Following a week of theater billed as confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, desperate Democrats turned to the media for help peddling yet another unwarranted attack on the Supreme Court nominee: that Kavanaugh believes birth control is abortion.
The charge followed an exchange during Thursday’s hearing when Sen. Ted Cruz asked Kavanaugh, who has served on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals since 2006, to explain his dissent in the Priests for Life case. That case, as Kavanaugh noted, involved a Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) challenge to Obamacare’s mandate that insurance pay for birth control.
Kavanaugh laid out for the senators the legal standards governing RFRA claims, explaining the first question was whether the mandate imposed “a substantial burden on the religious exercise.” “And it seemed to me quite clearly it was,” Kavanaugh explained, before adding: “It was a technical matter of filling out a form in that case. They said filling out the form would make them complicit in the provision of the abortion-inducing drugs that they, as a religious matter, objected to.”
Completely ignoring the legal issues at play and the context of Kavanaugh’s comments, the abortion activist organization NARAL pounced, tweeting (and pinning) the flatly false claim that “Kavanaugh just referred to birth control as ‘abortion-inducing drugs,’ which is not only an anti-science lie, it’s an anti-choice extremist phrase that shows that our right to access both abortion and contraception would be in SERIOUS danger if he is confirmed.”
If You Can Summarize an Idea, You Obviously Agree With It
The usual suspects, such as The Huffington Post, quickly joined in to push this false narrative, writing, “On the third day of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he referred to contraception as ‘abortion-inducing drugs.’” By Friday, the mainstream media was actively aiding abortion activists’ misrepresentation, with CNN proclaiming “Brett Kavanaugh’s views on birth control drew scrutiny after he referred to contraceptives as ‘abortion-inducing drugs.’”
New York socialist candidate for U.S. House Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez added her voice, declaring “Brett Kavanaugh doesn’t even know what birth control IS. He doesn’t deserve to pass a 7th grade health class, let alone a Supreme Court confirmation.”
While Ocasio-Cortez’s ignorance of the legal niceties is understandable, the same cannot be said for Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), who claimed Kavanaugh is “going after birth control.” Harris previously served as California’s attorney general and knew full well that Kavanaugh’s “abortion-inducing drugs” testimony reflected, not his own opinion, but the views of Priests for Life and the other plaintiffs involved in the RFRA lawsuit.
Lest there be any doubt of Kavanaugh’s meaning, one need only look to his actual statement: “They said filling out the form would make them complicit in the provision of abortion-inducing drugs that they, as a religious matter, object to.”
Sen. Orrin Hatch’s office called out the distortion, providing a quick fact check for the uninitiated: “The truth: [Kavanaugh] was summarizing another’s argument, using the exact phrase from an opinion.”
For good measure, Hatch’s office screen-grabbed and highlighted the plaintiffs’ “abortion-inducing” argument from the case.
Desperation does tell. Even when called on their deception, Democrats and abortion activists are doubling down. Abortion giant Planned Parenthood’s response proves representative.
Following Kavanaugh’s discussion of the Priests for Life case, the nation’s top abortion provider issued a press release leaving out “the words ‘they said,’ making it appear as if Kavanaugh was speaking for himself,” in discussing the litigant’s abortion-inducing drugs argument. When questioned about their misrepresentation of Kavanaugh’s testimony, “a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, acknowledged the error,” yet claimed that because Priests for Life objected to all birth control, Kavanaugh was characterizing “all types of birth control as ‘abortion inducing drugs.’”
Nonsense. It is true that in Priests for Life the plaintiffs morally opposed paying for employee health insurance that paid for all forms of birth control. But the plaintiffs themselves distinguished between birth control and abortion-inducing drugs, as seen in their petition for Supreme Court review: “Petitioners object to being forced by the federal government to purchase a healthcare plan that provides access to contraceptives, sterilization, and abortifacients, all of which are prohibited by Petitioners’ religious convictions.”
