Officials in the nation’s capital will deploy birth control to try to get the city’s rodent population under control after years of failure.
D.C. Health said on Wednesday they will start placing &#8220;fertility control bait” in targeted neighborhoods as part of a “blitz” targeting the rat population. At the same time, officials pleaded for Washington, D.C., residents to stop throwing food trash on the ground.
“You have said that we need a more effective strategy, and so we have come up with a new strategy,” D.C. Health Director Ayanna Bennett said.
The rat control program is <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2026/04/03/dc-rat-control-birth-control-pilot/">predicted</a> to cost around $130,000 and will focus on the Adams Morgan neighborhood first before expanding to the wider city. That part of town is known for its bars and international restaurants.
&#8220;We’re gonna get the rat population down and then we’re gonna come back in three weeks to see if any of those babies survived and get them, too. But, they cannot stay down if they find anything to eat,” Bennett said. “So that means everybody cannot be throwing food on the ground. The mayor doesn’t like it and it’s helping the rats. We don’t want your trash to be outside of the bin, if at all possible.”
D.C Health <a href="https://dchealth.dc.gov/service/rodent-and-vector-control-division">revealed</a> more about the “targeted rodent control pilot” program, saying that it would improve public health in “areas experiencing high rodent impact.”
The “three-pronged blitz” will include placing rat poison at rat burrows and “non-lethal rodent fertility control bait designed to reduce rodent reproduction over time.”
“The blitz activities will occur in three-week cycles, where a team of inspectors will apply all three control methods and conduct frequent monitoring,” D.C. Health said.
The rat blitz was welcomed by residents, who have long complained about the city’s inability to keep the rat population down.
&#8220;They be in the dumpsters. They be running in groups, like, two, three — a few too many,&#8221; one local man <a href="https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/dc-is-putting-rats-on-birth-control/4085151/">told</a> NBC News4.
&#8220;Anything that they can do to help limit the rats I would probably be in favor of,&#8221; another man said. &#8220;I’ve never heard of it. I trust that the science is real. But if it is, the less rats in D.C. is a good thing.&#8221;
Other cities like New York have tried similar strategies to control the rat population.
&#8220;Two rats in a given year can reproduce 15,000 descendants,&#8221; New York City Councilmember Shaun Abreu <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/rat-birth-control-nyc/">said</a> last year. &#8220;We have to go at the source.&#8221;

Dirty disgusting rats on area that was filled with sewage, smelly, damp, and garbage bags. Referring to the problem of rats in the city, disease outbreaks from animals, filth of city. Selective focus.

The Nation’s Capital Deploys An Unlikely Weapon In Its Failing War On Rats

Animals

Birth Control

General

U.S.

Washington D.C.

The following is an edited transcript excerpt from <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1933-the-new-ayatollah-of-iran-is-gay?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel">The Michael Knowles Show</a>.
* * *
We&#8217;re not supposed to say anything but good about people who&#8217;ve just died. As the saying goes, speak no ill of the dead.
This man, however, left a wake of death, destruction, and catastrophe wherever he went. And most people don&#8217;t even know his name: Paul Ehrlich.
I write about Paul Ehrlich at some length in my book “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Speechless-Controlling-Words-Minds/dp/1684510821/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Y2L5GPaNcg2v5jnT9SD5ksR5a40NcpExppW6aHVVBg2FzlIHja61O5i6m-pH9wpIMWHGSkrLhkrd8rHzMDQN1iA3BuBH-UVJi0EyStx6M6l_7HKhwR0GKrN8w6e8rOUE18q_fPEggyexww619c7-BErp7yFNm38xTMhU_w6ZaMi3k03CxrXWwSCCSRcazdNo3eNXnHdUbDw3bae74VylSnpc0SFRJr6jlNhYAX6vRAs.q0vDzxnV2mm76BoF3WDe4Demnp2J-5X6usahlx1IIbo&amp;qid=1773785807&amp;sr=1-2">Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds</a>.” 
And now, here we have his obituary in <a href="https://x.com/SonnyBunch/status/2033466323842331077">The New York Times</a>:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
“Premature,” lol. The abject refusal to just admit this guy was completely wrong is one of the funnier Boomer-coded traits. <a href="https://t.co/oM5GYgDEtR">pic.twitter.com/oM5GYgDEtR</a>
— Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) <a href="https://twitter.com/SonnyBunch/status/2033466323842331077?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 16, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Source: @SonnyBunch/X.com
The headline and sub-headline reads: 
<blockquote>Paul Ehrlich, who alarmed the world with The Population Bomb, dies at 93. 
His bestselling 1968 book, which forecast global famines, made him a leader of the environmental movement, but he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature.</blockquote>
Here we go. Big lie. 
His predictions “proved premature.” What were his predictions? His prediction was that if the population grew any more, we would have widespread famine, because the Earth could not sustain all those people.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1933-the-new-ayatollah-of-iran-is-gay?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-1054531" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/MK-watch-now-1-1024x171.jpg" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/MK-watch-now-1-1024x171.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/MK-watch-now-1-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/MK-watch-now-1-768x128.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/MK-watch-now-1-1536x256.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/MK-watch-now-1.jpg 1800w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
His prescriptions, therefore, were to stop having kids and sterilize people. We should use the government to reduce the population. These policies of his led to the one-child policy in China and forced sterilizations in India. This guy is — not single-handedly, but pretty close — responsible for the population crisis (or depopulation) that we face today.
And they say his predictions &#8220;proved premature.&#8221; 
Since he made his prediction that we would inevitably face mass starvation because the population was growing too much, since that time, the world population has doubled and global malnutrition has been cut dramatically. Today there are twice as many people as when he made his prediction, and we are more well-fed than ever.
It&#8217;s not that his predictions proved premature. They were completely wrong. Totally wrong. 
The New York Times is covering for Ehrlich in its obituary of him. Ehrlich did more evil than almost anybody in the 20th century. And the consequences of his stupid predictions and prescriptions — because he prescribed policy to governments — were mass evil.
The consequences of his ideas led to mass death, sterilization, the violation of basic rights, and he never let up on it.
Here is Paul Ehrlich, in the 1970s, discussing the problem as he saw it:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
In a 1970 interview, Paul Ehrlich stated: &#8220;The FCC should see to it that large families are always treated in negative light on television.&#8221;
He added that if this approach failed, then the government should &#8220;legislate the size of the family&#8221; and &#8220;throw you in jail if you have… <a href="https://t.co/Ij7C5eso4W">pic.twitter.com/Ij7C5eso4W</a>
— Gentry Gevers (@gentrywgevers) <a href="https://twitter.com/gentrywgevers/status/2033583323864568245?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 16, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Source: @gentrywgevers/X.com
In the interview, Ehrlich says,
<blockquote>The first thing the government should do is try and take the pressure off to reproduce &#8230; Young couples — if they don&#8217;t have children — people say, &#8216;gee, they must be sterile.&#8217; They never say, &#8216;gee, maybe they like good wine and going to the theater and so on, they prefer that to scraping diapers.&#8217; So there&#8217;s pressure to have children. So the first thing that should happen is that the president ought to say, &#8216;From here on out, no intelligent, patriotic American family ought to have more than two children, preferably one, if you&#8217;re starting a family now.&#8217; He ought to make the FCC see to it that large families are always treated in a negative light wherever they appear &#8230;  you can move to giving women bonuses for not having babies, that almost certainly would do the job. 
If that didn&#8217;t have the effect, then you could move to changing the tax structure so that people who had the money and had the children paid more for them — in other words, increase taxes on people with children rather than decrease them, since when they have the children they require more services. 
If that doesn&#8217;t work, then you&#8217;ll have the government legislating the size of the family. And people say, &#8216;Oh that&#8217;s impossible, government can never intrude and tell you how many children to have.&#8217; Well, I got news — you know it intruded a long time ago and told you how many wives you can have and there&#8217;s not the slightest question that if we don&#8217;t get the population under control with voluntary means that in the not-too-distant-future, the government will simply tell you how many children you can have and throw you in jail if you have too many.</blockquote>
So God tells us in the book of Genesis to &#8220;Be fruitful and multiply.&#8221; 
This Antichrist figure comes out in the 1970s and says, &#8220;Do not have children. It&#8217;s unpatriotic to have children.&#8221;
It&#8217;s funny because patriotism comes from the word &#8220;Pater,&#8221; meaning father — it&#8217;s an extension of filial piety, it&#8217;s an extension of the family — and he&#8217;s saying the pro-family thing to do is to destroy your family.
He says, first we&#8217;re going to incentivize people — we&#8217;re going to discourage them culturally. Say having kids is bad, you should just drink good wine instead. 
All these arguments you hear today — Don’t you want to travel? Don’t you want to have experiences? Don’t have kids.
And if that doesn&#8217;t work, we&#8217;re going to pay people not to have kids. Give women bonuses. Subsidize it. Say instead of having kids, go work at the widget factory, do spreadsheets, we’ll give you money.
That doesn&#8217;t work? Okay, now we punish you. Forget the carrot, now it&#8217;s the stick. If you have kids, we&#8217;re going to tax you. We&#8217;re going to make you pay for the privilege.
And if that doesn&#8217;t work, we&#8217;re just going to stop you from having kids.
What does that mean in practice? Because China implemented this. It means forced abortion. The government comes in and kills your child. You want to keep your child? No. Government kills your child.
It leads to policies like in India, where people were told you can only get access to food and resources if you sterilize yourself.
That happened because of this guy. Because of his book. Because of his ideas.
He said in &#8220;The Population Bomb&#8221;: 

