The war on birth control
“No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body.”
It’s hard to not feel overwhelmed right now with the state of the nation—masked agents are running rampant, groceries cost a bajillion dollars, surveillance tech is everywhere, et cetera—but let me implore you to pay attention to reproductive rights for one minute.
There is currently a war on birth control—and contraception in general—in the U.S. Anyone who was paying attention during the fall of Roe could’ve told you this was coming years ago, but alas. I bring this up now because I just interviewed Alexandria Masse, a Canadian textile artist, who is crocheting together a tapestry chronicling her birth control information sheet at a time when birth control access and rights are being unraveled.
Alexandria Masse: It’s very sad and frustrating to turn on my phone every day and see so many agendas being pushed online that are against reproductive healthcare. I get a lot of people who are just like, “Well, birth control is poison, and if you are a real feminist, you wouldn’t want to be on birth control.”
It’s like, no, women fought and died a hundred years ago to make sure they could have access to birth control. Women were having so many kids, and they were performing abortions on each other at home. They created and fought for medical birth control so women could have autonomy over their own bodies. Watching that be misconstrued and twisted online to fit a specific right-wing agenda is very frustrating, and it’s very disrespectful, I think, to the woman who fought so hard for this medication to be available for us.
In light of my conversation with Masse, I wanted to write up an explainer of what exactly is going on, because with today’s headlines being what they are, stories of reproductive rights are not making front page news despite the severity of the situation.
Access to contraception in the U.S. is not as guaranteed as one may think. American women who were married were not legally allowed to use contraception until a 1965 ruling. The protections that have since been put in place can easily be rolled back, just like the right to have an abortion has been.
Currently, 13 states across the country have a total ban on abortion and only nine states and D.C. have no gestational ban, meaning that for most Americans, there is a limit on abortion access.
Yet, despite most Americans opposing the criminalization of abortion, it’s already happening, partially thanks to the Trump-backed Project 2025. Ms. Magazine laid out a few ways this is creeping into legislation:
In Texas, Senate Bill 8 allows private citizens to sue anyone who helps someone obtain an abortion.
In Oklahoma, providers face felony charges, which are punishable by fines and imprisonment.
In Arkansas and South Carolina, lawmakers have previously proposed classifying abortion as homicide—making both providers and people seeking abortion eligible for the death penalty—though the bills did not pass.
Despite the Right’s attempts to criminalize abortion—which are becoming more common—it is important to reiterate that one in four women U.S. women are expected to have an abortion in their lifetime. “This statistic confirms what we already know: Abortion is a normal part of the reproductive lives of people with the capacity to become pregnant,” said Rachel Jones, a principal research scientist at the Guttmacher Institute.
In September 2025, representatives from the Guttmacher Institute wrote an op-ed on how the Right is waging a war on contraception, noting “conservative lawmakers in some states are quietly working to further restrict access to contraception — for example, by reclassifying as abortion widely used methods of birth control such as emergency contraception. This allows anti-abortion legislators to claim they are not banning birth control — even as they lay the groundwork to do exactly that.”
So, the fight continues. I’ll leave you with a quote from Margaret Sanger, the late birth control activist: “No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body.”