WDI USA Continues to Fail on Abortion Rights

As the assault on women's freedom of movement, lives, health, and bodily autonomy rages on, WDI USA remains myopically focused solely on gender identity issues.

The fallout from last month’s Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned abortion rights, is grotesque and unrelenting, with radical right wing politicians, media personalities, and activists vying to see who can go furthest to humiliate, degrade, and physically endanger women and girls through forced childbearing. Consider last week alone: On Monday, the Department of Health and Human Services, in response to President Biden’s Executive Order on abortion access, issued a guidance affirming that abortions as emergency care are legal, and that federal law overrides state law in such cases. In states where abortion is tightly restricted, some physicians are delaying treatment for women miscarrying until her condition deteriorates to a point where abortion is deemed necessary to save her life, in order not to fall afoul of the law. By Thursday, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton sued the Biden administration over the guidance, claiming that it violated the state’s “sovereign interest.”

On Wednesday facts emerged verifying the story of a 10-year-old girl taken across state lines for an abortion after she’d been raped. Even outlets usually considered “mainstream” had cast doubt on the story, with the Wall Street Journal publishing an editorial entitled, “An Abortion Story Too Good To Confirm,” and Washington Post writer Glenn Kessler noting that the story had a single source, and asserting that abortions for 10-year-olds are “pretty rare,” yet reporting in the same article that in 2020, 52 Ohio girls under the age of 15 had abortions. Once the girl’s rapist was arrested, the mob turned on the physician who had performed the procedure, insinuating she hadn’t filed the proper paperwork, (she had), and Indiana attorney general Todd Rokita vowing to investigate her.

On Friday, every Republican member of the House of Representatives, and one Democrat, voted against the Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA) which would enshrine abortion rights. All but three House Republicans voted against a bill protecting interstate travel to obtain abortions. In the Senate, James Lankford (R-OK) blocked a vote on a bill to protect interstate travel. On Saturday Idaho Republicans voted by a nearly four-to-one margin to reject an amendment to their party platform that would allow abortions to save the life of the mother.

Neither the US chapter of Women’s Declaration International (WDI USA), nor their president Kara Dansky, had anything to say about abortion rights and women’s health and safety the entire week, excepting Dansky’s complaint about the term “pregnant people.” Nothing on twitter, their Facebook page, their website blog, or Dansky’s own blog on Substack.

WDI USA has a history of failing to advocate for abortion rights, despite affirming that Article 3 of the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights, the founding document of their organization, upholds such rights. Last March WDI USA refused to support the WHPA due to gender identity language in the bill, such as “people with the capacity for pregnancy.” They continue to do so despite changing political conditions that include overturning Roe, evermore draconian abortion restrictions at the state level, and changes in the text of the bill to de-emphasize transgender language and affirm that abortion rights are a women’s issue. 

Following the leaked draft of the Dobb’s decision in May, Senate Democrats deleted a section “clarifying that while the [WHPA] referred to women, it was meant to protect the rights of ‘every person capable of becoming pregnant’” in last ditch effort to get a couple of Republicans to vote “yes.” The most recent House version notes that abortion access is “critical to the health of every person capable of becoming pregnant,” but also states that women are “the majority of people targeted and affected,” and that abortion restrictions harm the “autonomy, dignity, and equality of women, and their ability to participate in the social and economic life of the nation.”

What did energize the leadership of WDI USA last week was the news Saturday that a federal judge in Tennessee issued a temporary injunction blocking implementation of Department of Education guidance on Title IX issued in response to the Biden administration’s 2021 Executive Order on LGBT discrimination. The Court granted the stay, saying that the rules on gender identity appear to conflict with Title IX’s prohibitions on sex-based discrimination. Thus, the new rules cannot be enforced without going through a “semi-legislative process.” Dansky and WDI USA vice president Lauren Levey quickly organized a webinar to celebrate and discuss the ruling.

According to Dansky, WDI USA “played a role” in the decision. She reported to webinar attendees that although their amicus brief was not admitted into evidence, “we have to assume” that the judge took it into consideration anyway, because in its rejection, the Court “made abundantly clear that it had read every word of our brief and it understood the points that we were making.” 

Noting that the injunction applies in the 20 states that were plaintiffs in the case, Dansky told viewers:

If you are a woman or a girl living in one of those 20 states, you are not subjected to the Biden orders from 2021 that allow men to pretend to be women. So, congratulations! Seriously, congratulations, women and girls who live in those states. This is a massive win for you… You are no longer subject to these tyrannical, horrible, lying orders that the Biden administration issued in 2021.