<blockquote>The battle to feed all of humanity is over… hundreds of millions of people will starve to death… nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.</blockquote>
Totally wrong. Could not have been more wrong.
He said we must have population control — hopefully through voluntary means, but by compulsion if necessary. That was his thesis.
He described population growth as a &#8220;cancer.&#8221; Population growth just means more people. So if more people are a cancer, then people are the disease.
Human beings are a disease.
The left has held on to that view for a very, very long time. And this is where the truly wicked origins of leftism — which endeavors to invert reality — began, during the French Revolution as an assault on the Church. This is where the real satanic, Luciferian character of liberalism really begins to show itself. One of the fruits of liberalism is the view that human beings are a disease that must be cured, that must be eradicated from the earth. 
And now this guy is eradicated from the earth. And it&#8217;s sad, because every man&#8217;s death diminishes me because I&#8217;m a human. 
As John Donne wrote in his famous poem, &#8220;No Man is an Island&#8221;:
<blockquote>No man is an island entire of itself; every man 
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; 
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe 
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as 
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine 
own were; any man&#8217;s death diminishes me, 
because I am involved in mankind. 
And therefore never send to know for whom 
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.</blockquote>
We should pray for him, because he led a very, very evil life. And in many ways, maybe he didn’t fully understand what he was doing. “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
But we can’t just think about him — we have to think about the institutions.
This guy got everything wrong. Not a little wrong — perfectly wrong. And he never paid a price for it. He kept his positions, his prestige, his influence. His policies were implemented. They led to enormous harm. And the institutions backed him up.
And now one of the chief cultural institutions, The New York Times, is still covering for him — still saying his ideas were just “premature.”
Not premature. Wrong.
And as a final note, that idea — “forgive them, for they know not what they do” — this connects to something else.
The world feels tense right now. The stakes feel higher. There’s conflict in Iran, division at home, a lot of strain in the culture. For Christians, this is Lent. And if you’ve paid attention over the years, this season often feels like that — more tension, more conflict, more difficulty. In the story, this is the period in the desert, the temptation, the struggle.
And then comes Easter.
I’m not saying everything magically gets better overnight. But if you believe in spiritual realities, that there is a meaning to history, a rhythm to the liturgical calendar, then it’s not surprising that things feel strained right now.
Sometimes things look like they’re falling apart — like when Christ was crucified on Calvary — right before they come back together.
That’s the pattern.

Paul Ehrlich at a press conference this afternoon at Macquarie University.Internationally famous biologist, Paul Ehrlich, is visiting Australia and will be taking the position of Visiting Professor in Environmental Studies at Macquarie University.

One Of The Most Evil Men In History Just Died

Abortion

babies

Children

China

Death

Obituaries

Opinion

Population

The New York Times

This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
***
Perhaps the most common feature of the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/14/politics/maha-birth-control-politics-of-the-pill">flurry</a> <a href="https://www.ama-assn.org/public-health/population-health/what-doctors-wish-patients-knew-about-birth-control">of</a> <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/10/27/nx-s1-5535839/population-shift-birth-rate-misinformation">articles</a> <a href="https://www.kff.org/health-information-trust/misleading-narratives-and-social-media-shape-contraception-perceptions/">about</a> <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953623004380">young</a> <a href="https://msmagazine.com/2025/12/17/young-women-teen-girls-gen-z-birth-control-beliefs-democrat-republican-tiktok-misinformation-contraception/">women</a> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/17/birth-control-why-are-influencers-turning-away-from-the-pill-and-towards-natural-contraceptive-methods">rejecting</a> <a href="https://nypost.com/2025/10/09/health/ob-gyn-reveals-troubling-trend-shes-seeing-with-gen-z-women/">hormonal</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/style/birth-control-skepticism-wellness-tiktok.html">birth</a> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/03/21/stopping-birth-control-misinformation/">control</a> is the claim that their concerns are fueled by “misinformation” or based on “unfounded theories.” I’m a younger millennial. I’ve never used hormonal birth control, and I don’t plan to. But what these writers and doctors fail to grasp is how fed up women are of being told their pain is normal and prescribed a pill at 13, only to be told they have “unexplained infertility” and need IVF at 30.
It doesn’t take a medical degree to hypothesize that women’s healthcare has gone terribly wrong. It is almost entirely structured around either suppressing or bypassing the female reproductive system altogether. When journalists and doctors claim women like me are misinformed, they reject an opportunity to help make women healthier. 
For 60 years now, the standard of care for women in the United States has been a protocol that seeks not to understand and work with the female body, but to inhibit and short-circuit it. It’s no surprise that the women who watched their mothers and grandmothers unquestioningly swallow the pill and continue to suffer are now demanding a better way.
The increased rejection of hormonal birth control also comes amid a tectonic shift in medical treatment for minors.  Several major medical associations recently issued <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/pediatricians-group-says-research-doesnt-support-gender-affirming-treatments">statements</a> against pediatric gender transition in the wake of the Fox Varin lawsuit, which held medical providers responsible for performing a double mastectomy on a minor. Sex-rejection treatments and surgeries involve medicating children with puberty blockers and hormone therapies, among other things. And yet many adolescent girls, some as young as 11, are prescribed hormone therapy in the form of the hormonal birth control pill or an IUD, despite their long-term effects being largely unknown.
Of sexually active 15 to 19-year-olds, almost half are prescribed some form of hormonal birth control. This, despite the fact that there are no large randomized controlled trials on the effects of synthetic hormones during girls’ pubescent years. Some research on this cohort has shown <a href="https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/120/5/1135/71113/Contraception-and-Adolescents?utm">reductions</a> in <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010782408002801?utm_source">bone mass</a> and <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40097087/">density</a>, which is itself concerning. But little exists on long-term effects to adolescent brain or cardiovascular health, both of which actively require sex hormones for development. Animal studies <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40188588/">show</a> that exposure to hormonal contraceptives during adolescence has persistent effects on the female brain and behavior, though it’s unclear how this translates to humans.
Your response to women rejecting hormonal birth control will almost certainly depend upon your answer to one question: What is medicine? The same ideology that undergirds the transgender movement forms the foundation of women’s health, too: “My body, my choice.” But making your body in your own self-image is not medicine. It’s choice theory applied to the human body. And the philosophy of choice will always be insufficient because it inherently rejects the bounds of reality.
What if women’s health was actually about making women healthy instead of maximizing choice? The solution to America’s health problem is the same as the solution to transgender ideology: Respect reality, recognize that our bodies bound us and we can’t make ourselves into whatever we choose to be, and accept that women’s bodies are different from men’s. That’s not only okay but also good. Women’s bodies were made to bear children; blaming the patriarchy or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-pursuit-of-equality-is-ruining-your-marriage">raging about the system</a> will not change that fact. Let medicine be about restoring the body’s natural function, not trying to change it. When we become unfocused on what the practice of medicine is in principle, people get hurt, even when medical professionals have the best intentions.
As a woman who has been on the receiving end of so-called “women’s healthcare,” it seems as though there is little will to understand the potentially negative effects of hormonal birth control, or the positive effects of working with rather than against the female body’s natural function. After all, birth control is convenient and perhaps even something of a sacrament to the feminized, sexually evolved West.
“Women have been taking the pill for decades,” I was told by a pushy doctor at an Ivy League research hospital, who wouldn’t let me leave his exam room without a prescription for the minipill for the extreme cramps I was having in my early 20s. When I asked for a hormone panel to help diagnose a potentially underlying health condition, fearful I’d be unable to conceive later in life, he said, perhaps revealing more about himself than intended, that a hormone panel wouldn’t tell him anything.
But not all women’s health practitioners are so unimaginative. Dr. Naomi Whittaker is a board-certified OBGYN and surgeon focused on women&#8217;s restorative reproductive medicine. She’s also the founder of <a href="https://www.rrmacademy.org/">RRM Academy</a>, which employs both conventional medicine and the latest in restorative reproductive techniques. “Working with the female body rather than against it is the cornerstone of what I do,” she said. “I see hormones not as a nuisance to suppress, but as a language the body uses to communicate.” She calls restoring the body’s natural function “the spirit of restorative reproductive medicine.”
Even still, the establishment offers these doctors no help. Medical associations and education do not teach the kind of medicine Dr. Whittaker practices, and they are deeply skeptical of it. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine have <a href="https://www.asrm.org/globalassets/_asrm/advocacy-and-policy/advocacy-activities/2025/2025-08-13-joint_letter_opposing_rrm_081425.pdf">issued statements</a> and <a href="https://www.asrm.org/news-and-events/asrm-news/press-releasesbulletins/asrm-hosts-capitol-hill-briefing-for-policymakers--congressional-staff-to-hear-from-providers--patients-about-importance-of-ivf-access-realities-and-limitations-of-restorative-reproductive-medicine/">held congressional briefings</a> against restorative reproductive medicine. After all, it is a competitor to the medical status quo at a time when the government has expressed more interest in women’s health and fertility. It seems as though the medical establishment is vying for a cut of a much-hoped-for government check.
Regardless, women continue rejecting the status quo. And this rejection comes amid an explosion of so-called “fem-tech” companies marketing devices (usually wearables, such as rings or watches) to assist women in either avoiding or achieving pregnancy naturally.
These devices use sensors to track temperature, sleep, and heart rate, among other things, to pinpoint ovulation or even underlying health conditions. Natural Cycles, which uses an AI algorithm adjusted to each individual user, became the first app to be cleared by the Food and Drug Administration as birth control in 2018. And Oura, whose sensor-laden rings have become something of a <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/09/oura-ring-lobbying-rfk-maha-washington-00770320?nid=0000014f-1646-d88f-a1cf-5f46b7bd0000&amp;nname=playbook&amp;nrid=b076877d-0054-4fa6-8bd9-93aa06bde864">status symbol</a> in Washington, is aiming higher than transforming women’s healthcare: It is purporting to change the face of American healthcare altogether.
Wearables such as the Oura ring are not only designed for tracking menstrual cycles, though they can do that. They are also designed to help wearers know more about their bodies (sleep quality and blood oxygen, activity, or stress levels, for example) and to help alert them to potential illness. Only a few months ago, an older-style wearable — the Fitbit — alerted me that my heart was in arrhythmia and told me to go to the emergency room. At 31, I am not the usual candidate for atrial fibrillation, and the ER doctor assumed the device had been faulty. After performing an EKG, he was amazed to find the watch had been right. Untreated heart arrhythmias are the most common cause of sudden cardiac death in the world.
American medicine has long suffered from being reactive rather than proactive. We treat symptoms and diseases rather than teaching people how to avoid them. After all, symptom and disease management is where all the money is, and healthcare, like all businesses, needs money to survive. But wearables may be a sign that’s changing. After all, Oura’s market valuation of $11 billion dollars is more than four times greater than it was just three years ago. 
As women continue rejecting the pill, those beholden to the medical status quo will probably continue blaming women for falling prey to misinformation. That’s a lazy response. They’d do well to look a little closer: Women may be the early adopters of a new age of American medicine, rejecting pills and their unintended side effects in favor of preventative and restorative approaches, with wearables at the helm. American women seem to be ahead of the curve in heralding a return to true medicine. The only question is: Will the medical establishment get on board?
***
Katelyn Walls Shelton (<a href="https://x.com/AnnaKateShelt">@AnnaKateShelt</a>) is a visiting fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Bioethics, Technology, and Human Flourishing Program and a 2025 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow. Her Substack is <a href="https://katelynshelton.substack.com/">Technically Human</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Birth Control Pills, Female Contraception Estrogen Hormones, Prescription Medicine for PMS

