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."
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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.
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.
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