WoLF and WHRC USA Silent on Impending Loss of Abortion Rights
I am always struck, in discussions about the regulation of abortion, by how seldom the class of persons whose bodies and health are most intimately involved in pregnancy and childbearing, women and girls, enter into consideration. The focus instead revolves largely around phrases and concepts such as “state interest,” fetal “viability,” and “right to privacy” (the basis for the 1973 Roe v Wade decision), During the recent Supreme Court oral arguments in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the notion of the “right of the people'' to decide by returning the issue to state legislatures emerged. Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart, arguing for the Court to uphold the 2018 Mississippi Gestational Age Act, banning nearly all abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy, exhorted the Justices:
When an issue affects everyone, and when the Constitution does not take sides on it, it belongs to the people.
It was an argument he would reiterate again and again, emphasizing the controversial nature of the issue. About half an hour into the proceedings, Justice Sonia Sotomayor interrupted yet another of Solicitor General Stewart’s impassioned pleas for the “right of the people to decide,” to ask:
When does the life of a woman, and putting her at risk, enter the calculus?
Noting hardships for poor women, and that pregnancy and childbirth carry 14 times greater risk of death for women than does legal abortion, Justice Sotomayor continued:
And now the State is saying to these women, we can choose not only to physically complicate your existence, put you at medical risk, make you poorer by the choice, because we believe… what?
Stewart sidestepped the question:
As far as we’re concerned, [the life of a woman is] there the entire time. Our point is that all of the interests are there the entire time and Roe and Casey improperly prevents states from weighing those interests.
Julie Rikelman, litigation director for the Center for Reproductive Rights, arguing for Jackson Women’s Health, called on the Court to refuse to uphold the Mississippi law citing three reasons: 1) the “high bar” of stare decisis (the legal principle of respecting precedent); 2) the infringement of women’s liberty the law would impose; and 3) the regressive impact forced childbearing would have on women’s equal participation in society.
With respect to women’s liberty, Rikelman argued:
For a state to take control of a woman’s body and demand she go through pregnancy and childbirth, with all the physical risks and life-altering consequences that brings is a deprivation of her liberty. Preserving a woman’s right to make this decision until viability protects her liberty, logically balancing the other interests at stake.
Pregnancy and childbirth is a gritty and brutal business, not for the faint of heart. Women nourish new life with their blood and tissue, their own internal organs are pushed aside to make way for a growing fetus, their bodily systems strained. The most common pregnancy complications are gestational diabetes, placenta previa (in which the placenta totally or partially covers the cervix), and preeclampsia, a condition that causes seriously high blood pressure and can be life-threatening.
Pelvic injuries in labor and delivery are not uncommon. Using MRI techniques developed for use in sport injuries, researchers at the University of Michigan found that 25% of the women in their study population “had fluid in the pubic bone marrow or had sustained fractures resembling sports-related stress.” Up to 15% of the women studied had pelvic injuries that did not heal.
"If an athlete sustained a similar injury in the field, she'd be in an MRI machine in an instant," said Janis Miller, one of the authors and an associate professor at University of Michigan's School of Nursing. "We have this thing where we tell women, 'Well, you're six week postpartum and now we don't need to see you -- you'll be fine. But not all women feel fine after six weeks nor are ready to go back to work, and they aren't crazy."
The US has the highest maternal mortality rate among developed countries, with black women most at risk. (The Black Maternal ”Momnibus” Act was introduced in Congress earlier in the year, but has yet to be passed.) Further, the US maternal mortality rate has been increasing, rather than decreasing, over the last 30 years. Limited access to health care, insufficient access to midwifery care, and lack of guaranteed paid maternity leave have been identified as important factors.
The right to bodily autonomy and control over our sexual and reproductive capacity is fundamental to female liberation. In her classic text, The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), historian Gerda Lerner describes how human groups developed slavery by first enslaving captured women from warring tribes and exploiting their sexual and reproductive capacity:
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. In contrast to the economic needs of hunting/gathering societies, agriculturists could use the labor of children to increase production and accumulate surpluses…
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).
Given that the roots of our oppression lie in the exploitation of our sexual and reproductive capacity, it is rather astonishing that the self-described “unapologetically radical feminist” organization Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) had nothing to say about abortion rights as the Court heard oral arguments in a case that appears likely to overturn Roe v Wade. No statement on their website, no post on their Facebook page, not a tweet, nor a murmur.
The US chapter of Women’s Human Rights Campaign (WHRC USA) also remained eerily silent on the subject, despite Article 3 of their founding document, the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights, calling on states to
ensure that the full reproductive rights of women and girls, and unhindered access to comprehensive reproductive services are upheld.
Outside the Supreme Court, during oral arguments, protesters with various axes to grind waved placards and chanted slogans. Anti-choice activists were the loudest, having the best gear to amplify their voices, chanting, “Hey, hey! Ho, ho, Roe v Wade has got to go!” They had support among some trans activists chanting “Trans rights start at conception!”