The Pill Revolt — Why Millennial Women Like Me Are Rethinking Hormonal Birth Control

Health

Media Bias

Pregnancy

Technology

Upstream

Women

Woman holding contraceptive pill

How Big Pharma Covered Up The Dark Truth About Birth Control

Big Pharma

COVID

Matt Walsh

Pfizer

Psychology

Santa Barbara

Vaccines

Violent Crime

A Chicago museum exhibit dedicated to Planned Parenthood featured rosaries, because Christianity is in the business of &#8220;controlling the bodies&#8221; of women, the exhibit&#8217;s plaque said.
The International Museum of Surgical Science&#8217;s &#8220;Unplanned Parenthood&#8221; exhibit featured letters women wrote to Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger in the 1920s asking for information about birth control.
Some of the letters were hung from crosses using rosary beads.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
NEW: Rosary beads represent Christianity &quot;controlling the bodies of birthing people&quot; in this Planned Parenthood museum exhibit
At Chicago&#39;s International Museum of Surgical Science <a href="https://t.co/n4CGmgSGcN">pic.twitter.com/n4CGmgSGcN</a>
&mdash; Mairead Elordi (@JohnsonHildy) <a href="https://twitter.com/JohnsonHildy/status/1877079118769991760?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 8, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
&#8220;The rosary beads serve as a reminder of the enduring influence of christianity [sic] in the United States, symbolizing the ways religious institutions have played in shaping societal norms and controlling the bodies of birthing people,&#8221; <a href="https://imss.org/contemporaryart/michelle-hartney-unplanned-parenthood/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">read</a> the plaque for the exhibit.
&#8220;Birthing people&#8221; is a gender neutral term often used in place of &#8220;women&#8221; by those who espouse gender ideology.
The letters were embroidered onto vintage wedding dress fabric by volunteers in sewing circles around the country, the plaque said. The wedding dress material symbolizes the &#8220;societal expectations placed on women in the early 1900s.&#8221;
The fabric letters were then hung from porcelain backings, &#8220;evoking the fragility of the rights of people with uteruses,&#8221; while the backings have imagery from wedding cakes, lingerie, and jewelry, &#8220;serving as a commentary on the societal pressure placed on women to embrace marriage, often masking the limitations it imposed, particularly during the times when birth control and autonomy were denied.&#8221;
Meat hooks symbolized &#8220;the patriarchy.&#8221;
&#8220;Vintage meat hooks were used as symbols of the brutality of the patriarchy and the way men have treated the bodies of people with uteruses like animals,&#8221; the plaque said.
Chicago is one of the most Catholic cities in the country, with about a <a href="https://www.voanews.com/a/most-catholic-cities-in-us/2966577.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">third</a> of its residents identifying as Catholic.
One Catholic Chicago resident told The Daily Wire it was &#8220;heart-wrenchingly offensive&#8221; to think of his tax dollars going towards the display.
The museum has <a href="https://imss.org/2023/09/the-international-museum-of-surgical-science-to-offer-artist-stipends-in-2024-season-for-chicago-illinois-based-artists/?srsltid=AfmBOoqEraaOLaphC478hd7hBDoEB3NiBEP_DB-FsX8Uukmbc3T3KYW7&amp;utm_source=chatgpt.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">received</a> government grants, including pandemic relief money.
&#8220;Worse, the use of the Catholic rosary and Crucifixes in the exhibit is a mockery of the Lord&#8217;s Mother and all of the prayers from all those who hold life sacred from conception,&#8221; he said, &#8220;something [about] 1.3 billion Catholics universally hold to, and an issue the Church is unwavering on.&#8221;
&#8220;It’s despicable what the City is supporting. Wasting our tax dollars to mock Catholics, and the desecrate to rosary,&#8221; the Catholic Chicagoan said, adding that he encourages the city&#8217;s two million Catholics to &#8220;vote accordingly.&#8221;
The museum said in a statement to The Daily Wire that the &#8220;views, statements, and ideas expressed in this exhibition are solely those of the artist&#8221; and the museum &#8220;does not endorse or promote any political or social beliefs presented in this exhibit.&#8221;
<div>
&#8220;The International Museum of Surgical Science supports a commitment to contemporary art and artists through exhibitions and programs that use the frame of contemporary artistic practice to examine new perspectives in medical and surgical science and our relationship to the body,&#8221; Director of Museum Operations Michelle Rinard said.
&#8220;We believe in the power of the arts to build community, inspire social change and bring fresh perspective to difficult and complex issues — including issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender identity and sexual orientation. IMSS seeks applications that address these issues,&#8221; Rinard said.
</div>

Rosary Beads in Hands of Catholic Woman

Chicago Museum Hangs Pro-Birth Control Notes On Rosaries In Planned Parenthood Exhibit