Kavanaugh did not mention the Priests for Life’s opposition to providing coverage for sterlization procedures, which also shows that his reference to abortion-inducing drugs was not intended to cover the totality of the plaintiffs’ objections and thus, in no way, equated birth control to abortion.
Kavanaugh Expressed Support for Subsidized Birth Control
Since the Democrats will likely continue this charade for the foreseeable future, let’s add one final proof of their fraud. In his dissent, Kavanaugh expressly stated “that the Government has a compelling interest in facilitating women’s access to contraception.” Then, in explaining why this interest is compelling, Kavanaugh posited that “facilitating women’s access to contraception” would reduce the number of unintended pregnancies, which in turn would reduce the number of abortions.
If Kavanaugh actually believed that birth control induces abortions, then, contrary to his own analysis in this case, increased access to contraception would increase the number of abortions. In fact, Kavanaugh’s own views aside, increased access to birth control does not necessarily decrease abortions and may increase them. But this was not his argument.
The Left’s false flag about Kavanaugh is but half the problem. In casting Kavanaugh as the Grinch who stole birth control, Democrats simultaneously ridicule pro-life claims that some forms of birth control are “abortion-inducing.”
Dr. Eugene Gu, whose Twitter thread Ocasio-Cortez retweeted as evidence that Kavanaugh deserved an “F” in middle-school science, took that tack. Gu, who made news last year when he sued President Trump for blocking him on Twitter, called it “horrifying to hear” a Supreme Court nominee refer to birth control as abortion-inducing drugs.
Gu is not the most objective of sources for abortion information. His company, Ganogen, used fetal organs from aborted babies for medical research. In 2014, Gu implanted “the heart and kidney of a human fetus into a rat” and “the organs actually grew inside the rat and sustained its life.” Gu’s source for the fetal organs? StemExpress—the company captured in undercover videos buying aborted baby body parts from Planned Parenthood.
Yes, Birth Control Can Kill an Embryo
So what does Gu have to say about the claimed abortion-inducing drugs, such as Plan B? That does not cause an abortion, according to the good doctor. But the Food and Drug Administration’s prescribing information clearly states that, in addition to preventing ovulation or fertilization, Plan B “may inhibit implantation (by altering the endometrium).” As such, one mechanism of action of Plan B is abortion-inducing.
Gu also insisted that, although intrauterine devices (IUDs) can prevent the implantation of an embryo, “[t]his is still NOT abortion.” But how so, if Gu also readily admits IUDs prevent an embryo from implanting? By relying on the Orwellian redefinition of pregnancy the pro-abortion medical community pushed in the 1960s.
Prior to that, even Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger recognized that destroying a fertilized ovum or embryo constituted an abortion. Here’s Sanger in a 1932 article promoting birth control: “Some ill-informed persons have the notion that when we speak of birth control we include abortion as a method. We certainly do not. Abortion destroys the already fertilized ovum or the embryo; contraception, as I have carefully explained, prevents the fertilizing of the ovum by keeping the male cells away. Thus it prevents the beginning of life.”
While the science didn’t change, the times did, and 1959 saw Dr. Bent Boving, a featured speaker at a Planned Parenthood symposium, arguing for changing the definition of conception from when fertilization occurs to when implantation occurs. Boving explained that “the social advantage of [birth control] being considered to prevent conception rather than to destroy an established pregnancy could depend upon something so simple as a prudent habit of speech.”
Then in 1965, the pro-abortion American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology followed Boving’s lead and redefined “conception” as from fertilization to implantation, thus labeling women pregnant only following implantation. Viola: no pregnancy, no abortion. So, contrary to the pro-abortion Left’s claimes, pro-lifers aren’t anti-science—we are just anti-redefining-science.
Where Kavanaugh stands on the issue, though, isn’t known because he wasn’t offering his views, but those of Priests for Life. Anyone listening to, or reading about, the exchange in good faith would know that. In other words, everyone except the mainstream media and Democrats.
