Hint: it’s not just abortion. The same people who are trying, with considerable success, to make abortion unavailable also want to limit women’s ability to avoid pregnancy in the first place. They also pay only lip service, if that, to ameliorating the struggles of low-income mothers and children, even as they claim poverty drives women to have abortions they don’t want.

Birth Control and Sex Education

According to the Guttmacher Institute, in 2010 publicly funded family planning services prevented 2.2 million unintended pregnancies, which would have otherwise led to 760,000 abortions. (That’s added on to the countless pregnancies prevented by birth control the woman pays for privately or through insurance.) Increased use of better contraception, not restrictions on abortion access, led to a 13 percent drop in abortions between 2008 and 2011.

Modern contraception works pretty well: the two-thirds of women who use it consistently account for only 5 percent of abortions. And yet, not one major anti-abortion organization supports making birth control more available, much less educating young people in its use: not Feminists for Life, National Right to Life, or the Susan B. Anthony List; not American Life League, Americans for Life, or Pro-Life Action League, to say nothing of the US Council of Catholic Bishops, Priests for Life, and Sisters for Life.

Anti-abortion organizations either openly oppose contraception, or are silent about it. Even Democrats for Life of America avoids the subject.

It is hard to find a public-health expert who will deny that the most effective way to prevent abortion is reliable contraception, but anti-abortion hardliners find ways to dispute this no-brainer. They argue that the Pill and emergency contraception are “abortifacients,” “baby pesticide,” and “killer pills” which prevent the implantation of fertilized eggs, no matter how many studies show that these drugs do not work this way. (By their math, the actual number of abortions is practically infinite — the millions of women on the Pill could be having “abortions” every month.)

They argue that birth control is ineffective (so it doesn’t kill babies after all?), but they also argue that the root problem is “the contraceptive mentality,” the contemporary norm of sex for pleasure and intimacy without fear of pregnancy.

When anti-abortion Republicans do come out for contraception, their proposals are unrealistic, if not disingenuous. “We pro-life advocates need to lead the Title X charge,” urged Republican lobbyist Juleanna Glover in a rather desperate-sounding 2012 New York Times op-ed. Her suggestion — beef up Title X, but bar funds from “any group that performs abortions” (that is, Planned Parenthood) — may sound like a reasonable compromise, but it’s a fantasy.

In the first place, there is no organized politically powerful anti-abortion force that is keen on birth control. The GOP of contraception enthusiasts like Nelson Rockefeller, Bob Packwood, the Richard Nixon who signed Title X, and the George H. W. Bush who was so keen on birth control as a congressman that he was nicknamed “Rubbers”? That party is gone, supplanted by one in thrall to the religious right and other ideological extremists, who consolidated their power in Tea Party election victories beginning in 2010.

In the second place, there is no alternate network of actually existing clinics to replace those of Planned Parenthood. When Texas cut roughly forty Planned Parenthood clinics from its new Texas Woman’s Health Program in 2011, reimbursement claims for birth control dropped by 38 percent for low-income women, while claims for wellness exams dropped by 23 percent.

By 2013, the Austin Chronicle reported, Republican lawmakers had cut two-thirds of the state’s family-planning budget, and seventy-six family planning clinics (including non-Planned Parenthood ones) had closed. The number of women served was 77 percent fewer than in 2011. It’s hard to believe that conservatives proffering an olive branch to pro-choicers over contraception are making a genuine attempt at compromise rather than a cynical rhetorical gesture.

The same pattern holds for sex education. Abortion opponents promote abstinence-only education despite strong evidence that it has no long-term positive effects. It may delay sex for younger teens, but not by much, and when those kids do have sex they are less likely to use condoms or contraception. Texas has the nation’s third highest rate of teen pregnancy, but in 2011 anti-abortion stalwart Governor Rick Perry prevented the health department from applying for millions of dollars in federal funds aimed at preventing teen pregnancy through birth control alongside abstinence education.

In 2013, however, Texas spent $1.2 million of federal money on a website to promote abstinence before marriage. (Yes, the federal government is still funding abstinence-only education, despite President Obama’s stated opposition to sex education that doesn’t include information about contraception.)

For the organized anti-choice movement, contraception and realistic sex education are not solutions to the problem of abortion. All three are aspects of the same moral and social disaster. As Susan B. Anthony List leader Marjorie Dannenfelser put it, “The bottom line is that to lose the connection between sex and having children leads to problems.”

And the biggest of these problems? Women having lots and lots of sex. In 2011, Planned Parenthood had to stop providing birth control to low-income New Hampshire women when the state’s all-male executive council rejected around $1.8 million in state and federal funds. “I am opposed to abortion,” said council member Raymond Wieczorek. “I am opposed to providing condoms to someone. If you want to have a party, have a party but don’t ask me to pay for it.”

The benefits of birth control to women’s health, the economic costs of unwanted pregnancies, childbirth, and children, even the suffering of women who need the Pill to control disease — these sensible policy concerns were nothing compared to the chance to give the finger to women: have sex on your own dime, tramps.