Lawmakers and advocates resurrected a 20-foot inflatable statue of an IUD outside the state Capitol Tuesday. Speakers gathered around the replica, called Freeda – as in “Free Da Womb” – and called for the Legislature to guarantee Mississippians’ right to contraception amid shifting political winds across the country.
Freeda, a symbol of reproductive autonomy, has visited six countries, over 20 states and more than 50 cities – even attending Burning Man twice. Americans for Contraception, the group touring Freeda, is making its way across the South in honor of the anniversary of a 1965 U.S. Supreme Court decision that established a constitutional right to contraception by recognizing the right to privacy.
In 2022, after the right to abortion was overturned, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas called on the Supreme Court to review the 1965 case, prompting some states to pass laws protecting contraception access.
“My children will have less rights than I had if we don’t do something about it,” said Rep. Zakiya Summers, a Democrat from Jackson who introduced legislation to guarantee access to contraception the last two years. The bill died both years.
Summers and her colleague, Sen. Kamesha Mumford, also a Democrat from Jackson, intend to try again next year to pass a Right to Contraception Act.
Sen. Kamesha B. Mumford, D-Jackson, speaks to a reporter across the street from the state Capitol in Jackson on Tuesday, June 9, 2026. “Freeda Womb,” a 20-foot inflatable IUD, was in Jackson to mark the anniversary of Griswold v. Connecticut, which established a precedent of a constitutional right to contraception. Credit: Richard Lake/Mississippi TodayIn April, after Mississippi lawmakers criminalized a common women’s health medication because of its association with abortion, Mumford spoke out about her personal experience using it to start a family. Threats to contraception are part of the same fight, Mumford said, adding that doctors prescribed her birth control as the first step in her journey with in vitro fertilization, or IVF.
“I’ve never taken birth control to prevent a pregnancy. I’ve always taken it to try to get pregnant,” Mumford told Mississippi Today.
Reproductive health post-Dobbs
In recent years, the reproductive health landscape has shifted considerably, said Mary Ziegler, a law professor and abortion historian at the University of California, Davis. Anti-abortion activists have found common ground with other groups such as pronatalists, who believe people aren’t having enough babies, and people in the Make America Healthy Again movement, who oppose Big Pharma.
Social media helped fuel the connections between these disparate groups, but it was the overturning of the right to abortion that made contraception a natural target.
“What’s politically possible, and what the next big thing is, changed once the right to abortion went away,” Ziegler said.
Those groups also found sympathy with a subset of people who are dissatisfied with their current birth control options, but wouldn’t want to see them disappear. Among sexually active women not using contraception, one in five don’t use birth control because they dislike or worry about the side effects, according to an analysis by KFF. Anti-abortion activists have capitalized on the dissatisfaction and used it as an opportunity to push alternatives to chemical contraception, such as fertility tracking apps – some of which are connected to pro-life ideology.
“There’s history there,” Ziegler said. “Early formulations of the pill were not safe for a lot of people. Early IUDs were not safe for a lot of people. There’s a grain of truth in all of this that they’re using for very different ends.”
Today, birth control methods are safe, but research has stagnated in recent years, Ziegler said. Improving birth control would involve expanding access and research, she said. Instead, it’s likely that the attack on birth control will have the opposite effect.
All of this is unfolding against the backdrop of an overhaul of Title X, a federal program that has been providing money for family planning services to states for over 50 years. In April, the Trump administration introduced preliminary guidelines that would shift the focus from contraception to conception for clinics that receive Title X funding.
Family planning has largely been understood as advancing economic mobility and gender equality.
“It allows women to control so many aspects of our lives – from finishing school to ultimately having healthy pregnancies and healthy births,” said Dana Singiser, a reproductive health strategist representing the nonpartisan organization Americans for Contraception.
That’s especially important in a state such as Mississippi, which consistently has some of the worst health outcomes for mothers and babies. Mississippi earned an ‘F’ grade for its rate of preterm births in 2024, according to a 2025 report card from the March of Dimes, a national nonprofit aimed at improving the health of mothers and babies.
Restrictions on it won’t just stop Mississippians from choosing not to parent. Restrictions may also stop some from starting families.
“It is very rare that a medication only serves one purpose,” Mumford said. “People aren’t one dimensional, and neither is the science that we use to improve their quality of life.”
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