Catholic

Catholic Church

Catholicism

Chicago

Contraception

Health Care

Margaret Sanger

Planned Parenthood

On Wednesday, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/u-s-senate" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Senate</a> Republicans blocked a Democrat bill that sought to codify the right to access <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/contraception" target="_blank" rel="noopener">contraception</a> in federal law, with many arguing that it would infringe on religious and parental rights.
Fifty-one members, including two Republicans, <a href="https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1182/vote_118_2_00190.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">voted</a> to advance the legislation — an insufficient number to reach the three-fifths majority needed to break the filibuster. Thirty-eight Republicans voted against moving forward. Nine other GOP members and <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/democrat-senator-bob-menendez-to-change-party-status-amid-his-corruption-trial" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ)</a> did not vote.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) <a href="https://x.com/CraigCaplan/status/1798457646502261075" target="_blank" rel="noopener">switched</a> his vote to &#8220;Nay,&#8221; a move that allowed him to file a <a href="https://x.com/SenateCloakroom/status/1798455388783964209" target="_blank" rel="noopener">motion to reconsider</a> the failed cloture vote at some point in the future. He has set up a vote next week for an IVF bill with a <a href="https://www.democrats.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/transcript-majority-leader-chuck-schumer-delivers-remarks-at-press-conference-with-senate-democrats-after-senate-republicans-blocked-the-right-to-contraception-act" target="_blank" rel="noopener">stated goal</a> of putting Republicans on the record on reproductive rights.
<a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/4381/text" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The contraception bill</a>, introduced by Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), would &#8220;protect an individual’s ability to access contraceptives and to engage in contraception and to protect a health care provider’s ability to provide contraceptives, contraception, and information related to contraception.&#8221;
Democrat lawmakers are pressing the birth control debate in a presidential election year. They argue Markey&#8217;s legislation is necessary because the 2022 Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade — a ruling that returned the issue of abortion access to the states — also <a href="https://www.markey.senate.gov/news/press-releases/markey-hirono-duckworth-statement-on-the-right-to-contraception-act-floor-vote" target="_blank" rel="noopener">&#8220;threatened&#8221;</a> contraception.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), who is <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/rick-scott-joins-race-for-senate-gop-leader" target="_blank" rel="noopener">running</a> to become the next leader of the Senate GOP, led 21 of his Republican colleagues in a <a href="https://www.rickscott.senate.gov/2024/6/sen-rick-scott-leads-colleagues-in-slamming-democrats-attacks-on-religious-freedoms-parental-rights-political-games-on-contraception" target="_blank" rel="noopener">statement</a> that disparaged the contraception bill. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), considered a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-campaign-requests-documents-from-some-vp-contenders-report" target="_blank" rel="noopener">contender</a> for former President Donald Trump&#8217;s running mate in the 2024 election, was among them.
&#8220;There is no threat to access to contraception, which is legal in every state and required by law to be offered at no cost by health insurers, and it&#8217;s disgusting that Democrats are fearmongering on this important issue to score cheap political points,&#8221; the GOP lawmakers said.
<a href="https://onelink.to/dwapp" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" aria-describedby="sk-tooltip-9096" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://onelink.to/dwapp&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1716990157394000&amp;usg=AOvVaw33qQydjIo8bet419amChif">CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILYWIRE+ APP</a>
&#8220;This bill infringes on the parental rights and religious liberties of some Americans and lets the federal government force religious institutions and schools, even public elementary schools, to offer contraception like condoms to little kids,&#8221; they added. &#8220;It’s just another way for Democrats to use activist attorneys and our courts to advance their radical agenda and that is why we oppose this bill.&#8221;
The pair of GOP lawmakers who joined with the majority of Democrats and the independents who caucus with them voting to advance the legislation included Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK).
&#8220;This is not a perfect bill,&#8221; Murkowski <a href="https://x.com/lisamurkowski/status/1798457352930357587" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a> in a video posted to X. &#8220;This isn&#8217;t a bill that has gone through committee. Leader Schumer has decided that he&#8217;s just going to put it on the floor to move to it. That&#8217;s a lousy process, actually. This is unfortunately yet another messaging bill &#8230; but if it is going to be a messaging bill, I want my message to be very clear: that a woman should have a right to contraception.&#8221;

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and other senators Speak To The Press After The “Right To Contraception Act” Failed Passage

