As 2023 drew to a close, three prominent Republican activists took to Capitol Hill to offer GOP lawmakers a strategy for advancing the pro-life cause: promoting birth control. The trio planned, according to a Politico report, to warn Republicans “that if they don’t talk about birth control and work to make it more accessible, they risk losing voters and confirming arguments from the left that the party that outlawed abortion in much of the country is coming next for contraception.” Notably, the group included Susan Hirschmann, who has lobbied on behalf of Merck and Pfizer, manufacturers of hormonal contraceptives.

To adopt this strategy would be a significant unforced error, in terms of both policy and electoral politics. Even its premise is something of a mirage. Contraception is already widely accessible, and the idea that Republicans intend to prohibit its use is a fabrication of disingenuous Democrats. Statistics indicate that almost no one has any difficulty obtaining birth control, and there isn’t a significant political effort anywhere in the country to ban it.

This proposed rhetorical shift for pro-life Republicans, then, is less about confronting political reality than it is about convincing GOP lawmakers to sidestep the abortion debate in favor of what some in the party believe will be an easy crowd-pleaser. But it would also be a mistake to think that gesturing vaguely at contraception will do anything to win over new voters or, crucially, to counter the Democratic Party’s abortion messaging.

Democrats’ strategy on the issue consists in no small part of distracting voters from the party’s unpopular support for unlimited abortion with various forms of scaremongering about pro-life policy. In the wake of the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, abortion supporters asserted that pro-life laws would lead to pregnant mothers dying in medical emergencies, as in cases of ectopic pregnancy. More recently, progressives have misrepresented an Alabama court ruling to claim that pro-lifers plan to ban in vitro fertilization procedures.

In reality, every abortion regulation on the books has clear language allowing doctors to provide necessary medical care to save a pregnant mother’s life during a health-care emergency, even if that care would inadvertently harm her unborn child; it is abortion supporters, not opponents, who are causing confusion about whether such emergency treatment is permissible. And the Alabama case had nothing to do with banning IVF but rather was a civil wrongful-death suit brought by the parents of children conceived using IVF because the clinic’s lack of oversight and protection had enabled a patient to remove several cryopreserved embryos, causing their deaths.

A half-hearted nod to the importance of accessible contraception — hardly an urgent political matter — will do nothing to repudiate any of these lies or expose progressive extremism on abortion. What Republicans need is a cogent and compassionate articulation of their party’s pro-life stance, and this precludes cheerleading for contraception.

Research suggests that increasing access to birth control does little to prevent abortion. As Michael J. New has written in National Review Online, “studies show that programs to promote contraception use are ineffective at best or counterproductive at worst.” He cites 23 studies published in the period 1998–2006, all of which “show that easier access to emergency contraception failed to achieve any statistically significant reduction in rates either of unintended pregnancy or abortion.” These findings accord with both common sense and available data. The widespread availability of contraception has increased the incidence of sex between uncommitted men and women, which in turn has increased the rate of unexpected, out-of-wedlock pregnancies and subsequent abortions.

As a plank of any serious platform to reduce abortion, then, birth control makes little sense. More salient for election-minded Republicans might be the reality that women across the political spectrum — and especially younger Millennials and Gen Z women — are increasingly displeased with or uninterested in oral contraception, the physical and psychological side effects of which have been well documented for decades.

In the Human Life Review, researcher Grace Emily Stark summarizes many of these issues: “Among the evidence-based risks and side effects of birth control are increased risk of blood clots (and through these, increased risk of heart attack and stroke); increased risk of certain cancers (chiefly breast and cervical cancers); increased risk of depression, anxiety, and suicide; loss of libido; osteoporosis and bone fractures; weight gain; irritable bowel syndrome; and increased risk of developing certain autoimmune disorders.”

In addition to these substantial complaints, astute observers now realize that the medical system’s overreliance on and overprescription of hormonal contraception has stood in the way of potential advances for women’s health. “It is clear that freedom from one’s fertility and suppression of one’s menstrual symptoms,” Stark writes, “have come with two clear costs: an expectation that women accommodate themselves to the male-normative workforce, and a dearth of effective options to treat the root causes of gynecological and menstrual issues that plague women around the world.”

As women wake up to this reality, some are opting out of hormonal birth control. “Recently, after six years on it, I decided to stop taking the pill,” New York Post columnist Rikki Schlott wrote last January. “But it isn’t just me. Many of my friends are independently doing the same, whether it’s driven by concern for their mental health, desire for something more natural — or curiosity about what the world looks like when you’re not in a hormonal fog.” They have “an intuitive sense that hormonal birth control might be messing with us, and our brains.”

Democrats are wrong to claim that there’s an effort under way to restrict access to birth control, but there is indeed an emerging, vocal group of women who want nothing to do with it, and there are plenty within the pro-life movement who see birth-control promotion as counterproductive. No likely advantage would come from adding a contraception theme to the GOP’s national strategy. It would, however, stir up intraparty disagreement and allow progressives to gesture toward anti-contraception sentiment as evidence of a brewing movement to take birth control away.