GOP Governor Vetoes Right to Contraception… for a 2nd Time

Glenn Youngkin’s veto was expected, but it's a chilling reminder of the GOP's war on birth control, which has quickly become the anti-abortion movement’s target since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.

By Kylie Cheung | May 5, 2025 | 4:02pm

Photo: Getty Images Politics

GOP Governor Vetoes Right to Contraception… for a 2nd Time

For a second straight year in a row, Virginia’s rabidly pro-Trump governor, Glenn Youngkin, has vetoed a bill called the Virginia Right to Contraception Act, introduced in January. The bill would codify a right to use and prescribe the full range of contraception, including birth control pills, IUDs, and emergency contraception. In 2024, Youngkin vetoed the same bill, claiming it was unnecessary—all while proving with his veto precisely why it was necessary. On Friday, he did it again.

Youngkin’s veto was ultimately expected. In March, the governor proposed an amendment that would establish an exception for health care providers to deny coverage of contraception for “religious or conscientious objections”—obviously, the legislature’s Democratic majority shot this down. “There is no question that access is protected today under the Constitution… Thus, this legislation is unnecessary in its current form,” Youngkin said in a statement on Friday, recycling his argument from 2024. He also cited the exclusion of his bogus exception: “The General Assembly refused to adopt my reasonable amendments which included the addition of a conscience clause exemption that would protect religious freedom … any legislative action on contraception must be coupled with clear conscience protections and must preserve the rights of families to make personal decisions in accordance with their beliefs.”

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But expected or not, Youngkin’s veto is a chilling reminder of the rising GOP war on birth control, which has quickly become the anti-abortion movement’s next target since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.

Virginia’s Right to Contraception Act “was a commonsense bill to safeguard a basic freedom, one that shouldn’t be up for debate in the first place,” State Sen. Lamont Bagby, D-Richmond, the chair of the Democratic Party of Virginia, said in a statement on Friday. He continued, “[Youngkin’s] veto sends a clear and dangerous message: Republicans will always leave your freedoms, and your health care, on the chopping block.”

Youngkin’s second straight veto comes just one year after dozens of U.S. Senate Republicans blocked the federal Right to Contraception Act. Some, led by Iowa’s Sen. Joni Ernst, falsely claimed the bill was a backdoor to protect abortion rights by wrongly equating emergency contraception with abortion. And, before that, almost 200 House Republicans in 2022 vetoed an identical bill.

At the same time as Youngkin’s veto last week, Chris Fleming, a spokesperson for the advocacy group Americans for Contraception, issued a statement pointing to how Tennessee’s Republican governor just last month “signed bipartisan legislation protecting contraception rights—proving that even some conservative states understand what’s at stake.”

While that’s true, large swaths of Republicans in the Tennessee legislature voted against the bill; some argued that emergency contraception is an “abortifacient.” The same bill offers protections for IVF, which some Tennessee Republicans argued would endanger embryos—a dangerous, pro-fetal personhood position—while other Republicans billed it as a way to compromise and protect rights that already exist. Also, just last year, Tennessee Republicans blocked an identical bill by claiming it would limit the totality of the state’s abortion ban, implicitly equating birth control and IVF with abortion.

Last year, in fact, Republicans on the state and federal levels alike seemed united in attacking birth control, from Trump admitting he was “looking at” federal restrictions on the campaign trail, to Senate Republicans hosting top anti-abortion activists to testify before the Senate that emergency contraception is an abortifacient. Now, unsurprisingly, the Trump administration is targeting funding for family planning; last month, the administration froze over $65 million in Title X grants for state Planned Parenthood chapters and other reproductive care providers across the country. Trump and GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson last week pledged to pass a sweeping budget bill to broadly defund Planned Parenthood and reallocate that funding to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers, which don’t provide health care and exist to prey on, deceive, and surveil potential abortion seekers.

So, that’s the context in which Youngkin has yet again blocked a bill to establish Virginians’ right to access basic family planning care.

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