AMNA NAWAZ: Earlier this year, the Trump administration scrubbed CDC guidance on birth control from government Web sites and froze $65 million in funding to family planning clinics that provide free or low-cost contraception.
Despite the president's campaign statements that he does not support a ban on birth control, the moves are seen as part of a growing effort to restrict access to certain forms of birth control and to curtail reproductive rights.
For our new series The Next Frontier, special correspondent Sarah Varney reports on where the anti-abortion rights movement is focusing its efforts after the fall of Rome.
ASHLEY KEY, Mother: Reeve (ph), you know you're supposed to have a helmet.
SARAH VARNEY: Saturdays are a whirl at Ashley Key's (ph) home in this Houston suburb.
With three young sons and four dogs, someone is always coming and going.
Growing up an only child, Ashley says she always wanted lots of kids.
ASHLEY KEY: I love being a mom.
I genuinely feel like this is a calling of mine.
SARAH VARNEY: She first started taking birth control pills as a teenager to treat chronic migraines.
But as Ashley got older, she says it allowed her to safely navigate relationships.
ASHLEY KEY: I got to explore dating and deciding who I wanted to have sex with, who I didn't, and who I trusted to make that decision with.
SARAH VARNEY: Today, nearly 47 million women in the U.S. use some form of contraception.
And 89 percent of Americans support access to the pill.
ASHLEY KEY: If I weren't on contraception, I could have been a teenage mom, and that would have been insane for me because I had huge goals for my life.
SARAH VARNEY: Modern contraception has been central to advancing women's equal status.
For example, since the pill was introduced in 1960, female labor force participation increased from 37 percent to more than 57 percent today.
And for decades, the pill remained uncontroversial with broad bipartisan support.
WOMAN: We are the post-Roe generation!
(CHEERING) SARAH VARNEY: But once anti-abortion and conservative legal groups secured a major victory, overturning Roe v. Wade, they shifted their focus beyond abortion, just as social media has brought once fringe ideas about birth control into the public debate.
WOMAN: Most doctors do not tell us the truth about what can happen to us when we're on the pill.
WOMAN: It's honestly psychotic that our medical system is pretending like you can just temporarily change everybody's cycle.
SARAH VARNEY: One of the most influential activists is Lila Rose, founder of the anti-abortion group Live Action.
With just over two million subscribers to her social media accounts and YouTube channel, Rose is an icon to many young pro-life activists.
LILA ROSE, Founder, Live Action: Contraceptive methods are all massively unhealthy.
SARAH VARNEY: Rose tells her followers birth control brings all sorts of dangers, health risks, divorce, and encourages a hookup culture, which she says can lead to abortion when contraception fails.
To be clear, there is no scientific evidence that using hormonal birth control leads to divorce or encourages sexual promiscuity.
LILA ROSE: I think there is a good countermovement happening right now culturally to reject the hookup culture and to reject this promiscuity, laissez-faire attitude about sex, and to say, look, sex is amazing, sex is special.
Because it's amazing and special, it belongs in a lifelong, loving, committed relationship, AKA a marriage, where if there is a child that comes into the world, there's not this panic, oh, let's go get an abortion, instead of saying, oh, now we can build our family together.
KAEDYN GABRIEL, Pro-Life Aggies: I actually learned a lot when I got involved in the pro-life movement from watching her videos.
SARAH VARNEY: Kaedyn Gabriel is a rising junior at Texas A&M in College Station and a member of Pro-Life Aggies.
The group doesn't take a position on birth control, but when we sat down with these students, they echoed messages from pro-life influencers like Lila Rose.
Gracen Sieben graduated in May.
GRACEN SIEBEN, Pro-Life Aggies: I was on birth control for four or five years, and it totally messed up my cycle because it just gives you fake hormones.
If there's any underlying issues, then it doesn't fix them.
It just kind of covers them up.
SARAH VARNEY: Do you feel like you're seeing more content in your feed that supports that idea, your belief.. GRACEN SIEBEN: Yes, but also I follow a lot of people who are in that same -- in the same mind-set as me.
And so I'm getting a lot of that because I follow a lot of those people.
SARAH VARNEY: Hormonal contraception can cause mild side effects, and in rare cases certain ones that contain estrogen can increase the risk of things like high blood pressure, blood clots or stroke.
But the medications and devices are safe and effective and the pill has long been shown to reduce the risk of certain cancers, treat the symptoms of endometriosis and uterine fibroids and prevent anemia.
PROTESTERS: We will abolish abortion!
SARAH VARNEY: The pro-life movement isn't monolithic.
