The Great Backlash is Upon Us: Women’s Reproductive Rights Are Under Assault

San Diego Women’s March, Jan. 2017

By Jim Miller and Kelly Mayhew

The war on women is on.

Alabama, Georgia, Ohio, Missouri, and, soon, Louisiana, will join several other states to enact draconian legislation aiming to criminalize abortion, and, by extension, women’s reproductive freedom. The purported endgame is to wave a red flag under the noses of the Supreme Court to get them to overturn Roe v. Wade and abolish legal abortion in the U.S. once and for all.

As Michelle Goldberg put it in the New York Times :

“You can see, in the anti-abortion movement, a mood of triumphant anticipation. Decades of right-wing politics have all led up to this moment, when an anti-abortion majority on the Supreme Court could end women’s constitutional protection against being forced to carry a pregnancy and give birth against their will.”

Make no mistake, this is not about “life.” If it were, gun owners would not have more rights than school children, the death penalty would be abolished, and we’d be fighting like hell to stop catastrophic climate change. No, these laws are about erasing women and their bodies and criminalizing healthcare providers like Planned Parenthood.

Like the political and legal attacks on immigrants and workers that preceded this round of barbaric legislative assaults on women’s reproductive rights, these misogynist laws are part of the systemic rollback of the gains made by women, people of color, and working people over the last century.

The great backlash is upon us in earnest.

As we head into a primary season where the leading candidate on the Democratic side continues to wax poetic about the good old days of bipartisanship, the events of last week serve as a harsh reminder that the only good old days the American Right cares about are those before many of us had any of the rights that too many of us came to take for granted.

Let this sink in for a minute: as a result of some of this new reactionary legislation, in some places in America, a rapist might receive a lesser punishment than a woman who aborts a pregnancy that is a product of a rape. We have a president who feels he can grab women by the pussy whenever he feels like it and lawmakers who think they own and control women’s uteruses.

The lovers of “life” shrug as the planet dies and offer “thoughts and prayers” for dead school children after mass shootings, while they relentlessly work to criminalize women for thinking they have the right to determine what they can do with their own bodies.

Indeed, the disgusting irony of how much of this legislation is framed is that by outlawing abortion, states are defending women.  As Missouri’s governor tweeted after state legislators passed their anti-abortion bill: “Thanks to leaders in the House and Senate, we are one vote away from passing one of the strongest #ProLife bills in the country — standing for life, protecting women’s health, and advocating for the unborn.”

On what planet is the abolishing of women’s control over their bodies a “protection”?

This upside-down world distortion of the truth is part and parcel of Republican efforts to shield their actions behind horrifying rhetoric aimed at obscuring what abortion actually is. Social media has become awash in screaming posts about Democrats’ embrace of “infanticide”—that most abortions are late-term and that “newborn babies” are being left to die or are “executed”.

Never mind that the vast majority—90%–of abortions are performed in the first trimester and that late-term abortions are incredibly rare, traumatic, and done because there’s something terribly wrong with the fetus or the mother is in grave danger. Those are the facts that Republican lawmakers and their supporters don’t want you to know.

Instead, they are drumming up the stuff of nightmares to distract people from the truth because they know they represent the minority.

Meanwhile countless women will suffer, even though most of these bills won’t go in to effect for awhile, if ever, and the Supreme Court may choose to chip away at Roe rather than overturn it outright.

This is personal for millions of women. Many of us have had abortions. Does this mean we’re all criminals now? And what’s next?

Last week could go down in history as a key moment, the beginning of a massive rollback of women’s rights.  If this isn’t the kind of future you want to live in, it’s time to get serious about fighting back. The other side of the aisle doesn’t want to play nice with anyone.

They’re playing for keeps.