I Heard You Like Magic

I Have a Wand and a Rabbit (Just Not in Texas)

My favorite bumper sticker about reproductive rights has always been, “If you don’t like abortion, don’t have one.” In eight words it lets you know that this is a personal decision, something that I should be allowed to do and would never make you do. It really could be as simple as that on an individual level. And if we’re going for simple on the societal level, the bumper sticker could read, “If you don’t like abortion, give everyone birth control.” Not as pithy, but so logical it used to have bipartisan support.

In 1970, Republicans and Democrats in Congress came together to create the Title X program which provides contraceptive access to low-income women—including teenagers—to help them prevent unintended pregnancy. The program was the co-sponsored by then-Representative George H. W. Bush and signed into law by President Richard Nixon.

It has widely been seen as a success. One research study estimated that in the 20 years between 1981 and 2001, Title X prevented 20 million pregnancies about 9 million of which would have ended in abortion. Access to contraception through the program was seen as one of the reasons for the decreasing teen pregnancy rate in this country. An anti-abortion movement with pure motives of preventing abortion would love this program.

So would hardline fiscal conservatives. Remember, Title X services are for low-income women. If those women become pregnant, the birth of their child will likely be covered by Medicaid, as will the child’s health care going forward. An analysis found that for every dollar invested in family planning, taxpayers save $7.09. (The analysis is over 10 years old so the exact dollar amount has likely changed but you get the idea.) Plus, that doesn’t count the rest of the screening and preventative care done by these clinics that could save Medicaid from paying for breast cancer or cervical cancer treatments down the line.

But we don’t have an anti-abortion movement with pure motives. We have Project 2025 which wants women to know their trad wife place and understands that access to birth control gives them opportunities to be something better than Harrison Butker’s wife. And we don’t have fiscally conservative Republicans anymore. We have Trump Republicans who want to cut taxes on the rich and will fall in line with whatever vindictive plans their leader has cooked up.

This week’s spiteful scheme was to announce he was withholding $35 million in Title X funding for clinics in eight states the night before the clinics were set to get that money. Thus far the withholding includes all of the money earmarked for California, Hawaii, Maine, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Tennessee, and Utah. Clinics in other states are being targeted as well. Some are Planned Parenthood affiliates which Trump and friends have wanted to get rid of for years. Some are not.

Which clinics got told they’re broke as of April 1^st and which got to keep their money for now looked random, but like everything else Trump it seems to be grounded in retribution. Jessica Valenti of Abortion, Every Day (which everyone should be reading) broke this story on Monday night. She pointed to a clinic in Mississippi that was told its funding was being withheld while it is being investigated for possible civil rights violations. The letter informing the clinic of this pointed to a 2020 statement it posted after the murder of George Floyd. The clinic was told it might get its funding but first it needed to provide the feds with a bunch of information, including a list of patients’ names and races. (Pretty chilling, no?) Valenti also notes that one of the other grantees that saw its funding pulled happened to have sued Trump 1.0 over Title X funding restrictions. Coincidence?

Like all the other asinine things that have been done in the last 73 days, this is going to have real impact on real people. Four in ten women who visit a publicly funded clinic say it’s their only source of health care. These women will be less healthy and less able to prevent unintended pregnancy.

Do we think this is what Trump meant when he called himself the “fertilization” president at a Women’s History Month event last week. (It’s not. He was talking about his non-order executive order on IVF, but it’s a cringey thing to say either way.)

Ladies Grab Your Q-Tips

The FDA just approved a new, fully at-home test for chlamydia, gonorrhea, and trichomoniasis. The test, which is only for women, will be available without a prescription and will let you know if you need an antibiotic in less than 30 minutes.

We all got used to swabbing our noses during Covid and waiting for that dreaded double pink line. This comfort with being our own lab technicians led to increasing interest in at-home testing for other potential issues from colon cancer (a huge advance in screening) to food allergies (a highly dubious concept). Testing at home removes a lot of barriers to health care. You don’t have to locate a clinic or provider who will see you, schedule an appointment that doesn’t interfere with work or childcare needs, or find a way to get there.

Testing at home for STIs has become particularly popular because it also avoids the embarrassment some people feel talking about sex with a provider. (I would argue this embarrassment is unwarranted, but since so many of us have been taught shame around sex, I get it.)

Until recently, most of the kits on the market—whether you bought them from CVS or one of the many online testing companies—let users collect their own sample but don’t give results right away. Instead, users mail the tests to a lab and get the results in a few days.

The new Visby Medical Women’s Sexual Health Test is different. It can be done entirely at home. It comes with a collection kit that allows users to swab their vagina and a powered testing device that processes the sample and sends the results to an app. Users get their results on the app.

Anyone who tests positive needs to see a health care provider either in person or via telemedicine so they can get right medication. (It’s not clear whether the test will come with access to virtual health care providers, but many of the currently available tests make that connection for anyone who gets a positive result.) Anyone who tests negative but has symptoms should also see health care provider.

This test can be used by people with or without symptoms. Clinical trials found that Visby Medical Women’s Sexual Health Test was accurate. It correctly identified:

• 98.8% of negative and 97.2% of positive chlamydia samples,

• 99.1% of negative and 100% of positive gonorrhea samples, and

• 98.5% of negative and 97.8% of positive trichomoniasis samples.