Senate Republicans Block Dem Contraception Bill

Chuck Schumer

Congress

Ed Markey

Lisa Murkowski

Marco Rubio

Politics

Rick Scott

Senate Democrats

Susan Collins

U.S. House of Representatives

U.S. Senate

Over the past few years, the biggest knock you&#8217;ve heard against the field of public health is that they completely mismanaged COVID, mainly by exaggerating its impact. They told us it was a potentially civilization-ending epidemic — one that justified lockdowns, mandatory shots, et cetera. In the end they were wrong, of course, and for that reason no one will ever trust one of these supposed experts again.
But the really extraordinary thing about the field of public health isn&#8217;t the epidemics they fixate on. It&#8217;s the ones they ignore. In particular, there is one ongoing public health crisis that these experts really don&#8217;t want to talk about — even though, if it continues for much longer, it will quite literally bring about the end of humanity.
I&#8217;m talking about collapsing fertility rates all over the world, which is a problem you really have to put in context if you want to understand how dire things are.
Right now, Russia, China, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Ireland, Switzerland, Greece, Denmark, Australia, Canada, Qatar, the UAE, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, the UK, Germany, and the United States — and many others — have birth rates that are well below replacement level.
The U.S. fertility rate is at its <a href="https://twitter.com/ianbremmer/status/1783920672617443824" target="_blank" rel="noopener">lowest</a> point in nearly a century. What that means is that people aren&#8217;t having enough children to sustain the population. But not every country is affected by this crisis. There are countries where fertility is much higher than replacement level. They include such esteemed locations as Niger (one of the poorest countries on the planet), Chad, Somalia, Angola, Tanzania, Afghanistan, Zambia, Cameroon, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and of course Haiti.
It doesn&#8217;t take a genius to see where this is heading. Third-world hellholes are reproducing, while first-world countries — the ones that sustain the global economy that keeps billions of people alive — are not reproducing. As this goes on, and third-world inhabitants continue to pour into the first-world, the distinction between these two parts of the world continues to blur until they&#8217;re completely irrelevant. Eventually everywhere will be third-world.
This is not a new problem. But to the extent political leaders have tried to solve it, by and large, they&#8217;ve failed.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1357-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h4>
A decade ago, for example, China <a href="https://twitter.com/ChinaPowerCSIS/status/1781729541385249271" target="_blank" rel="noopener">eased</a> its barbaric one-child policy. They expected millions more births as a result. But the following year, the country saw only an additional half-million births. And the country&#8217;s birth rate has remained below replacement level ever since.
Beginning in the 90s, Japan undertook its own <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10615026/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">efforts</a> to raise the birth rate, including offering more parental leave, more child care services, et cetera. The result? Nothing has improved. It&#8217;s only gotten much worse. Last year, Japan&#8217;s birth rate was the lowest on record.
It&#8217;s the same story in Hungary. Starting with Orban&#8217;s government in 2010, Hungary doubled its spending on families. And yet, last year, Hungary, like Japan, recorded its lowest number of births in history.
So whatever the problem is here, it&#8217;s clear that it cannot be resolved solely through more spending or government intervention. Simply providing some ad hoc economic incentives isn&#8217;t cutting it — although those policies are good, they aren’t sufficient. So what is the solution? You can say that the broader economy needs to improve, which is obviously a big part of it. But the declines I&#8217;m talking about have been in progress for decades. Singapore&#8217;s birth rate has been dropping since the 1980s, and their GDP per capita grew dramatically in the new millennium. It&#8217;s a similar situation in Taiwan. And birth rates in the U.S. were declining pre-pandemic, for more than a decade — even throughout <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/us-household-incomes-soared-in-2015-recording-biggest-gain-in-decades/2016/09/13/a832da44-79e0-11e6-ac8e-cf8e0dd91dc7_story.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">periods</a> in which median household incomes were setting new records.
What this means is that figuring out the root cause of this problem is more complicated than looking at economic indicators alone. It means analyzing culture, and in particular, taking a close look at prevailing attitudes towards children and families, and trying to change them. That was the main goal of the Natal Conference, which took place at the end of last year in Austin, Texas. Speakers from all over the country gathered to assess what&#8217;s gone wrong and how to fix it.
One of them was Kevin Dolan, an organizer of the event. And he made it clear that, whether you personally like the idea of having kids or not, the collapse of fertility rates will have devastating effects on you and everyone you know. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="001 Economic Problem" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/151AO19JmPs?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Whether you agree with him or not, one of the first things you notice about Kevin Dolan is that he&#8217;s not a demagogue. He didn&#8217;t hold this conference to berate anyone for not wanting to have kids. He&#8217;s not some kind of cult leader who demands that everyone sign a pledge to create a certain number of children. He&#8217;s a normal guy. And he&#8217;s trusting, too, which is why he allowed a Politico reporter to attend the event to write about it.
How did that turn out? Predictably, Politico published a hit piece that&#8217;s so bizarre, and so totally disconnected from the event, that it verges on self-parody.
Here&#8217;s how Politico wrote about the conference <a href="https://twitter.com/politico/status/1784569937391956477" target="_blank" rel="noopener">on Twitter</a>: &#8220;The far right is so obsessed with making babies, they just held a whole conference about it.&#8221;
Yes, you heard that right. Politico has uncovered the sinister Right-wing plot to have babies and ensure the survival of the human species. They caught us. We are anti-extinction. Much to our shame.
Then if you click through to the article, you&#8217;ll find this <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/04/28/natalism-conference-austin-00150338" target="_blank" rel="noopener">sinister-sounding</a> headline: &#8220;The Far Right’s Campaign to Explode the Population.&#8221;
It&#8217;s not hard to see what Politico is getting at. Basically, they&#8217;re saying that anyone who wants Western societies to produce children — which is to say, anyone who wants Western societies to continue existing — must be &#8220;far Right.&#8221; It&#8217;s reminiscent of how &#8220;freedom&#8221; has <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/radio/checkup/what-s-your-reaction-to-the-ottawa-standoff-and-the-border-blockades-1.6349636/why-the-word-freedom-is-such-a-useful-rallying-cry-for-protesters-1.6349865" target="_blank" rel="noopener">become</a> a dirty word in Canada. The people who want to destroy Western civilization aren&#8217;t doing a great job of hiding it anymore.
But if you go online to the Natal Conference&#8217;s website, you can find a bunch of speakers explaining very clearly what they think is happening in this country. They talk about everything from divorce laws to common fears people have about parenting, and the impact these considerations are having on fertility rates. None of this is a &#8220;Right-wing conspiracy.&#8221; That&#8217;s the familiar terminology they trot out whenever the Left knows that something is really happening and they want it to keep happening.
And indeed, there&#8217;s a very active anti-natalism movement right now. Spend any time on the darker corners of the internet, and you&#8217;ll find quite a few people who fully embrace depopulation as a positive good. It&#8217;s grim stuff.
In fact, mainstream media outlets routinely run stories about young people who don&#8217;t want to have kids because it will hurt the planet somehow. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="002 Climate Change Preventing Children" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nb0QjLjRcEg?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
That&#8217;s the more socially acceptable form of the depopulation agenda, and it&#8217;s being promoted by corporate media. But the anti-natalism movement gets more organized, and more explicit, the deeper you look.
One of the leaders of this depopulation agenda is Les Knight, the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. Here&#8217;s footage of one of his recent conferences. As you watch this, compare Knight&#8217;s presentation with the one you heard earlier at the Natal conference, just in terms of the general sanity of the speaker. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="003 Voluntary Human Extinction" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ivkmVF2R9wk?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
That&#8217;s the first land acknowledgement you&#8217;ll hear that doesn&#8217;t just acknowledge some of the tribes or whatever, but also acknowledges some of the wildlife. This is as cultish and as creepy as it gets, but you won&#8217;t see Politico running any articles on this guy being &#8220;far Left.&#8221; They&#8217;re not smearing Les Knight. Instead, quite the opposite.
The New York Times recently published <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/23/climate/voluntary-human-extinction.html">a glowing profile</a> of Knight: &#8220;For the sake of the planet, Les Knight, the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction movement, has spent decades pushing one message: &#8216;May we live long and die out.'&#8221;
In that clip you just saw, you heard Knight mention that no one ever talks about the fact that world population is increasing, even as birth rates plummet. But there are a couple of obvious explanations for this. One is that — as I mentioned earlier — not all countries are experiencing plummeting birth rates. The most dysfunctional countries on the planet are actually reproducing at extremely high rates. Additionally, just from a statistical perspective, it takes time for lagging birth rates to show up in world population figures. There might be a lot of young couples now having kids in some places. That doesn&#8217;t mean those couples will be around in 20 years, still having children. Birth rates decline first, and then population declines. When you get to the point where the population itself is starting to decline, that’s when the catastrophe has really hit. The goal is to prevent that from happening.
Reversing this decline should not be a &#8220;Right-wing&#8221; project. Yet there are very few prominent people outside of conservative circles who are willing to talk about this at all. Elon Musk is the only notable exception. In fact, it should tell us something that Musk — one of the wealthiest and most powerful men on the planet — considers depopulation to be the greatest existential threat we face as a species.
This weekend I engaged in a back-and-forth with Musk on Twitter about the causes of this existential threat. The conversation started when someone posted this chart on social media. It shows that the number of men under 30 who report having zero sexual partners since turning 18 has increased from 8% in 2008 to 27% in 2018.
https://twitter.com/SMTuffy/status/1783781813950845313
That&#8217;s obviously a striking chart, and it demands an explanation. I responded by <a href="https://x.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1783918984208765414">saying:</a> 
<blockquote>A lot of theories to explain this but it’s very clearly like 98 percent because of porn.</blockquote>
I made that observation because the iPhone and Pornhub were both born in 2007. Male virginity rates skyrocketed pretty much from that very moment, as birth rates plunged the opposite direction.
In reply to my tweet, Musk <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1784106328971227305" target="_blank" rel="noopener">wrote this</a>: 
<blockquote>It’s not porn, which has been readily available from the days of VHS tapes, but rather the general temptation of the online world, if you’re going to blame it on anything electronic. Sex is not what matters. Lots of people are having sex that have no kids. Population implosion is what will end civilization.</blockquote>
What Musk is saying about pornography is obviously true. Pornography clearly pre-dates the year 2007. But it was nothing like the pornography that&#8217;s been available in the past decade or so.
Here&#8217;s one small data point: Playboy at its peak sold around 7 million copies a month. Pornhub — just one site — gets something like 15 times as many visitors per day. Way more people are consuming porn today, way more often, starting at way younger ages. And on top of that, the porn itself is way more graphic and debased. This isn&#8217;t the whole reason that birth rates are declining. But it is a major plank in the depopulation platform.
That&#8217;s a strong argument for continuing to ban young people from accessing online pornography, which several states have already done. It&#8217;s also a good reason for parents to limit or even eliminate their kids access to electronics. And that should just be the beginning. If all of this sounds drastic, it&#8217;s probably because you haven&#8217;t been fully informed about the scale of the problem that Western civilization is now facing. And that&#8217;s by design.
A few months ago I did a whole <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-origins-of-the-anti-human-depopulation-agenda" target="_blank" rel="noopener">monologue</a> on the Jaffe Memo, and the origins of Planned Parenthood&#8217;s very comprehensive campaign to depopulate the planet. Very powerful &#8220;nonprofits&#8221; and political organizations in this country don&#8217;t want you to reproduce. That&#8217;s not conspiratorial; it&#8217;s just true. They&#8217;ve put it in writing.
The good news is that this is one of the few problems in our society that pretty much everyone can help solve. It&#8217;s maybe the single most solvable crisis in history. They have to expend all this effort and push all this propaganda to discourage reproduction because it&#8217;s one of the most natural things a person can do. But the propaganda is failing now. Because of the Natal Conference and efforts like it, as well as Elon Musk and other prominent figures, there&#8217;s more attention to declining birth rates than there has been at any point in recent history. That&#8217;s why Politico and Left-wing activists are melting down. There&#8217;s nothing they want to see less than more children being born. That tells you everything you need to know about their ideology — and it also tells you how to defeat it.

