As the electoral dust of 2024 settles, newly elected lawmakers will begin shaping their policy agendas for 2025. Republicans have a unique opportunity to pass meaningful policy initiatives to bring the much-desired change Americans voted for.
This election was contentious and divisive, but as we look to a new Congress and administration, we should look for opportunities for consensus and unity.
As former Republican members of Congress committed to working across party lines to advance center-right policies, our advice to incoming lawmakers is to prioritize the issues that matter most to Americans.
We are also parents, who know the joys and challenges of raising a family. And we believe all fellow Americans who want to, should be able to share in that most fulfilling of human experiences and build their families — in whatever ways are best for them.
Becoming parents is easier for some than for others. Timing is an issue for many prospective parents, who for economic, health, emotional or other reasons aren’t yet in a position to have children. Other families who want to start a family may find themselves unable to for various reasons and they opt for adoption. Still others will turn to in-vitro fertilization, where a woman’s eggs are fertilized outside her body, or other alternative methods.
What all of us have in common is that having children is the most important and meaningful decision we make. We don’t need the government to intrude in what are mainly medical areas. Rather the government can be helpful through a tax code that supports families or provides a broader range of modern health care options.
This is not only a woman’s issue. It’s an American issue, and as Republicans who believe in safeguarding individual liberty not only from foreign enemies but from unnecessary infringement by our own government, we hold that the right of all American families to self-determination is self-evident.
Our Constitution protects that right, and the continued success of our society depends on respecting our freedom to make our life’s most important decisions, including about our healthcare, in ways that make the most sense for us without being hindered by the government. That is especially important in regard to the decision of when and how to have children.
Ours is a diverse, contentious society. It’s hard to get large majorities of Americans to agree on most public policy issues. But one issue that enjoys overwhelming support from Republicans, Democrats and independents is access to affordable contraceptives and IVF treatment.
In polling sponsored by the center-right nonprofit Centerline Liberties, there is overwhelming, universal and bipartisan support for affordable contraception, with supermajorities across all partisan lines in favor of protecting and expanding access to contraception and net positive support across all key demographic groups.
Again, this level of support argues persuasively against categorizing these questions as strictly “women’s issues.” Of course, they’re important to women, but men are likewise extremely supportive of efforts to protect and expand access to contraception. Seventy-five percent of men (and 63 percent of Republican men) say it is good for society that public funds provide women with increased access to contraception.
More than two-thirds of respondents support protecting access to IVF. Ninety percent of men agree (and 57 percent of men strongly agree) that “all people in the U.S. should be able to both afford and have access to (it).” Ninety-one percent agree (58 percent strongly) with the issue when it is framed as an individual right.
Seventy-three percent of respondents agree that public funding for programs that increase access to contraceptives and family planning services is generally a good thing for our society. That number includes 61 percent of Republicans and 73 percent of independents. Their appeal is prevalent nationwide, including in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. Roughly 50 percent of voters in those states believe it to be a very good thing.
Republicans have traditionally boasted that we are the pro-family party. What questions are more important to healthy families than when and how to begin their family? That seems so blindingly obvious to us, and to so many Americans, particularly when those decisions are cast as a question of individual liberty, that it is politically foolish to deny it.
Ninety-one percent of all voters (including 86 percent of Republicans and 91 percent of independents) agree that “Every individual has a right to make and carry out one’s own healthcare decisions on contraception and fertility treatment.”
As former Republican officeholders, and more importantly, as proud American parents, we urge our fellow Republicans and all Americans to support the fundamental right of every American family to make the decisions they deem best to ensure their health and happiness.
Barbara Comstock, a Virginia Republican, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 2015 to 2019. Charlie Dent, a Pennsylvania Republican, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 2005-2017.
