Donald Trump has spent the better part of his life bragging about sexual exploits with women. As president, he is showing women the same lack of respect as his administration wages an all-out attack on access to birth control – which is also an attack on women’s freedom to make their own decisions about whether and when to have children.

In just the first five months of this administration, the threats to contraception access have come one after another. Trump overturned protections for the millions of low-income people who rely on the Title X family planning program. He filled top Department of Health and Human Services spots with people who are committed to making birth control as inaccessible as possible.

Teresa Manning – who now helps lead the section of the department of Health and Human Services focused on family planning – has insisted that birth control doesn’t work and that the federal government shouldn’t be in the business of family planning, anyway. HHS secretary Tom Price, a vocal opponent of the Affordable Care Act’s birth control coverage provision, once derisively asked critics to “bring me one woman” who can’t afford birth control. (Journalists were quick to bring him many.)

So it was disturbing, but not at all surprising, to learn that the Trump administration is considering a rollback of the ACA contraception provision that would allow any company to use religion as a justification for denying birth control coverage to the women who work for them. One health law professor summarized the remarkably broad proposal like this: “If you don’t want to provide it, you don’t have to provide it.”

That hardly sounds like a good way to approach a fundamental and critical health care need for half of the country’s population.

Telling companies that they can decide whether or not the women who work there can access birth control is not only patently absurd, it is a grave threat to women’s health and lives – especially women who are already struggling to make ends meet.

Both common sense and a significant body of research show that being able to control whether, or when, to have children has huge implications for other aspects of women’s lives, from access to education to workforce opportunities to mental health. This is especially the case for young women. The vast majority of teen pregnancies are unintended, and fewer than four in ten girls who have a child before they turn 18 receive a high school diploma.

Access to affordable contraceptive services – which most young women get from private health care providers (such as through their parents’ plans) and about a third from publicly-funded clinics – lowers the number of unintended pregnancies, and in doing so opens up a world of possibilities in women’s lives. Birth control has been credited as one of the most significant factors for women’s economic wellbeing in the last half century.

As others have pointed out, it is hard to believe that we are still debating contraception in the year 2017. But since we are, it’s important that we call it like it is. Trump and his team insist that their attacks on birth control are about protecting religious freedom, but they are really about one thing: controlling women’s bodies and women’s futures.

Birth control has helped generations of women to be in the driver’s seat of our own lives – and the relentless Republican attempts to undermine access to it show just how powerful, and how necessary, it remains.

Kathleen Turner is an advocate and Academy Award-nominated actress, and serves on the board of People For the American Way’s affiliate, PFAW Foundation.