Family waving American flags

The Dastardly Right Wing Plot To Have Babies And Save Humanity From Extinction

Birth Rates

Dating

Elon Musk

Readers Pass

The Washington Post has been <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2023/10/11/washington-post-buyouts-metro-cuts/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">hemorrhaging</a> subscribers and web traffic for years. Late last year, the paper <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/business/media/washington-post-job-cuts.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">conducted</a> yet another round of layoffs, impacting hundreds of employees.
Jeff Bezos purchased the paper for $250 million a decade ago, and last year alone, it managed to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2023/10/11/washington-post-buyouts-metro-cuts/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">lose</a> roughly $100 million. This is not a profitable venture, and in normal circumstances, businesses that lose this much money don&#8217;t stay around very long. But the Washington Post has stuck around. Jeff Bezos has kept it on life support to fulfill a specific mission, which is to harangue and censor independent voices on behalf of Jeff Bezos&#8217; donors in the Democratic Party.
A couple of days ago, that mission was on full display.
On March 21st, The Washington Post published an <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/03/21/stopping-birth-control-misinformation/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">article</a> entitled, &#8220;Women are getting off birth control amid misinformation explosion.&#8221; The Daily Beast ran a <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/explosion-of-women-ditching-birth-control-amid-misinformation-blitz-docs" target="_blank" rel="noopener">similar story</a>, warning ominously of an &#8220;explosion&#8221; of women who are ditching birth control amid a &#8220;misinformation blitz.&#8221;
First of all, it needs to be said that any time the media collectively decides to label something &#8220;misinformation,&#8221; they really mean &#8220;information that we find personally or politically inconvenient.&#8221; They&#8217;re not interested in proving you wrong, they&#8217;re interested in shutting you up. And that&#8217;s exactly what&#8217;s happening here.
As the Washington Post piece says: &#8220;Brett Cooper, a media commentator for the conservative Daily Wire, argued in a viral TikTok clip that birth control can impact fertility, cause women to gain weight and even alter whom they are attracted to. It racked up over 219,000 &#8216;likes&#8217; before TikTok removed it following The Post’s inquiry.&#8221; The piece goes on to describe other similar videos that the Post also wants to be deleted from the internet. 
For example, this one, from Ben Shapiro&#8217;s show a year ago:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Is the Birth Control Pill Wrecking Your Health?" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ErrWNrFDcqI?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
It&#8217;s hard to imagine a more anodyne clip than that. This is not a woman making up crazy, unhinged conspiracy theories about birth control. She&#8217;s not expressing some dangerous, unscientific opinion. She doesn&#8217;t even appear to be political. She&#8217;s just articulating a very reasonable, increasingly common concern, which is that taking unnatural hormones might have some unexpected and unwanted effects on the human body. Even if you don&#8217;t know anything about the scientific data on this point, that&#8217;s not a crazy thing to believe.
But as that clip goes on, they do talk about some of the research on this point. None of this is quack science. It&#8217;s widely accepted in medical literature.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1332-the-media-panics-as-more-and-more-women-choose-to-dump-their-birth-control-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h4>
For example, a recent <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6193788/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">study</a> out of Denmark, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry found that, &#8220;hormonal contraception use doubles the risk of suicide attempt, and triples the risk of suicide.&#8221; The study specifically found that &#8220;the association between hormonal contraception and primary outcomes peaked at 2 months, but continued even after the cessation of hormonal contraception for some years.&#8221; The researchers also reported that hormonal contraceptives were connected with a 70% increase in rates of depression.
Before I get into the specifics of what other studies have found, it&#8217;s important to pause here and take another look at how the Washington Post is framing this story. Here&#8217;s the first paragraph: 
<blockquote>Search for &#8216;birth control&#8217; on TikTok or Instagram and a cascade of misleading videos vilifying hormonal contraception appear: Young women blaming their weight gain on the pill. Right-wing commentators claiming that some birth control can lead to infertility. Testimonials complaining of depression and anxiety. &#8230; Physicians say they’re seeing an explosion of birth-control misinformation online targeting a vulnerable demographic.</blockquote>
The implication of what the Post wrote is that it&#8217;s &#8220;misinformation&#8221; to say that birth control is related to &#8220;depression and anxiety.&#8221; But that&#8217;s not true. At no point in the Washington Post&#8217;s article did they debunk the study from Denmark. They don&#8217;t even mention it. Instead, they simply state, as a matter of fact, that you&#8217;re crazy if you link birth control to weight gain, infertility, or depression. They claim the only significant side effects of birth control medication are blood clots. But they&#8217;re wrong, on all counts.
One of the main reasons they&#8217;re wrong is that hormonal birth control inhibits the body&#8217;s natural reaction to stress. As a UCLA Health study put it late <a href="https://www.uclahealth.org/news/study-shows-how-birth-control-pills-affect-womens" target="_blank" rel="noopener">last year</a>:
<blockquote> Researchers at the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences’ Laboratory for Stress Assessment and Research found contraceptive users and non-users processed stress differently at the molecular level, with contraceptive users also reporting a more negative psychological response to stress compared to non-users.</blockquote>
Is it possible that disrupting the body&#8217;s natural stress response might lead to weight gain, given that weight gain is one of the most common symptoms of stress? The Washington Post thinks you&#8217;re a science denier if you even suggest that. They&#8217;ll have you pulled off TikTok if you even mention the possibility. And that&#8217;s weird, because less than a year ago, NBC News ran this report, in which their medical experts explain that weight gain and hair loss are among the symptoms of hormonal birth control. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Why some women are quitting hormonal birth control" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/u3Z-1JXyIvA?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
I guess we&#8217;re expected to believe that at some point between May and this week, the science changed. But actually, it didn&#8217;t. Going back to the UCLA study, researchers confirmed existing research which found that: 
<blockquote>hormonal contraceptive pills may increase women’s risk for chronically elevated inflammation, which carries the long-term risk of developing illnesses such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, and autoimmune disorders, as well as potential mood disorders, including depression.</blockquote>
The lead author at UCLA added: 
<blockquote>Cortisol gets a bad rap, but increases in cortisol in response to stress help the body manage stressful situations. &#8230; If women on the pill are having these increases in cortisol but their mood is getting worse, it could mean that the pill is preventing their bodies and minds from returning to normal following stress.</blockquote>
The truth is that hormonal birth control does come with all kinds of risks and side effects. All drugs do. Drugs that suppress the normal, healthy functions of the body are always especially risky. And that includes potential impacts on fertility, as much as the Washington Post doesn&#8217;t want to admit it. Right now, if you go to the Planned Parenthood <a href="https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/birth-control/birth-control-shot" target="_blank" rel="noopener">website</a>, you&#8217;ll find that they recommend a method of hormonal birth control known as &#8220;the Depo shot.&#8221; 
<blockquote>The depo shot (AKA Depo-Provera) is an injection you get once every 3 months. It’s a safe, convenient, and private birth control method that works really well if you always get it on time.</blockquote>
What Planned Parenthood doesn&#8217;t mention on their website is that the &#8220;depo shot&#8221; has clear and proven impacts on fertility. This is from the WebMD website, which on most days, the Washington Post agrees is a <a href="https://www.webmd.com/baby/get-pregnant-after-birth-control">reliable source</a>: 
<blockquote>Injectable birth control (Depo-Provera): Unlike other forms of hormonal birth control, it may be harder to get pregnant after you stop getting these shots. It may take 10 months or more before you ovulate again. For some women, it will take up to 18 months for periods to start again.</blockquote>
So this is a method of hormonal birth control that does impact fertility after you stop taking it. In fact, it can make women infertile for a very long time. This isn&#8217;t some conspiracy theory — and neither is the idea that hormonal birth control can contribute to weight gain, depression and suicide. The same sources that the Left tells us to trust at every opportunity — established medical researchers — are very clear on this. But the &#8220;trust the science&#8221; crowd has suddenly become very distrusting of science.
And that&#8217;s not the only platitude they&#8217;re abandoning in order to censor anyone who speaks critically about birth control. Remember &#8220;my body, my choice?&#8221; If these people really believed in the &#8220;my body my choice&#8221; mantra, they would celebrate, or at least accept, that an increasing number of young women are choosing to forgo birth control. But birth control is central to their cultural agenda.
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With fewer women on the pill, more women will become mothers, and some of them will drop out of the workforce and discover fulfillment and happiness as wives and homemakers. This is the real crisis that the Washington Post and the other Left wing rags are worried about. The last thing that the elites want to see is a movement of women fully embracing their own womanhood, and men fully embracing their manhood. A move back towards the family, away from materialism and self-preoccupation and towards marriage and parenthood. These people have been waging a war on the family for decades, and the birth control pill is their nuclear bomb. The family is the greatest threat to them. And a society full of families — of intact, happy families, with attentive mothers and strong fathers — that is a society that has rendered these people powerless. That is their fear. And they fear it like they fear nothing else.
And politically, of course we know that unhappy career middle managers at Citibank are one of the core constituencies of the Democratic Party. If they rebel, Democrats will have real trouble winning another election. And they&#8217;re willing to do anything — including lying to women about the serious and even fatal drug side effects of birth control, and so many other drugs — to prevent that from happening.