There were more than 2.2 million cases of chlamydia and gonorrhea reported in the U.S. in 2023. In addition, there were an estimated 2.6 million cases of trichomoniasis (often called trich). If diagnosed early, these infections can be cured with antibiotics. When left untreated, however, they can cause serious health issues including infertility. These infections are often asymptomatic, which is why it’s important that people who are sexually active get tested even if they don’t have symptoms.

Making STI testing as widely available as possible is one of the keys to bringing overall rates down. Testing is actually a prevention method because when people test and treat, they stop spreading the infection. At-home testing is a great option and may be even more important now as Trump closes family planning clinics that offered this testing and RFK Jr. systematically guts our public infrastructure. (We’re five years out from a world-changing pandemic, in the middle of a measles outbreak with bird flu nipping at its heels, and RFK Jr. just closed HHS’s infectious disease department. I’m not scared, you’re scared.)

Ken Paxton’s Wife is Coming After Your Sex Toys

Texas doesn’t want you to have sex toys. This isn’t new. The Lone Star State has been anti-dildo since the 1970s when you had to get up the nerve to go to an adult boutique or brave the back room of Spencer’s while sipping your Orange Julius. Now, two laws designed to make it harder to buy anything that buzzes are working their way through the legislature.

Is anyone surprised that one of them is sponsored by the wife of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton? He’s very busy arresting midwives, interrogating school employees about trans kids in sports, and spying on journalists and lawmakers in his state. It’s really nice of the Mrs. to take this one on.

Angela Paxton’s law is designed to protect youth from wands and rabbits outside of magic shows (thanks, Chappell). It requires anyone selling or promoting “obscene devices” online to use an age verification process to prove all consumers are 18 or older. Sellers could collect government issued photo IDs or use a third-party verification system that relies on public records. The law also suggests vendors rely on payment methods that can only be used by people 18 or older but says this method needs to be supplemented with one of the others. (Why include it at all if that’s case?)

If you try to verify ages but are bamboozled by a 16-year-old in a fake mustache and top hat, you can be excused. But if you knowingly sell to a teen or don’t seem to care, it’s considered a Class A misdemeanor and is punishable by a $5,000 fine.

Age verification has been a winning strategy for lawmakers across the country—including in Texas—who want to ban porn. Pornhub, one of the largest adult entertainment platforms, has decided that trying to verify the ages of users is just not worth the trouble. It was much easier for the XXX giant to just turn off access to all users from most of the prudish states that passed these laws. (Access remained in states that had an existing identity verification systems that Pornhub could tap into.) Lawmakers in 17 states (exactly the ones you’d expect) must feel proud that their webtrolling constituents can no longer get hot MILF action in one easy step.

Of course, we all know this isn’t stopping porn viewership south of Mason-Dixon line. It just means that a hell of a lot of Kentuckians, North Carolinians, and Oklahomans have become experts in setting up VPNs that make them look like they’re, well, any place else in the world. While the age laws were theoretically put into place to protect teenagers, I have a hard time believing that John Smith III (age 16) isn’t better at setting up a VPN that John Jr. (45) or John the First (72). Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if III set up Grandpa’s VPN for him.

I can understand some of the pearl clutching around kids and porn. There is a lot of stuff out there that I wouldn’t want my kids to see (mostly because it’s too violent), and the idea that porn serves as anyone’s sex educator is disturbing to this sex educator. I can’t, however, figure out the moral panic around vibrators. They’re harmless and often used alone. If we want to prevent teen pregnancy and STIs in teens, shouldn’t we be promoting masturbation?

But it’s not really about teens, and that’s evident when we look at the other law Texas is considering. This one would ban retailers that are not “sexually orientated businesses” from selling sex toys. That means that Walmarts, Targets, and CVSes across the state would have to strip their shelves of rings and bullets. (Not real bullets, of course, you can sell those in Texas no problem.) Sex toy sales could still continue in adult bookstores, adult video stores, and sex shops at least until the Paxtons decide to ban those too. (My office in Times Square used to be above an adult video store, but I haven’t seen one in years. I wonder if they’re going to make a comeback in the South given the porn-site blocks.)

As I said earlier, this isn’t a new thing in Texas. The state tried to ban all sales and promotions of obscene devices in 1973. That law was struck down as unconstitutional (a concept we still had in the seventies), but they passed another law in 2003 that seems to still be in effect. Apparently, it is a felony to have “six or more obscene devices or identical or similar obscene articles.” Why six? (Six? Six? Six is good.) Yet another reason I’m not moving to Texas anytime soon.

In all seriousness, though, why on earth do Texas lawmakers give a s**t about how may vibrators I own? I’m a grown adult who is in the one kind of relationship they approve of (a monogamous, heterosexual, married one). I have never used a vibrator or a clit sucker to hurt anyone, and if I did, that would be my fault, and not the fault of the vibrator (isn’t that what they say about guns?). Why do they care if I have 8, 10, or 472 vibrators hidden under my bed. Wouldn’t they rather have the sales tax on all 472 of those vibrators than arrest me for owning them? (By the way, Texas has no specific restrictions on how may guns a person can own.)

You know what else I don’t understand? Why are the people of Texas not pissed that Mr. and Mrs. Paxton are policing their sex lives? Can we all go spy on the Paxton’s marital bed to see if they’re doing anything we disapprove of? I’ll make the popcorn.