Sen. Lisa Murkowski voted in favor of the Right to Contraception Act, which failed to advance in the Senate on Wednesday. It needed 60 votes to end a filibuster and move forward, and it had just 51 votes, with Murkowski and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine siding, as is their way, with the Democrats.
Murkowski then produced a video in which she declared, “a woman has a right to contraception.”
Is contraception a right under the U.S. Constitution? It’s a novel interpretation. Even food and shelter is not a guaranteed right, like the right to pursue happiness, as mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, and the right to free speech, to keep firearms, privacy and to not have to house soldiers in your home.
The government doesn’t buy people firearms, even though the right to bear arms is mentioned in the Constitution.
But the Democrats, Murkowski, and Collins believe that there is a right to either a contraption-type contraception, such as IUDs or condoms, or chemical contraception, such as birth control pills; neither were safely available during the time the nation was founded. The authors of the Constitution in 1787 would never have imagined such a right developing 237 years later.
Murkowski then said in her video that the way to reduce the number of abortions is to make contraception a right, and explained that this is a position she has had “for a very long time.”
Sen. Dick Durbin agreed it’s a right.
“It would codify the right to contraception that the Supreme Court first recognized in Griswold. It would also allow patients, providers, and the Justice Department to go to court to enforce these rights,” Durbin said.
He was saying the quiet part out loud: Taxpayers would be required to pay for birth control for all women and, presumably, men. Free condoms and vasectomies for all?
A few days earlier Murkowski said women have a right to abortion, which she sanitized as “access to reproductive health care.” She said women in Alaska are worried about access to reproductive, even though the Dobbs decision by the Supreme Court leaves abortion laws up to the states and the State of Alaska has one of the most liberal abortion legal interpretations in the country.
Rights that are guaranteed by the Constitution do not include things like the right to shoes, lava lamps, gym memberships, or even health care itself. Obamacare expanded and warped that constitutional understanding and made health care institutionalized as a right, which means taxpayers now have to pay for things like transgender surgeries and after-surgery care, and all other manner of health care, which has become an ever-expanding field.
This is the Democrat theme consistently voiced since the days of slavery — that people have a right to the fruits of the labor of another person.
In this case, if birth control pills are a right, then they must be provided free by force of law to everyone who wants them, and they must be paid for by everyone who doesn’t want to pay for them.
Those who get behind on their taxes to the government that provides these “rights” at a cost to someone else may find their wages garnished and their homes foreclosed on, because while things like birth control is a “right,” your income and your home are still not a right.
