Conservatives are coming for your right to contraception

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June of 2022, casting aside nearly 50 years of “settled” law, it sent shock waves throughout the country. Women no longer had a federally protected right to make key decisions concerning their own health care. Since then, 21 states have enacted outright bans or further restrictive measures on abortion.

As an American historian, I was alarmed by the legal rationale of Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in the Dobbs decision. He argued that aside from rights specifically spelled out in the text of the U.S. Constitution, only those rights “deeply rooted in the nation’s history in tradition” deserve to be protected.

Alito cherry-picked examples from the past in which the men who ruled society regarded independent women as a serious threat to social order. This included an invocation of Sir Matthew Hale, the 17th century English jurist who believed that men could not be charged with marital rape because wives’ bodies belonged to their husbands. His opinion also ran roughshod over American history since abortion in our country was widely practiced until the time of “quickening” up until the late nineteenth century.

But the language of Dobbs signals that conservatives and their allies on the Supreme Court will not stop at abortion — that they aim to overturn basic human rights regarding marriage and sexual conduct that most Americans affirm. Central to Roe v. Wade was the court’s finding that a fundamental “right to privacy” was inherent in the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. This reasoning was first used in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which struck down state restrictions on contraception as a violation of the rights of marital privacy.

Having dispensed with Roe, Griswold is now the target. A general “right to privacy” is not explicitly spelled out in the Constitution. Nor is the right to contraception “deeply rooted in the nation’s history in tradition.” If Griswold is overturned, then the legal foundations of federal protections for interracial marriage, same-sex intimate sexual conduct, and homosexual marriage also collapse — since they were all based on the “right to privacy.” Indeed, Justice Clarence Thomas, in his concurring opinion in Dobbs, salivated at the prospect of overruling these cases involving “due process precedents.” However, he conveniently omitted Loving v. Virginia (1967), which protected his own interracial marriage. His hypocrisy knows no bounds.

So, conservatives are coming for your right to use contraceptives. Republicans in the U.S. Senate blocked the Right to Contraception Act. And the Heritage Foundation’s Christo-authoritarian plan for the next Trump administration— “Project 2025” — includes reviving the Comstock Act of 1873, which made it a federal offense to distribute birth control through the mail or across state lines.

One by one, the goal is to strip Americans of basic freedoms as Christian nationalists implement their radical plan to “save” America—an America based not on pluralistic democracy but on religious autocracy.

Peter Jauhiainen a professor of religious studies at Kirkwood Community College, specializing in American religious history.