contraceptive pill

The Media Panics As More And More Women Choose To Dump Their Birth Control

Brett Cooper

Drugs

Jeff Bezos

Washington Post

Billionaire <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/ben-shapiro-sits-down-with-elon-musk-for-exclusive-wide-ranging-discussion-on-dei-space-religion" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Elon Musk</a> posted about the side effects of hormonal <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/fda-greenlights-first-birth-control-pill-with-no-prescription" target="_blank" rel="noopener">birth control</a> pills on Friday, setting off a host of women to reply to the post with their own negative experiences from taking the contraceptive.
Hormonal contraceptive, a.k.a &#8220;the pill,&#8221; is extremely <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db327.htm#section_4" target="_blank" rel="noopener">common</a> among women and <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/safe-medicine-younger-girls-starting-birth-control/story?id=14116032#:~:text=Today%2C%20one%20in%20five%20American,is%20getting%20younger%20and%20younger.">girls</a>, and is sometimes even recommended for youths for something as benign as acne. However, side effects from the pill are hardly talked about, though some women in recent years have spoken out about <a href="https://nypost.com/2023/01/30/young-women-abandoning-birth-control-pills-for-mental-health/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">ditching the pill</a> following such side effects.
&#8220;Hormonal birth control makes you fat, doubles risk of depression &amp; triples risk of suicide,&#8221; Musk posted to X. &#8220;This is the clear scientific consensus, but very few people seem to know it.&#8221;
The post has already been viewed more than 37 million times.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Hormonal birth control makes you fat, doubles risk of depression &amp; triples risk of suicide.
This is the clear scientific consensus, but very few people seem to know it.
&mdash; Elon Musk (@elonmusk) <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1758569518442701250?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 16, 2024</a></blockquote>
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The SpaceX CEO followed up with a link to a Time magazine <a href="https://time.com/5030447/birth-control-side-effects-suicide/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">article</a> highlighting the increased risk of suicide associated with the pill. He also linked to a <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29145752/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">study in the American Journal of Psychiatry</a> that found hormonal contraception to double the risk of suicide attempts, and triple the risk of suicide.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
<a href="https://t.co/2R8TgggrRg">https://t.co/2R8TgggrRg</a>
&mdash; Elon Musk (@elonmusk) <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1758569948153344504?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 16, 2024</a></blockquote>
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The responses to the post included women lauding Musk for bringing attention to the issue, and sharing their own stories.
Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood clinic director-turned-pro-life advocate, responded: &#8220;Hormonal birth control gave me pseudotumor cerebri, which causes debilitating headaches and if untreated, blindness,&#8221; she wrote. &#8220;I will have to be on medication for my entire life or otherwise lose my sight.&#8221;
&#8220;Fertility is a sign of HEALTH!!!,&#8221; Johnson stressed. &#8220;Don’t take a pill to break something that is working! I’m so thankful to have gotten off that crap and now have 8 beautiful children.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Hormonal birth control gave me pseudotumor cerebri, which causes debilitating headaches and if untreated, blindness. I will have to be on medication for my entire life or otherwise lose my sight. Fertility is a sign of HEALTH!!! Don’t take a pill to break something that is…
&mdash; Dr. Abby Johnson (@AbbyJohnson) <a href="https://twitter.com/AbbyJohnson/status/1758898799387566484?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 17, 2024</a></blockquote>
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Ashley St. Clair of The Babylon Bee recounted her experience after being on the pill for nearly a decade, starting at age 14.
&#8220;I was placed on the pill at just 14 years old for acne. A few months later, I saw my first-ever therapist despite no prior history of depression,&#8221; she wrote. &#8220;Shortly after that, I was placed on an SSRI. Each time I would talk to my doctors about my deteriorating mental health, not a single one in nearly a decade of being on the pill suggested that it may in fact be the hormones I was taking every single day. Not one.&#8221;
&#8220;In retrospect, after being on birth control for nearly a decade, being placed on the pill for &#8216;acne&#8217; was akin to killing a mouse with a rocket launcher,&#8221; St. Clair continued. &#8220;Hundreds of thousands of women across the United States and the world have had a similar experience to mine — feeling completely out of their mind on a pill their doctor told them was relatively &#8216;harmless.'&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
I was placed on the pill at just 14 years old for acne. A few months later, I saw my first-ever therapist despite no prior history of depression. Shortly after that, I was placed on an SSRI. 
Each time I would talk to my doctors about my deteriorating mental health, not a single… <a href="https://t.co/Fj4hOj4qQQ">https://t.co/Fj4hOj4qQQ</a>
&mdash; Ashley St. Clair (@stclairashley) <a href="https://twitter.com/stclairashley/status/1758570914432659527?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 16, 2024</a></blockquote>
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&#8220;I’ve been (wrongfully) slandered time and time again as an anti-science conspiracy theorist for pointing out all the legitimate reasons why we shouldn’t shut off our natural hormonal functioning,&#8221; writer Andrea Mew posted, captioning screenshots of her columns on the topic published at Evie magazine. &#8220;Is the tide finally turning for mainstream opinions on hormonal birth control?&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
I’ve been (wrongfully) slandered time and time again as an anti-science conspiracy theorist for pointing out all the legitimate reasons why we shouldn’t shut off our natural hormonal functioning.
Is the tide finally turning for mainstream opinions on hormonal birth control? <a href="https://t.co/TZumHdReg4">https://t.co/TZumHdReg4</a> <a href="https://t.co/bHmvhgfvXU">pic.twitter.com/bHmvhgfvXU</a>
&mdash; Andrea Mew (@andreajmew) <a href="https://twitter.com/andreajmew/status/1758633220055466078?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 16, 2024</a></blockquote>
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&#8220;I CAN VOUCH FOR the weight gain and mood swings, etc. I took this stuff for about 2 years as a very young wife,&#8221; another woman <a href="https://twitter.com/lsfletcher21/status/1758852523690000795" target="_blank" rel="noopener">responded</a> to Musk. &#8220;Hated the way it made me feel, and stopped taking it. I&#8217;m a grandmother now &#8230; never regretted getting off the pill. I feel the same way about many modern meds. Be careful folks and listen to your body.&#8221;
Other women discussed the <a href="https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/hormones/oral-contraceptives-fact-sheet" target="_blank" rel="noopener">increased risks</a> of both <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/certain-birth-control-pills-increase-risk-of-breast-cancer-by-up-to-30-university-of-oxford-researchers-find">breast cancer</a> and cervical cancer associated with the pill.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/certain-birth-control-pills-increase-risk-of-breast-cancer-by-up-to-30-university-of-oxford-researchers-find" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Certain Birth Control Pills Increase Risk Of Breast Cancer By Up To 30%, University Of Oxford Researchers Find</a>

Billionaire Elon Musk at Paris Viva Tech Fair

Elon Musk’s Post On Hormonal Birth Control Goes Viral; Women Respond With Their Negative Experiences

Elon Musk Draws Attention To Side Effects Of Hormonal Birth Control; Women Unload With Their Negative Experiences

Depression

Suicide

<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/fda">The Food and Drug Administration</a> on Thursday approved the first daily birth control pill that does not require a prescription.
The over-the-counter birth control pill is a progestin-only pill called Opill that is produced by French drugmaker HRA Pharma.
&#8220;Today&#8217;s approval marks the first time a nonprescription daily oral contraceptive will be an available option for millions of people in the United States,&#8221; Dr. Patrizia Cavazzoni, director of the FDA&#8217;s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said Thursday in a statement.
&#8220;When used as directed, daily oral contraception is safe and is expected to be more effective than currently available nonprescription contraceptive methods in preventing unintended pregnancy,&#8221; Cavazzoni said.
Opill is expected to become available sometime early next year at convenience stores, grocery stores, and for sale online. Opill was <a href="https://www.statnews.com/pharmalot/2023/05/10/fda-panel-votes-in-favor-of-the-first-ever-over-the-counter-birth-control-pill/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">approved</a> decades ago by the FDA, but up until now patients needed a prescription to get it.
In May, an independent FDA advisory panel voted unanimously to dub the over-the-counter birth control drug safe for most people.
Opill uses only progestin, a synthetic hormone that mimics progesterone, but other birth control pills use both estrogen and progestin, which <a href="https://medlineplus.gov/druginfo/meds/a601050.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">work</a> to stop ovulation. The progestin-only pill, sometimes called the &#8220;minipill,&#8221; does <a href="https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/minipill/about/pac-20388306" target="_blank" rel="noopener">not always</a> stop ovulation.
About two thirds of adult American women under 50 use some kind of contraception, and a third of those women use birth control pills, <a class="zZyg UbGl iFzk qdXb WCDh DbOX tqUt " href="https://www.kff.org/report-section/contraception-in-the-united-states-a-closer-look-at-experiences-preferences-and-coverage-findings/" data-testid="prism-linkbase">according</a> to a 2022 Kaiser Family Foundation survey.
However, over the last few years some women have spoken out about how they feel hormonal birth control damaged their health, particularly the kind that includes estrogen as well. Women have reported depression, anxiety, mood swings, and even <a href="https://theweek.com/articles/656761/how-birth-control-almost-ruined-life" target="_blank" rel="noopener">their hair</a> falling out as a result of hormonal birth control.
A 2016 Danish <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/2552796" target="_blank" rel="noopener">study</a> found that hormonal birth control was associated with depression, especially among teenagers.
Some OB-GYNs have even <a href="https://www.zrtlab.com/blog/archive/obgyn-not-prescribing-the-birth-control-pill/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a> they refuse to prescribe hormonal birth control because it comes with too many health risks.
However, some doctors say the progestin-only pill <a href="https://familydoctor.org/progestin-only-birth-control-pills/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">comes</a> with fewer risks, even though it still disrupts a woman&#8217;s natural hormone cycle with synthetic hormones.
The FDA advisers <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Health/fda-approves-1st-birth-control-pill-prescription/story?id=101210924" target="_blank" rel="noopener">raised</a> concerns about people, especially young teenagers, being able to pick up their birth control pills as easily as if they were picking up ibuprofen. In the end though, the FDA advisory panel decided the benefits of avoiding unwanted pregnancies outweighed the risks.
In its announcement Thursday, the FDA said the most common side effects of Opill include irregular bleeding, headaches, dizziness, nausea, increased appetite, abdominal pain, cramps, and bloating.
The FDA <a href="https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-first-nonprescription-daily-oral-contraceptive">said</a> making the pill available without a prescription may help reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and their &#8220;potential negative impacts,&#8221; noting that the U.S. has 6.1 million unintended pregnancies per year.
&#8220;Unintended pregnancies have been linked to negative maternal and perinatal outcomes, including reduced likelihood of receiving early prenatal care and increased risk of preterm delivery, with associated adverse neonatal, developmental and child health outcomes,&#8221; the FDA said.
Opill should be taken at the same time every day to make sure it is effective, the FDA said.

