The Republican assault on sexual freedom is underway

While denouncing the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling on in vitro fertilization last week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made a point of tying the ban to the misogyny being embraced within the conservative movement.

The ruling effectively classifies frozen embryos as people under state law and prohibits owners of embryos from discarding them, even if an owner isn’t planning on implanting the embryo. Paired with the conservative movement’s ongoing attack on contraception, the IVF ruling highlights what Ocasio-Cortez described as “a patriarchal theocracy” that’s gaining ground in the conservative movement. The movement’s endgame, as the New York Democrat described it, is to deny women their sexual freedom by ensuring that sex is used primarily for pregnancy, rather than pleasure.

She explained it all to MSNBC’s Alex Wagner:

I want to be very clear that this was intentional and that this is exactly what Republicans have been going for. We’ve seen it. You have the Heritage Foundation, you have lots of folks who are on record saying, you know, not only do they want to go after abortion, not only do they want to go after reproductive freedom, they’re going after IVF. They’re going after contraception. We have a mifepristone ruling that is coming down from the Supreme Court and Clarence Thomas enriching himself from the same folks who are saying that they are trying to control women’s bodies quite explicitly. And going beyond that, they also want to control what they call ‘recreational sex.’

Ocasio-Cortez is smart to put these campaigns against reproductive freedom in the context of a broader assault on sexual independence more generally. The effort to restrict access to birth control is based in the belief — long and widely held among many in the conservative movement — that reproductive freedom enables sexual freedom and that this has some kind of corrosive impact on society.

Underscoring Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks, the conservative Heritage Foundation last year tweeted a video of British writer Mary Harrington advocating against the birth control pill and in favor of “rewilding sex, returning the danger to sex, returning the intimacy and, really, the consequentiality to sex.”

Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo added his two cents, writing on X last week: “‘Recreational sex’ is a large part of the reason we have so many single-mother households” and that “the point of sex is to create children.”

Last year, Hadley Manning of the right-wing Independent Women’s Forum bemoaned how contraception has created a “culture of cheap sex that has created mass confusion, pain and regret.”

Controversial conservative faith leader Joshua Butler wrote last year that birth control “intentionally denies a fruitfulness that points forward to the future hope of the kingdom” and that sex while using contraceptives makes participants “unable to bear witness to the work of the Spirit in creation and redemption.”

These comments should give you some sense of the mindset that’s becoming par for the course in a right-wing movement that is fundamentally misogynistic in both its rhetoric and its policy. Conservatives want to target no-fault divorce and make it difficult for women to leave their partners, and they already have targeted affirmative action and diversity programs that have worked to give women access to jobs and education outside the home. And their attacks on reproductive choice are fundamentally a war on sexual freedom — based in a belief that women are meant to be mothers and not much else.