Lauren Boebert once again says something crazy and AOC can’t hold back: After the Colorado Congresswoman said she had a kid because it was less expensive than birth control, her comments were ridiculed by her New York counterpart.
Rep. Lauren Boebert made some comments this week that were controversial even by her standards. And this time, it wasn’t about guns, but rather birth control.
“I left a prescription at a pharmacy once. I went to get birth control … The price was very, very high … And I said, ‘It’s cheaper to have a kid.’ And I left it there, and now I have my third son,” Boebert said in a committee hearing this week.
The comment left a lot of people scratching their heads, including those wondering what the child in question might think of what she said.
It also drew a rebuke from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
“And then she voted against the right to contraception so she could double this problem and give it to the next person,” the Congresswoman known as AOC tweeted over a video of Boebert making the comments.
This was a reference to a piece of legislation called the Right to Contraception Act, which Ocasio-Cortez had sponsored in the last Congress. The bill passed the House but failed to clear the Senate.
It is, needless to say, much more expensive to raise a child than it is to obtain a subscription to birth control pills.
Lauren Boebert Under Siege
The back-and-forth came during a tumultuous time in the Colorado Congresswoman’s personal life. Last week, she announced that she is divorcing her husband of 18 years, although she has defended her soon-to-be ex-husband Jayson in public comments.
Lauren Boebert has strongly disputed claims from a process server that Jayson Boebert was drinking “a tall glass of beer, and cleaning a gun” when the server arrived with the divorce papers, and also that Mr. Boebert was “yelling and using profanities” once he realized he was being served.
“The stories reported about the process server, and even Jayson running over a mailbox are a complete lie,” Boebert tweeted this week. “Jayson doesn’t sit around cleaning guns and he certainly doesn’t drink beer out of a glass, just as much as he doesn’t drink Bud Light.”
Later, Boebert denied rumors that she is dating pastor and country singer Sean Feucht, stating that she couldn’t date a man with “better hair” than her. Feucht denied the rumors as well.
“This is false. And it’s defamatory,” Feucht said on Twitter last week. “I’m giving everyone making this accusation 24 hours to retract and apologize. If you don’t, you’ll hear from my lawyer.”
An organization called American Muckrakers appears to have started the seemingly baseless rumor while posting photos of Boebert and Feucht together at events and has since begun fundraising off of Feucht’s legal threats.
American Muckrakers has been feuding with Boebert for much of her time in Congress, with the group claiming last year — again, without any basis in fact — that Boebert had worked as an escort and had had two abortions. Boebert threatened to sue the group, and they later sued her for defamation.
A CNN fact check in 2022 accused American Muckrakers of making “multiple false claims” about Boebert, and noted that the group’s leader “conceded that the super PAC was wrong when it insisted a photo of another woman posing on a bed is a photo of Boebert.” Also, he admitted that the group was wrong about Boebert having an abortion in 2004, and about the date of a Boebert car accident.
CNN also revealed that the escort site in question had no record of Boebert working with them, and also got in touch with the woman in the photos who had been misidentified as Boebert. And the date when they had claimed Boebert had an abortion was just a few months before the birth of one of her children.
Expertise and Experience: Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.