US-HEALTH-JUSTICE-ABORTION-POLITICS

FDA Greenlights First Birth Control Pill With No Prescription

Hormonal contraceptives come with an increased risk of breast cancer, according to a new study conducted by researchers from the University of Oxford.
The study, <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1004188" target="_blank" rel="noopener">published</a> in PLOS Medicine on Tuesday, showed an increased risk of around 20-30% in breast cancer linked to current or even recent use of hormonal birth control pills, including combined oestrogen and progestogen birth control pills and progestagen-only contraceptives.
The study&#8217;s abstract said the findings show that &#8220;current or recent use of progestagen-only contraceptives is associated with a slight increase in breast cancer risk,&#8221; which is &#8220;similar in magnitude to that associated with combined hormonal contraceptives.&#8221; Notably, progestagen-only contraceptive use has substantially increased in recent years.
Researchers also found that the risk of breast cancer in pre-menopausal women taking these forms of birth control increased with age. &#8220;Given that the underlying risk of breast cancer increases with advancing age, the absolute excess risk associated with use of either type of oral contraceptive is estimated to be smaller in women who use it at younger rather than at older ages,&#8221; the paper said.
The new findings, combined with past research on hormonal contraceptives, &#8220;suggest that the 15-year absolute excess risk of breast cancer associated with use of oral contraceptives ranges from 8 per 100,000 users for use from age 16 to 20 to about 265 per 100,000 users for use from age 35 to 39.&#8221;
This heightened risk is found to gradually decrease in the years after women stop taking the contraceptives.
Researchers based their findings on data from nearly 30,000 women — 9,498 women who developed invasive breast cancer between the ages 20 and 49, and 18,171 women without breast cancer of similar age.
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Despite the risks associated with hormonal contraceptives, Claire Knight of Cancer Research U.K., which funded the study, seemed to shy away from outright discouraging its use.
“Women who are most likely to be using contraception are under the age of 50, where the risk of breast cancer is even lower,&#8221; Knight said, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/21/all-hormonal-contraceptives-carry-small-increased-risk-breast-cancer?CMP=share_btn_tw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">according</a> to The Guardian. &#8220;For anyone looking to lower their cancer risk, not smoking, eating a healthy balanced diet, drinking less alcohol, and keeping a healthy weight will have the most impact.&#8221;
“There are lots of possible benefits to using contraception, as well as other risks not related to cancer,&#8221; she added. &#8220;That’s why deciding to take them is a personal choice and should be done after speaking to your doctor so you can make a decision that is right for you.&#8221;
Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, abortion and contraception activists have been rallying for increased &#8220;access&#8221; to both abortion and birth control measures. Back in July, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) received its first application for an <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/fda-receives-first-application-for-over-the-counter-birth-control-pill" target="_blank" rel="noopener">over-the-counter birth control</a> pill from HRA Pharma, a company that praised the move as a step toward &#8220;reproductive equity.&#8221;
“This historic application marks a groundbreaking moment in contraceptive access and reproductive equity in the U.S.,” <a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/perrigos-hra-pharma-submits-application-to-fda-for-first-ever-otc-birth-control-pill-301583602.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a> Frédérique Welgryn, Chief Strategic Operations and Innovation Officer at HRA Pharma, in a statement. “More than 60 years ago, prescription birth control pills in the U.S. empowered women to plan if and when they want to get pregnant. Moving a safe and effective prescription birth control pill to OTC will help even more women and people access contraception without facing unnecessary barriers.”
The <a href="https://www.hra-pharma.com/articles/perrigos-hra-pharma-submits-application-to-fda-for-first-ever-otc-birth-control-pill-66" target="_blank" rel="noopener">contraceptive</a> from HRA Pharma is a daily progestin-only pill, sometimes known as the &#8220;mini pill.&#8221; Progestins are synthetic forms of the hormone progesterone.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/texas-federal-judge-rules-against-title-x-allowing-teens-to-get-birth-control-without-telling-parents" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Texas Federal Judge Rules Against Title X Allowing Teens To Get Birth Control Without Telling Parents</a>

BIRTH CONTROL PILLS

Certain Birth Control Pills Increase Risk Of Breast Cancer By Up To 30%, University Of Oxford Researchers Find

World

A judge in Texas <a href="https://www.texastribune.org/2022/12/21/texas-title-x-teens-birth-control/#:~:text=U.S.%20District%20Judge%20Matthew%20Kacsmaryk%20ruled%20that%20Title%20X%2C%20a,and%20state%20and%20federal%20law." target="_blank" rel="noopener">ruled</a> Tuesday against a program that allowed teenagers to get birth control without telling their parents. 
U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk issued a ruling stating that the Title X program violates the rights of parents, as well as state code. Kacsmaryk used to work as a religious liberty lawyer who assisted in litigating cases looking to get rid of contraception protections, the Texas Tribune <a href="https://www.texastribune.org/2022/12/21/texas-title-x-teens-birth-control/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a>.
Jonathan Mitchell, the former Texas solicitor general, brought the case forward on behalf of Alexander Deanda. Deanda has three children and is “raising each of his daughters in accordance with Christian teaching on matters of sexuality, which requires unmarried children to practice abstinence and refrain from sexual intercourse until marriage,” the complaint reportedly noted.
Deanda claimed that the clause regarding confidentiality in Title X goes against the power of parents and the Texas Family Code. 
Deanda <a href="https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/3784122-federal-judge-rules-against-hhs-program-allowing-teens-confidential-birth-control/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">noted</a> that he “wishes to be informed if any of his children are accessing or attempting to access prescription contraception and other family-planning services. And he does not want his children to obtain or use these drugs or services unless he consents.”
Kacsmaryk ruled that Title X goes against the father’s rights per the code, as well as the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment, and it doesn’t allow him to have the “fundamental right to control and direct the upbringing of his minor children.” He also <a href="https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/family-planning-services-limited-after-parental-rights-ruling" target="_blank" rel="noopener">noted</a> that the government didn&#8217;t have a compelling reason to violate the father&#8217;s rights.
Kacsmaryk’s ruling sets apart the confidentiality section of the Title X law. The judge did not put forward an injunction banning clinics from giving out birth control to minors without the consent of parents. An appeal is <a href="https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/family-planning-services-limited-after-parental-rights-ruling" target="_blank" rel="noopener">anticipated</a> and the Title X administrator in the state reportedly said it is waiting to get more information from the Department of Health and Human Services about how to move forward. The effects of the ruling remain to be seen. 
On December 8, Kacsmaryk <a href="https://www.bloomberglaw.com/public/desktop/document/DeandavBecerraetalDocketNo220cv00092NDTexApr102020CourtDocket/3?doc_id=X7VK4BPU0TI971A385NTH61B573" target="_blank" rel="noopener">granted</a> the motion of the plaintiff and rendered summary judgment. In a conclusion of that order, the judge noted that &#8220;[d]efendants&#8217; administration of the Title X program violates the constitutional right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children and Texas Family Code.&#8221;
Organizations such as Planned Parenthood and the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association both spoke out against the decision. 
“Despite the fact that the right to contraceptive access is protected by the U.S. Constitution for all, including adolescents, this ruling seeks to lay the foundation to undo that right,” Clare Coleman, president and CEO of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, said in a statement.
“Title X-funded providers are considered highly trusted sources of health care information for their patients, and not being able to access confidential care will block a critical pathway to essential health services for young people,” she stated. 
“Opponents of reproductive rights are not satisfied with overturning Roe–they want to take away birth control from young people, and restrict access to essential sexual and reproductive health care wherever they can,” Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood, said.
According to the <a href="https://opa.hhs.gov/grant-programs/title-x-service-grants/about-title-x-service-grants" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Office of Population Affairs under the Department of Health and Human Services</a>, “Title X recipients provide a broad range of medically approved Family planning services.&#8221; This involves natural family planning procedures, as well as contraception approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The services include “[p]regnancy prevention and birth spacing,” “[p]regnancy testing and counseling,” “[o]ther preconception health services,” and more. 
It added that the services of Title X are “voluntary, confidential, and provided regardless” of whether or not someone can pay for them.

8357912F-1B33-4DB0-A0BD-CC0CEDED3B00_1_105_c

Texas Federal Judge Rules Against Title X Allowing Teens To Get Birth Control Without Telling Parents

U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk Rules Against Title X Allowing Teens To Get Birth Control Without Telling Parents

Courts

Parenting

Texas

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