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She had barely opened her city corridor to questions when Consultant Mariannette Miller-Meeks, a Republican from a aggressive district in Iowa, was pressed to defend her opposition to abortion rights.
“One of many predominant features of the federal authorities is to guard life,” Ms. Miller-Meeks, who gained election in 2020 by simply six votes, advised a sparse crowd this month in Iowa Metropolis, a youthful, extra progressive a part of her district the place she hardly ever campaigns.
Ms. Miller-Meeks then rapidly pivoted to politically safer terrain, telling her constituents about how she had additionally sponsored laws geared toward increasing entry to contraception.
“One of the best ways to forestall abortion is to forestall being pregnant,” she mentioned.
It’s an more and more frequent technique amongst weak Home Republicans — particularly these in politically aggressive districts — who’re attempting to reconcile their social gathering’s hard-line anti-abortion insurance policies with the views of voters of their districts, significantly independents and girls.
Whereas many of those G.O.P. lawmakers have forged votes within the Home this yr to restrict abortion entry — sustaining a stance that some Republicans concede harm their social gathering in final yr’s midterm elections — Ms. Miller-Meeks and others spent a part of the summer season congressional recess speaking up their help for contraception entry, which is broadly well-liked throughout the nation and throughout social gathering traces.
Showing to embrace entry to contraception has turn into an crucial for Republican candidates in any respect ranges who’re involved that their social gathering’s opposition to abortion rights has alienated girls, significantly after the Supreme Courtroom’s choice final yr to overturn Roe v. Wade and the intense abortion bans in G.O.P.-led states which have adopted.
“Can’t all of us agree contraception needs to be obtainable,” Nikki Haley, the one Republican lady within the presidential main, mentioned final week on the first main debate, looking for to blunt assaults from Democrats on the problem of reproductive well being care.
In states the place abortion is now prohibited, 43 % of voters say abortion entry needs to be simpler, up from 31 % in 2019, in response to a latest Pew Analysis survey.
Championing entry to contraception in these states is “good politics and good coverage,” mentioned Nicole McCleskey, a Republican pollster. “Republicans have lengthy mentioned we have to discover alternate options to abortion. That is one. There are plenty of Republicans who’ve longstanding data of selling contraception. It’s a significant effort to interact girls voters.”
Simply forward of lawmakers’ lengthy summer season break, Ms. Miller-Meeks was a part of a bunch of Home Republican girls who launched the Orally Taken Contraception Act of 2023, a invoice that they pitched as a technique to develop entry to contraception and that she known as “a big step ahead for well being care.”
Abortion rights advocates argue that the laws is actually meaningless and merely an effort by Republican lawmakers to mislead voters about their positions on girls’s well being. However for the G.O.P. girls who’re backing it, the invoice gives a chic technique to shift the dialog away from the divisive situation of abortion.
Becoming a member of Ms. Miller-Meeks on the laws was Consultant Jen Kiggans, Republican of Virginia, a prime goal of Democrats in subsequent yr’s elections. Ms. Kiggans, a nurse practitioner, voted along with her social gathering in July to connect language to the annual protection coverage invoice that will reverse a Pentagon coverage geared toward preserving entry to abortion providers for navy personnel no matter the place they’re stationed, and has spent the weeks since emphasizing her advocacy for increasing entry to contraception.
Along with co-sponsoring the contraception entry invoice, Ms. Kiggans supported an modification to the protection measure by Consultant Veronica Escobar, Democrat of Texas, to remove co-pays for contraception for navy members and their households.
The contraception invoice launched in July, co-sponsored by a minimum of eight Republican girls and endorsed by the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Professional-Life America, would direct the Meals and Drug Administration to situation steering for corporations that wish to make oral contraception obtainable with out prescriptions. However it isn’t clear what sensible impact it might have.