Levey noted that the plaintiffs were all red states, and that WDI USA has "concentrated our state legislative advocacy work in those states." Levey was referring to state legislative testimonies that WDI USA writes and presents to oppose or support bills on issues including pediatric medical transition, banning trans-identified males from women’s sports, and keeping private spaces such as changing rooms and restrooms female-only. WDI USA coordinates this work with a group called the Title IX coalition that includes Save Women’s Sport as well as anti-abortion, anti-feminist organizations such as Concerned Women for America (CWA), Heritage Foundation, and Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).

Levey went on to make an astonishing analogy. She speculated that:

We're going to have two countries side by side and one of them is going to recognize gender identity and the other one is going to recognize sex as we understand it… One is going to protect women on the basis of sex and the other is not going to protect women. It's going to protect men who lie about their sex and this is going to be a living example, side by side, of these two ways of going forward, and I think that's really going to be valuable to us.

The only thing that I can think of that comes anywhere close to it in American history as I know it is when there were slave states and free states. You had this living example, side by side, of what enslavement looked like, and then you had the possibility of no enslavement… and there was this incredible tension between the two parts of the country. I kind of think that this is going to be very, very undermining to the proponents of gender identity going forward because it's going to be a living example of justice for women.

Of the 20 states that Levey describes as “free” states where women are “protected,” six have banned abortion entirely, with very limited exceptions. Three of the six allow abortion only to spare the life of the mother, with the other three allowing for health of the mother as well. None of the six allow abortions in cases of rape and incest. Four more of the twenty have laws pending that would ban abortion, with limited exceptions, and another three allow abortion only up to 6 weeks of pregnancy. A fourth has a “heartbeat” law pending that would also limit abortions to 6 weeks. Congressional representatives from all 20 of the plaintiff states voted against a House bill that would protect interstate travel to obtain an abortion. The lawmaker who blocked a Senate vote on a bill to protect interstate travel is from Oklahoma, one of the 20 states.

In what universe can restricting women’s travel and bodily autonomy be construed as “freedom”? Levey presents here a stunning reversal, where “free” states for women are those that advocate restricting women’s freedom of movement and promote forced childbearing, while “slave” states are those that require federally funded educational institutions to allow individuals to use facilities, and compete in sport, according to their “gender identity.” While the latter is an affront to women’s intelligence, and an infringement of our rights, the former is actual slavery.

Slavery is a condition of forced servitude, where individuals’ freedom of movement is constrained in order to exploit their labor. Prize-winning feminist historian Gerda Lerner describes in The Creation of Patriarchy how human groups learned to enslave one another by exploiting the reproductive and sexual capacity of women captured in war.

The development of agriculture in the Neolithic period fostered the inter-tribal "exchange of women,” not only as a means of avoiding incessant warfare by the cementing of marriage alliances but also because societies with more women could produce more children…

Women themselves became a resource… exchanged or bought in marriages for the benefit of their families; later, they were conquered or bought in slavery, where their sexual services were part of their labor and where their children were the property of their masters. In every known society it was women of conquered tribes who were first enslaved, whereas men were killed. It was only after men had learned how to enslave the women of groups who could be defined as strangers, that they learned how to enslave men of those groups and, later, subordinates from within their own societies. Thus, the enslavement of women, combining both racism and sexism, preceded the formation of classes and class oppression (p212-13).

In a recent essay, Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale, also described prohibitions on abortion as “slavery:”

Women who cannot make their own decisions about whether or not to have babies are enslaved because the state claims ownership of their bodies and the right to dictate the use to which their bodies must be put. 

WDI USA claims to be a radical feminist organization but their focus and work belies that claim. Radical feminists locate the “root” of women’s oppression in the exploitation of our sexual and reproductive capacity. Any project for women’s liberation must address women’s sovereignty over their own bodies and the conditions under which we do reproductive labor. Beyond that, a true feminist agenda analyzes and addresses the systemic nature of our oppression.

There is something very wrong with an erstwhile “feminist” organization that can get to a point where its leaders describe states with viciously anti-woman laws as “living examples of justice for women.” WDI USA’s single-issue obsession renders them insensitive to the dangerous situation that is developing for American women and girls, and blinds them to the larger agenda of their anti-feminist allies on gender identity issues. That crowd is coming for contraception and lesbian and gay rights next, and it’s hard to imagine that WDI USA will notice or care.

Update: On July 25th, one week after this article was posted, WDI USA sent an action alert asking signatories to contact their Senators to urge them to support bills to protect interstate travel to obtain an abortion, and to protect access to contraception.