Many voters say that contraception and abortion access are central to their vote this November. In fact, the issue of abortion is rising to the top of the list for single-issue voters. But when did women’s healthcare even become so political?

Reproductive rights are a hot-button issue in America, and since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, the chasm between Democratic politicians who support abortion rights and Republicans seeking to restrict abortion access has widened. But, believe it or not, women’s healthcare and abortion rights weren’t always political, or controversial.

In the early 1970s, evangelicals largely considered abortion a “Catholic issue.” One of the largest evangelical denominations in the country, the Southern Baptist Convention, was on the record supporting abortion in a number of cases — in fact, many Southern Baptists saw the Roe decision as drawing a necessary line between church and state. It wasn’t until the rise of the ultra-conservative religious right in the 1980s that abortion became politicized as a means to energize voters. Susan Shaw, professor of women, gender and sexuality studies at Oregon State University, chronicled the history of the Southern Baptists’ attitudes to abortion in a 2022 essay for The Conversation, writing, “Fifty years ago, the Convention’s views of abortion were guided by concerns about government intrusion into a private matter between a woman and her health care provider. Today, the Convention has fully embraced governmental control of a woman’s decisions about reproduction.” 

It’s dizzying to contemplate how quickly legislation has shifted around women’s bodies and our reproductive choices in the two years since Roe was overturned; today, 22 states ban or restrict abortion earlier in pregnancy than the standard set by Roe v. Wade in 1973. And the discourse around “childless cat ladies,” as GOP vice-presidential nominee JD Vance termed us (I’m happily childfree by choice) supposedly running the country and making everyone miserable feels nothing short of absurd. However we need to pay attention to this kind of rhetoric, because Republicans have outlined plans to restrict reproductive freedoms and women’s healthcare choices even further if Donald Trump is elected president again.

During this week’s presidential debate, Vice President Harris attacked former President Donald Trump for his association with Project 2025, a detailed blueprint from a think tank called the Heritage Foundation that aims to implement a conservative agenda in a second Trump administration. Trump has sought to distance himself from the controversial plan to overhaul the government, but it’s tough to overlook his close relationships with the architects behind the project, many of whom are his former officials — and the fact that his nominee for VP wrote the introduction to a Heritage Foundation report that promoted an abortion ban and criticized IVF.

How would Project 2025 affect women’s healthcare and reproductive rights? Well, for starters, it would take away access to free emergency contraception for 48 million women, according to a state-by-state analysis from the Center for American Progress. (BTW, emergency contraception works to prevent pregnancy before it starts by delaying ovulation. It is not abortion medication.) Project 2025 calls for the Food and Drug Administration to reverse its 24-year-old approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, and restrict access to abortion medications by enforcing an 1873 law called the Comstock Act, which prohibits any drugs or instruments used in abortions from being sent through the mail. 

The Project 2025 policy book also outlines a plan to get rid of the Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force established by the Biden administration, and recommends that the Health and Human Services Department should "maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family."

Biblically based? Excuse us? Besides the fact that there are millions upon millions of Americans who are decidedly not Christian — seven percent of us identify with a non-Christian religion, while twenty-two percent say they have no religious preference, according to Gallup — there’s a little thing called the First Amendment in the Constitution that says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Ahem.

The government has zero business intervening in what a woman chooses to do with her body. Reproductive freedom and sexual wellness are central to a happy, healthy society. Women’s healthcare shouldn’t be on the ballot — we sure aren’t voting about what men can do with their bodies! — but, since it is, we hope you’ll vote to protect the ability of women to make our own health decisions this November.

Follow MaryJane at @itsthemayoforme on Instagram and TikTok.