Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) has repeatedly claimed that former Sen. Scott Brown, her Republican opponent in the race for U.S. Senate there, pushed legislation letting employers deny women coverage for birth control and mammograms. PolitiFact took a look at the birth control coverage claim deemed it “true” while it deemed the mammogram claim “mostly false.”
The attack by Shaheen, which follows a pattern of Democrats attacking Republicans on contraception and women’s issues, centers around an amendment proposed by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) that said employers couldn’t be made to cover “specific items or services” that conflict with the “religious beliefs or moral convictions of the sponsor, issuer, or other entity offering the plan,” according to PolitiFact.
Brown has responded to these attacks by saying that he has always supported women having the ability to get contraception easily. He recently said he has supported that “since I was 18 years old.”
PolitiFact found that Brown, in fact, did support that amendment and thus Shaheen’s claim that Brown supported a proposal that would have prevented women from getting access to birth control as true. It did not, however, find evidence that people have expressed religious objections to mammograms and dubbed that claim “mostly false.”
“Shaheen said Brown “co-sponsored legislation to let employers deny women coverage for birth control,” PolitiFact said. “The amendment, which Brown supported, was written loosely enough to allow a religious-conscience opt-out for birth control — an issue about which there has been a longstanding policy debate on religious and moral grounds. We rate the claim True.”
The TPM Polltracker average finds Shaheen with a 5.9 point lead over Brown.
