Hey, Ted Cruz, That’s Not How It F**king Works

There have been many WTF moments during the Judiciary Committee hearings this week—like Amy Coney Barrett’s insistence on using the outdated and biased phrase “sexual preference”—but it does not surprise me that our first “That’s Not How It F**king Works” moment is brought to us by Ted Cruz. I’m pretty sure the expression became my catchphrase right around the time Todd Akin told us that a woman can’t get pregnant from “legitimate” rape. Or maybe it was when Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a slut because she took her birth control pill every day. Or when an Idaho State Representative asked a doctor if women could just swallow a camera to check on their pregnancies. I’ve said it so many times in the last few years, my family got me a tee-shirt. And, now, thanks to yet another Republican man who wants to control women’s bodies despite lacking a basic understanding of how they work, we can all say it together. 

Hey, Ted Cruz, That’s Not How It F**king Works

During the hearing, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) brought up the noble nuns who went to the Supreme Court to argue against the Affordable Care Act’s birth control mandate. He said: “The Little Sisters of the Poor, our Catholic convent of nuns, who take oaths of poverty, who devote their lives to caring for the sick, caring for the needy, caring for the elderly, and the Obama administration litigated against the Little Sisters of the Poor, seeking to fine them in order to force them to pay for abortion-inducing drugs, among others.”

Okay, fine, the nuns are great, and Obama was bad, but can we talk about the phrase “abortion-inducing drugs” for a second, Mr. Cruz? There are abortion-inducing drugs. When used together, mifepristone and misoprostol can safely end a pregnancy. But Cruz wasn’t talking about these drugs, because the ACA mandate and the Little Sisters of the Poor case were not about abortion pills. They were about contraception—the pills, patches, rings, shots, implants, and IUDs that people use so they don’t get pregnant in the first place. 

Ted Cruz didn’t misspeak; he was engaging in a subtle war of semantics common to anti-abortion forces. Brett Kavanaugh said the same thing in his confirmation hearing. Science and medicine agree that pregnancy begins when a fertilized egg implants into the wall of the uterus, but many abortion opponents say life begins at fertilization. They then argue that birth control prevents fertilized eggs from implanting in the uterus and, therefore, contraception is akin to abortion because it ends the pregnancy/life.

This is a false equivalency argument. When pregnancy begins is a scientific fact that can be proven by peeing on a stick. The entirely different issue of when life begins is a matter of opinion best left to theologians and philosophers. (I have always enjoyed the joke that ends with the rabbi saying, “life begins when the kids go to college and the dog dies.”) 

But it’s also just wrong. Even if you accept its flawed premise, the argument that birth control methods interfere with implantation and are, therefore, abortion-inducing drugs fails because that’s not how birth control works. Most modern methods contain some combination of the hormones estrogen and progestin. These hormones—whether they come in the form of a patch or a pill or an implant in the inner arm—prevent ovulation. If there’s no egg, there’s no fertilization. They also thicken cervical mucus which means sperm can’t get into the uterus. If there’s no sperm, there’s no fertilization. Even Emergency Contraception Pills, which are taken after unprotected sex, prevent pregnancy by preventing ovulation. Studies have found no evidence that they work after an egg has been fertilized. 

The misperception that IUDs interfere with implantation has been particularly persistent because they were often described as making the uterus inhospitable. But most of today’s IUDs contain hormones, so they, too, work by preventing ovulation. And, the one IUD that does not have hormones in it—Paragard—contains copper which is toxic to sperm. If they can’t swim, they can’t fertilize. (The only exception to this is when the Paragard IUD is inserted after unprotected sex to act as emergency contraception, but few women are even aware of this option.)

Senator Cruz, Justice Kavanaugh, and others who refer to contraception as abortion-inducing drugs are not just making factual mistakes, they’re setting up an argument in which facts don’t matter. They are deliberately taking birth control out of the realm of science and health care and making it an issue of morality and religion. Then, they can pretend they have a monopoly on morality and fall back on arguments of religious freedom when they try to take away our access to these methods. It’s straight out of the anti-abortion playbook where it has worked so well for them. We can’t let this happen to birth control too.