous."
Donald Trump and his allies want voters to believe that Robinson's views are an outlier and not reflexive of what Trump intends to do if he wins office. (Though Trump adores Robinson, trollingly comparing him to "Martin Luther King on steroids.") The truth is this hostility to contraception is baked right into Project 2025, which was developed by hundreds of past and future Trump advisors as a replacement for a traditional policy agenda. Along with schemes to use executive orders to pass abortion bans without going through Congress, Project 2025 contains radical schemes to drastically restrict — and eventually outright ban — female-controlled contraception methods. This is why Republicans in Congress continue to block efforts to enshrine contraception rights into law. The end goal is to take birth control away.
Alice Ollstein and Megan Messerly at Politico detailed the various ways Project 2025 proposes that another Trump administration could strip women, especially working class and poor women, of birth control. The conservative plan outlines dramatically slashing funding for family planning clinics and the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program. There's also the scheme to destroy the Affordable Care Act, which covers birth control along with health care generally for millions of women. And if they can't do that, the fallback is rewriting the coverage rules of the ACA so that employers are no longer required to include contraception coverage in their health care plans.
"I’ve been very concerned with just the emphasis on expanding more and more contraception," complained Emma Waters, one of the architects of Project 2025. She added that having "an absolute right" to determine when you get pregnant is not what's "best" for women. Her Twitter feed shows more of the same: retweets of concern trolls who denounce reproductive technologies that allow women to wait until they're stable to have babies, sneering at mothers who use daycare, and insisting marriage only works when the wife submits to her husband.
As I wrote about in February, the reason the Christian right loathes in-vitro fertilization (IVF) is because they believe, falsely, women exploit it to "delay" childbirth. Irin Carmon of New York magazine fleshed this argument out more over the weekend, quoting anti-abortion leaders who complained that IVF is "encouraging families to delay childbirth" and, heaven forbid, allowing women to pursue "careers, travel, and finding themselves." As Carmon notes, the most common reason women "delay" childbirth into their 30s is they don't have money to raise a child or haven't met a man they wish to marry yet. It's easier for the right to blame "female selfishness," which is defined as any desire to have a life outside of giving birth and raising children.
IVF, which Senate Republicans on Tuesday blocked from protecting federally, doesn't allow women to "delay" childbirth, but contraception certainly does — and in an explicit way. Every single complaint that the right has about women who put off marriage and childbirth until after they're old enough to rent a car makes the most sense as a diatribe against birth control. They find it easier to gripe about IVF because it's still a technology used by only a small fraction of the population. Contraception, on the other hand, is a near-universal behavior, so attacking it directly is not politically popular. But these anti-IVF arguments make the larger philosophy clear: Any technology that allows women to time when she has children is wrong and should be taken away.
As such, Project 2025 has language in it that subtly lays the groundwork for an eventual ban on nearly all forms of female-controlled contraception. As Reproductive Freedom for All pointed out in a campaign memo, "Project 2025 includes personhood language and policies that propagate the belief that life begins at conception." The same people perpetuate the false claim that hormonal contraception, from the birth control pill to the IUD, works by "killing" fertilized eggs. (These forms actually work by preventing fertilization.) The goal is eventually to marry the fake science to the "personhood" laws to argue that abortion bans also ban most forms of contraception. Recent Supreme Court rulings have laid the groundwork for this strategy by reifying the right-wing belief that "science" is whatever a Federalist Society-selected judge says it is.
The dramatic shift leftward among young women already has the GOP worried, making Republicans especially keen to keep their designs on contraception out of public view. People like Donald Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, will yell about "childless cat ladies" and insist that women should be having more children, but he won't admit publicly the anti-contraception implications of this argument. Occasionally, however, we see a GOP candidate with even less impulse control than Trump, like Robinson, say the quiet parts out loud. But it's in their behavior that we see that someone like Robinson is not an outlier. Republicans know that the best way to wage war on the childless cat ladies is to take away their birth control. They're now trying to figure out how to do that so quietly that the public doesn't rise to stop them until it's too late.
