Life's Pleasures Quote by Patty Murray

Murray’s line is built to do two things at once: draw a bright moral boundary and indict a bureaucratic process as ideological capture. By saying “redefining birth control as abortion,” she isn’t litigating pharmacology; she’s accusing the FDA of changing the rules of the cultural fight. “Redefining” signals an administrative sleight of hand, a move that doesn’t look like a ban but functions like one. The subtext is that the real battlefield is language. If contraceptives can be labeled “abortion,” the regulatory machinery and the stigma attached to abortion can be applied to products that have long lived in a separate social category.

The second sentence sharpens the charge: “setting the bar higher.” That phrase sounds technocratic, even responsible, which is precisely why it’s politically useful. Murray flips it into a critique of selective rigor, implying the agency is using standards not as neutral safeguards but as a choke point. It’s a classic Washington argument: the policy isn’t being killed in public; it’s being suffocated in process.

Context matters. In the post-Dobbs era, agencies like the FDA become proxies for legislative gridlock, and “bar higher” becomes shorthand for access delayed, clinics burdened, and patients priced out. Murray’s intent is to rally her coalition by recasting a regulatory dispute as a rights dispute: if the FDA can blur the line between contraception and abortion, then nothing in reproductive healthcare is safe from partisan reclassification.