By ROBERT FARLEY | FACTCHECK.ORG
A super PAC supporting Sen. Lisa Murkowski claims in several TV ads that her top challenger, Kelly Tshibaka, “wants to ban birth control in the mail.” Tshibaka has said she would ban the sale of the morning-after pill via the mail, but the ads leave the misleading impression she would ban all forms of birth control.
The ads attacking Tshibaka come from Alaskans for L.I.S.A. (Leadership in a Strong Alaska), a super PAC that backs Murkowski. The first two 30-second ads each feature a different woman who says some version of, “I’ve seen the video. Kelly Tshibaka says she wants to ban birth control in the mail. That’s nuts.”
The issue of contraceptives by mail is particularly crucial in Alaska, where many of the “communities are located off the road system,” another video states.
A third ad follows the same script, but includes a clip of Tshibaka saying, “I would want to make it illegal to send those pills at all.” A woman in that ad then says, “Kelly Tshibaka says she wants to ban birth control in the mail. That’s nuts.”
The video of Tshibaka is from a small campaign event on March 12. The quality of the audio in the video is not great. We could not make out the entirety of the question Tshibaka was asked, but the gist of it was about making it illegal to order abortion pills by mail, not birth control pills.
“So, yeah, I need to think about that more,” Tshibaka said. “I would want to make it illegal to send those pills at all, so you can’t order those pills. And I know from my time working at Postal Service that we can actually stop sending those pills through the mail. We can actually block them in the mail. If we were to pass that kind of act, the Postal Service can block them using data because I was on the team that developed those models. Creating, so a criminal act of a recipient, the drugmaker, the sender, there’s a whole chain there, right, that we would have to prosecute. It’s an interesting question that I’ll need to think through.”
That clearly marks Tshibaka’s support for banning the distribution via the mail of what is commonly referred to as “the abortion pill,” which is mifepristone taken in conjunction with misoprostol. The Food and Drug Administration approved the medication to end a pregnancy through 10 weeks of gestation.
A man in the audience at the March 12 campaign event then asked Tshibaka if “birth control fall[s] underneath that same category.”
Tshibaka says “it would.” Tshibaka then mentioned abortifacients (drugs that induce abortions), but due to the poor quality of the video, it was unclear to us which forms of birth control she was saying that she believes fall into that category. We reached out to the Tshibaka campaign for clarification, but we got no response.
However, a video posted on Tshibaka’s campaign website makes clear that she considers the Plan B pill, and similar medication known as morning-after pills, to be a pill “that cause[s] abortions” and therefore one that she favors banning via mail. A morning-after pill is taken within five days of unprotected sex to reduce the chance of pregnancy.
Read the rest of this column at FactCheck.org.
