Donald Trump’s pick for a Michigan state Senate seat is promising to ban all birth control if she gets the chance.
“I guess we have to ask ourselves, would that ever come to a vote in the Michigan state legislature? And if it should, I would have to side with it should not be legal,” Republican Jacky Eubanks said in a recent interview with the site Church Militant.
“People believe that birth control — it’s better, like you said, oh, because then you won’t get pregnant and you won’t need to have an abortion,” she added. “But I think it gives people the false sense of security that they can have consequence-free sex, and that’s not true and that’s not correct. Sex ought to be between one man and one woman in the confines of marriage.”
Eubanks’ comments are some of the most explicit from a conservative candidate about going after contraception. But some other Republicans have made clear that with abortion rights likely to be struck down this summer, they’re starting to eye contraception restrictions as well.
Republican politicians have started talking about Griswold v. Connecticut as another case they’d like to see the Supreme Court overturn after Roe v. Wade. That 1965 decision said married couples have a right to contraception access based on the constitutional right to privacy. That decision could set the stage for future decisions that further restrict birth control protections, abortion and marriage equality.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), for example, recently called Griswold “constitutionally unsound.” Arizona GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters’ campaign website said he would only support judges “who understand that Roe and Griswold and Casey were wrongly decided, and that there is no constitutional right to abortion.”
Other Republicans in Congress have scoffed at the idea of banning contraception, dismissing the notion that the Supreme Court would go after something that’s overwhelmingly popular. But Roe is popular as well, and its days are likely numbered.
GOP lawmakers have also long pushed personhood legislation — and are continuing to do so in the midterm elections — that would classify fertilized eggs as persons under the U.S. Constitution, making abortion illegal. But it could also ban certain forms of contraception, such as intrauterine devices (IUDs) and Plan B.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) warned earlier this month that state GOP legislatures are seeking to “criminalize contraceptive care, in vitro fertilization and post-miscarriage care, dragging our nation back to a dark time decades into the past.”
In his endorsement of Eubanks, Trump explicitly mentioned her support for the “big lie” — the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was marred by widespread fraud. Eubanks has called for another audit of Michigan’s 2020 election results despite the fact that a prior audit found no evidence outside interference. She has canvassed voters in search of purported evidence of fraud, prompting a complaint to police that she was intimidating voters.
“We are going up against the beast,” Eubanks said at a rally earlier this year. “The beast hates us, but the good news is God is on our side and God wins. If [we] continue to pray and to not comply and to stand up and peacefully fight back, we will see the regime’s power broken and finally the people will be put back in their rightful place as the true sovereigns in this nation.”