Many have no opposition to birth control.
Others want to severely restrict certain methods that they believe are the same as abortion.
GRACEN SIEBEN: When it's killing another person, then my right to do whatever I want is trumped by that life, because it's a valuable human life.
SARAH VARNEY: According to the Food and Drug Administration and major medical associations, hormonal contraception primarily works by stopping a woman's ovaries from releasing an egg.
But some pro-life activists claim that any hormonal birth control could prevent a fertilized egg from reaching the uterus and they consider that an abortifacient.
That argument is at the heart of the strategy to outlaw certain contraceptives under state abortion bans, and its leaders are reluctant to talk about it.
If abortion is illegal, for instance, in the state of Tennessee, Texas, a bunch of other places from the moment of fertilization, then, therefore, by this logic, there would be vast amounts of birth control that would no longer be legal in the state of Texas or Tennessee.
LILA ROSE: Yes, again, if it's a contraceptive, I don't think there's any issue with having it be legal.
But if it's designed as an abortifacient, then it is a problem.
It's an abortion.
SARAH VARNEY: But if -- I guess what I'm saying is, by your logic... LILA ROSE: It's not my logic.
This is just -- the birth control pill insert says it itself.
So... SARAH VARNEY: Right.
So, by your logic, those forms of birth control would then be illegal, because they would be considered abortifacients.
LILA ROSE: Yes, if it's also designed as an abortifacient, yes.
SARAH VARNEY: So the IUD, emergency contraception, birth control pills would then be illegal?
LILA ROSE: Again, if they're designed as abortifacients, yes.
MARY ZIEGLER, University of California, Davis, School of Law: The very meaning of abortion has been destabilized.
SARAH VARNEY: Mary Ziegler is a law professor at the University of California, Davis.
She says states now not only can ban abortion, but also decide how soon after sexual intercourse those criminal laws apply.
MARY ZIEGLER: We have seen more than 12 states change their definition of abortion in their state statutes since Dobbs.
So I think the more people in legislatures are willing to acknowledge that they are changing what abortion means, the more space that creates to include contraceptives in the definition of abortion.
MAN: Further introduction by Senator Cash (ph) to amend the code related to definitions related to abortions.
SARAH VARNEY: A number of states have tried to restrict access to contraception, from reclassifying widely used methods of birth control as abortion to allowing pharmacists to refuse to provide birth control medication on religious or moral grounds and excluding emergency contraception from state health insurance and sexual assault programs.
(CHEERING) SARAH VARNEY: But anti-abortion victories like the 2021 abortion ban in Texas have emboldened activists to go further, focusing on emergency contraception and IUDs.
JOHN SEAGO, President, Texas Right to Life: Texas is known as having a big ego, but we do think that we're critical to the pro-life movement.
SARAH VARNEY: At the state capitol in Austin, John Seago, president of Texas Right to Life, says his group treads carefully when it comes to birth control.
JOHN SEAGO: There is not some big grand scheme to go after birth control.
There are plenty of other areas right now that we want to prioritize.
The pro-life movement is built on our principles informed by science of when individual human lives begins and that's where we want the legal protection.
SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D-NY): This is not a show vote.
It's a show us who you are vote.
SARAH VARNEY: In reaction to state level efforts to restrict access, Democrats have tried twice to codify the right to contraception into federal law but have been blocked by Republicans.
REP. LIZZIE FLETCHER (D-TX): I think most Americans assume that married couples and single people can use the birth control of their choosing, that that's not the place for the government.
SARAH VARNEY: Representative Lizzie Fletcher, a Democrat from Houston, reintroduced the bill earlier this year.
But with Republicans in control of Congress, it's unlikely to pass.
REP. LIZZIE FLETCHER: The arguments that you're hearing from people in the movement against contraception are really part of a larger movement against our own personal autonomy.
This is about our freedom and our rights as Americans to make these decisions.
SARAH VARNEY: With three boys at home, Ashley Keys has thought a lot about having a girl but she's scared about what the future might look like for her.
ASHLEY KEY: I feel, unfortunately, like it's a double-edged sword.
Like, it's either you have to have children because what's wrong with you if you don't want to have children, what kind of woman are you?
But then say you have children at the wrong time and I can't afford this.
I need government assistance, I need help.
Well, now you're a deadbeat and you shouldn't have gotten pregnant then.
So it's like we can never get it right and it's really sad that we're at this point and that there's so much stigma to everything we do.
SARAH VARNEY: And she feels that judgment even now, as an adult trying to decide if or when to grow her family.
For "PBS News Hour," I'm Sarah Varney in Texas.