The New Argument Against Birth Control That Could Appeal Directly to RFK Jr.

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For decades, abortion opponents swore that they had created a single-issue movement and had no interest in changing access to birth control. It was never that simple, and the past few weeks have only made that clearer. Conservative opposition to contraception is a staple of right-wing social media , from anti-abortion groups to MAHA influencers. And in the second Trump administration, the arguments against birth control are changing: Regulators are being asked to revisit birth control at least partly (and explicitly) to benefit men .

That's the new argument promoted by the Heritage Foundation , the group that led Project 2025 . Heritage has been in the news lately for a second reason: a civil war within the powerful think tank after its president defended former Fox News host Tucker Carlson for hosting the white nationalist Nick Fuentes on his popular online show. But what Heritage has to say on sex and reproduction matters. The group has influenced everything from key appointments in the Trump administration to policy initiatives that track Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership .

Before, anti-contraception claims often borrowed from an anti-abortion strategy first forged in the 1990s. At the time, massive blockades of abortion clinics made headlines . So did a string of murders and other violent crimes directed at those who worked in them . The result was a perception among Americans that the anti-abortion movement was anti-woman. Major movement organizations responded with “ right to know ” that did double duty laws: discouraging abortion by painting it as dangerous—and rehabilitating the image of the anti-abortion movement by arguing that its leaders wanted to protect women.

Anti-contraception activists learned from this strategy and started pushing their own arguments about birth control and women's safety. They argued that the pill and IUDs increased the risk of glaucoma and stroke. They claimed that the pill had cancer risks on par with cigarette smoking . Some focused on limiting contraceptive access for minors, arguing that parents should have the right to consent before their children can use birth control .

Heritage has repurposed another anti-abortion strategy: one focused on the groundwater. When California contemplated making abortion pills available on the state's public university campuses in 2018, Students for Life argued that the move would pollute the groundwater with “gallons of chemically tainted blood and placenta tissue, along with human remains .”

The movement invested more in this idea during the Biden years, and especially after the Supreme Court overturned Roe . Anti-abortion policies were deeply unpopular, and most abortions in the country relied on pills. The hope was that appealing to concern about the environment to restrict or ban those pills might reach new audiences.

And that plan might be working. Recently, senior officials at the Trump Environmental Protection Agency directed scientists to determine whether tools could be developed to detect abortion pills in wastewater . In the name of protecting drinking water, abortion opponents have already proposed bills requiring anyone prescribed abortion pills to bag and return fetal remains to their physician .

In reinventing the groundwater argument for the birth control pill, Heritage does highlight risks to women, including lowered libido, mood swings, infertility, heart attack, and stroke . But Heritage seems to have bigger concerns. First up is the femininization of American men. Heritage invokes the specter of “male fish growing female genitals” when exposed to all the estrogen in the groundwater from the pill. Who knows how much the “ sexual development of young males ” has already been damaged, the group asks, given the hundreds of millions of people who have used the pill since the 1960s?

And then there is the issue of how men feel about women. Heritage stresses that women on the pill have experienced the equivalent of “medical menopause”—and that “women who no longer menstruate are not as attractive to men .” The pill, the argument suggests, may be behind what Heritage sees as a disastrous decline in marriage and childbearing .

It isn't clear whether Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will do anything to study the pill or introduce the kind of informed consent that Heritage is asking for. After all, despite fierce lobbying from the GOP, the administration hasn't yet introduced new restrictions on mifepristone, the pill used in more than half of all the nation's abortions .

But it's amazing how much the Overton window is shifting on questions like these. Not only is Heritage taking a swing at birth control, the group is asking RFK Jr. to focus on the interests of men .

Heritage equates the pill with feminism and the sexual revolution. The real history tells a more complicated story. It was feminist women's health activists who were the first to protest at Food and Drug Administration headquarters, protesting the dangers of early formulations of birth control and insisting that the “pill kills .” In the decades since, lower-dose contraceptives and improved IUDs have significantly reduced the risks feminists highlighted in the decade after Roe . The women's movement has long overlapped with demands for consumer protection, and it was no different with the pill.

As for Heritage's other arguments, marriage has declined partly because women have the means to support themselves or even parents without a partner . Some have seen marriage as wrong for them; others have refused to settle for partners who do not meet their expectations. As important, research shows that a decline in marriage has more to do with economic struggles than with male fish with female genitalia: Among women with a college degree, rates of marriage don't look that different than they did decades ago, while those without a bachelor's degree are less likely to find a partner they consider marriage material . Affordability, a lack of opportunity, and income inequality may be fueling the decline of marriage more than anything else.

But the accuracy of these arguments is almost beside the point. It's the fact that they are front and center in the first place. The pill isn't right for everyone, and its risks and benefits, like those of any medication, are something everyone should consider for themselves. But the renewed campaign against birth control seems to have much less to do with those risks than it does with making America manly again.