Solely two drug corporations are actively working to supply contraception over-the-counter. Considered one of them, Opill, was already accredited on the market with out a prescription earlier than the laws was launched. The opposite, Cadence Well being, is years into the appliance course of with the F.D.A. and doesn’t want the steering that the invoice directs the company to situation.
Abortion rights teams have dismissed the invoice as a stunt geared toward masking Republicans’ drive to crack down on each abortion and contraceptive entry.
“The laws is just not a real try to develop contraception,” mentioned Karen Stone, the vice chairman of public coverage on the Deliberate Parenthood Motion Fund. “They’re posturing to save lots of face with voters, all whereas failing to help present laws that will really assist folks entry over-the-counter contraception.”
The laws adopts the language of abortion opponents, suggesting that being pregnant begins on the level of fertilization moderately than when a fertilized egg is implanted within the uterus. Oral contraception is outlined within the invoice as a drug that “is used to forestall fertilization.”
“The language is kowtowing to the anti-abortion foyer and a part of an orchestrated effort to redefine being pregnant primarily based on spiritual ideology,” mentioned Dana Singiser, the co-founder of the nonprofit Contraception Entry Initiative. “That is the most recent in an extended line of payments that Republicans throw on the market that purport to be pro-contraception payments. While you peel again the layers of the onion, there’s at all times a catch.”
Ms Miller-Meeks, a doctor, defended the laws, a model of which she has been championing since her days within the Iowa Senate.
“Taking a market-based strategy will encourage funding within the over-the-counter contraception area with out value controls or mandates, resulting in elevated entry to those merchandise with out authorities overreach,” she mentioned. “As a pro-life congresswoman, I consider stopping undesirable pregnancies is paramount to defending the sanctity of life.”
Ms. Miller-Meeks, together with different co-sponsors together with Consultant Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma, have opposed Democratic-led efforts to safeguard entry to contraception. They voted final yr with the overwhelming majority of Home Republicans to oppose laws to make sure entry to contraception nationwide, a proper that was considered newly below risk after the Supreme Courtroom’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. Anti-abortion teams inspired lawmakers to oppose the measure, claiming that its definition of contraceptives could possibly be interpreted to incorporate capsules that induce abortions. Solely eight Republicans voted with Democrats to help the invoice, and most of them are now not in Congress.
The Republican playbook on contraception that Ms. Miller-Meeks and others are using isn’t new. In 2015, former Senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, toiling to attraction to average girls voters, launched an analogous invoice that purported to permit girls better entry to contraception by encouraging drugmakers and the F.D.A. to make it simpler to promote contraceptive capsules over-the-counter.
Democrats on the time dismissed the invoice as a political ploy, saying it might end in much less entry to contraception as a result of it might enable insurers to cease overlaying some varieties of contraception.
Since then, Republicans’ considerations about interesting to girls voters and independents have solely grown, particularly after final yr’s Supreme Courtroom ruling. In Iowa, the state with the fewest obstetrician gynecologist specialists per capita within the nation, Gov. Kim Reynolds final month signed into regulation a brand new ban on abortions after roughly six weeks of being pregnant, when many ladies have no idea they’re pregnant.
The state of affairs has left Ms. Miller-Meeks in a precarious place. Democrats hope that flipping her seat shall be a part of their path to successful again the Home majority in 2024. Earlier this month, Christina Bohannan, a former state lawmaker who misplaced to Ms. Miller-Meeks in 2022, introduced she would run for the seat once more. She instantly raised $276,000, greater than another congressional candidate in Iowa had raised of their first 24 hours.
Ms. Bohannan plans to make abortion rights central to her marketing campaign to unseat Ms. Miller-Meeks.
“About 61 % of Iowans help the precise to abortion in all or most circumstances,” she mentioned in an interview. “Consultant Miller-Meeks has aligned herself with probably the most excessive members of her social gathering as a substitute of the folks of Iowa on this situation, proposing one abortion ban over one other.”
Ms. Bohannan dismissed the contraception invoice as a “purely political” textual content that was drafted “to supply political cowl for her personal report.”
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