If he's elected president, Donald Trump will try to take away your birth control. We know this because he spent his first term in office attacking contraception access from many angles and, in many cases, successfully cutting people off from this necessary health care. His efforts were so dogged, it likely contributed to the alarming national outbreak of syphilis the country is experiencing.
The plain facts need to be stated up front because right now there's a "controversy" over whether Trump has designs on taking away birth control. Trump, in his usual manner, is fueling this dispute with his favorite tactic: lying.
The current dust-up started Tuesday morning when Trump told Pittsburgh's
KDKA News that
he's open to letting states ban birth control. "Things really do have a lot to do with the states, and some states are going to have different policy than others," he said when asked about proposals to ban contraception. He also claimed, falsely, that his campaign planned to release "a policy on that very shortly, and I think it’s something that you’ll find interesting." This is the standard lie Trump uses when asked about abortion. For instance,
Trump told Time on April 12 that he'd release an abortion policy plan in "two weeks." It's been six weeks and no sign of it.
It will never come. This is just Trump's way of evading having to weigh in on a sticky issue. He'd like low-information swing voters to believe he won't ban abortion, but, of course, he wants his evangelical base to have faith that he will sign any ban that's on offer. Reporters know that this "two weeks away" lie is code for "the Christian right gets whatever they want." So when he said it with regards to contraception, it was properly understood as a covert promise to go along with any proposed ban or restriction.