The question from the audience was about what she would do about people getting the so-called “morning after” pill through the mail.

“I would want to make it illegal to send those pills at all,” Tshibaka told supporters at a March 12 fundraiser. “So you can’t order those pills.”

“And I know from my time working at postal service that we can actually stop sending those pills through the mail. We can actually block them in the mail. If we were to pass that kind of act, the postal service can block them using data, because I was on the team that developed those models.”

“So a criminal act of a recipient, the drug maker, the sender, there’s a whole chain there, right, that we would have to prosecute. It’s an interesting question that I need to think through.”

Tshibaka also equated the birth control pill with abortion and called for a similar ban. She said, “That is the third step in the birth control process.”

It has become a popular right-wing claim that birth control pills and IUDs, for example, cause abortions.

“A key factor in the politicization of contraceptives and efforts to limit access is inaccurate portrayals of contraceptive methods as abortifacients versus preventors of pregnancy,” University of Wisconsin Professor or Obstetrics and Gynecology Jenny Higgins and three co-authors said in this 2021 review of the matter.

As proposed abortion bans move ahead in some states, the arguments about what constitutes an abortion have intensified, Julie Rovner of Kaiser Health News wrote March 22. She said some abortion opponents want to “bar many forms of birth control and in vitro fertilization, and give embryos property rights, among other things.”

“Other abortion opponents suggest banning forms of birth control they consider ‘abortifacients’ (methods they say cause abortions, such as most intrauterine devices and the “morning-after” pill), while not banning in vitro fertilization. Still others would continue to support most forms of birth control but not the abortion pill mifepristone, which, unlike the morning-after pill, works after a fetus has begun to develop in the womb.”