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Will Republicans Restrict Birth Control in 2025?
Trump says: ‘We’re looking at that.’ Maybe he isn’t, but others are.
Yesterday, a reporter for KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh asked Donald Trump: “Do you support any restrictions on a person’s right to contraception?”
He responded: “We’re looking at that and I’m going to have a policy on that very shortly.” Prompted to say more, he added that “some states are going to have different policy than others” and yet his federal policy would be “very comprehensive.”
Later, he posted to Truth Social: He “has never and will never” attempt to restrict birth control.
Funny, that, because Project 2025 has some ideas about what health insurance plans should be required to cover. Of course, that in itself doesn’t mean that birth control would be illegal; it only means that some people would have to pay for it out-of-pocket. But it does give a sense of the Republicans’ interest in limiting access to birth control — all the more important after the fall of Roe v. Wade has made abortion inaccessible to some people.
If You Want to Analyze Trump’s Possible Meaning
It is a sad ritual in U.S. journalism to give Trump as much benefit of the doubt as possible: to take him literally when it makes him look good, and not when it doesn’t.
If you want to analyze what Trump possibly could have meant, keep reading this section. If you don’t care about him and you just want to know what Republicans are planning to do if they take power in the upcoming election, skip to the “Project 2025” section below.
He knows what birth control is
One could say, attempting to be charitable to Trump, that perhaps the poor man just doesn’t know what “contraception” means. After all, it’s a four-syllable word that comes from Latin.
But I’ll argue that a man who’ll turn 78 in a few weeks, who has five children from three wives, who has been accused of sexual assault by two dozen women, who was found by a jury to have raped one, who owned the Miss Universe beauty pageant, who has a bachelor’s degree in economics, who was a party to a few thousand lawsuits before spending four…