Separated from them by the Court police were the pro-choice activists, mostly liberals, but including a small group of less than a dozen from Terf Collective.1 They brandished signs with captions such as “Terfs Take Back Abortion Rights!” and “Adult Human Females Demand Bodily Autonomy.” These slogans, predictably, antagonized the liberals, who proceeded to confront them screaming, “Trans Women Are Women!”
As this spectacle plays out, the radical right inches closer to the goals they set decades earlier. Key organizations in the Council for National Policy (CNP) network, such as the Heritage Foundation and Concerned Women for America (CWA), founded in response to the power and success of second wave feminism, have been working steadily to roll back our hard-won gains.2 The radical right has successfully chipped away at abortion rights for decades, and with former President Donald Trump’s judicial appointments, they are poised to achieve their goal of overturning Roe v Wade.
Donald Trump was not initially seen as presidential material in the eyes of the evangelical groups affiliated with the CNP and upon whom the latter depend to win elections. It was left to CNP luminaries such as Ralph Reed to spruce up the boorish candidate who was not a regular church-goer and had shocked students at Liberty University by swearing - a fineable offense at that school - and misquoting the bible. CNP leaders packaged Trump as someone, not of God, but who could serve as an instrument of God, just as the sixth-century BC emperor Cyrus the Great had done.
Author Anne Nelson describes the crucial 2016 meeting at the Marriott Marquis in New York that won over the evangelicals and gave Trump his marching orders:
They called a thousand fundamentalist leaders to come hear Donald Trump. The leading figures from the Council for National Policy, including Tony Perkins and a number of other figures… set up a meeting where they would introduce Trump to the fold as someone they could work with and get buy-in from their community, which would, they hoped, unlock the resources of the money, media, and ground troops…
When they all emerged, several elements of a major deal had occurred. The first one was that members of the Council for National Policy, including Tony Perkins, would be writing portions of the Republican national platform for the convention… The social issues… were largely going to concern women’s and gender rights…
Perhaps most critically was the question of the Federal judiciary. There is an agreement that Trump would appoint federal judges to the Supreme court, circuit courts, and appeals courts from a list that these organizations had prepared. The list was drawn up by the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, the National Rifle Association.
After winning the 2016 presidential election, Trump proceeded to pack the courts with CNP approved judges.
The Republican congress had created a logjam of appointments for the Obama administration, which resulted in a record number of appointments to be made…Trump has appointed a record number of judges to federal judiciary spots.
The last of these, Amy Coney Barrett, was appointed just weeks prior to the 2020 election, despite the Republicans denying President Obama’s Supreme court nominee nearly one year prior to the 2016 election, claiming such appointments should not occur during an election year. Justice Barrett, a devout Catholic, also belongs to an ultra conservative covenant community called the People of Praise. The group requires women to accept their husbands as their spiritual and household “heads,” has an all-male board of governors, and calls female leaders “handmaids.”
Given the gravity of the situation for US women, and especially women in Mississippi, the poorest state in the union, it is incomprehensible that WoLF and WHRC USA have not made a single statement or taken any action with regard to women’s impending loss of abortion rights. One cannot help but wonder how WoLF’s long-standing relationships with CNP groups such as the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), Heritage Foundation, and Concerned Women for America (CWA) affect their willingness to stand up for women’s right to bodily autonomy. These relationships now extend to WHRC USA via former WoLF board member, and current WHRC president, Kara Dansky.3 At the least, these two erstwhile feminist organizations should be “naming the agent,” as we say, calling out groups such as ADF for attacking female bodily autonomy and reproductive health rights.
Because it doesn’t stop with abortion rights. CNP network groups have already begun the attack on access to birth control. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of ADF’s client in Burwell v Hobby Lobby (2014), exempting, on the basis of religious freedom, the craft store chain from the Affordable Care Act mandate to include birth control in employee health care plans. They will also be coming for our lesbian sisters.
It’s past time for WoLF and WHRC USA to distance themselves from CNP groups. The harms women and girls will experience from the ascendancy of the radical right will far outweigh any short-term gains made by allying with them on the gender identity issue. Our foremothers built a strong feminist movement without attaching themselves to powerful patriarchs. We can do the same.
UPDATE: WHRC USA today (12/13/21) published a blog post about abortion on their site. Written by Lauren Levey, WHRC USA vice president, the post summarizes the two cases recently before the Supreme Court, affirms that Article 3 of the Declaration does mean abortion rights, and reviews her experiences as a 2nd waver that she discussed on the Green Flame podcast.
Although WHRC USA board President Kara Dansky and several other WHRC women attended the protest, they did not do so as representatives of that organization. They did so as a group from Terf Collective which they called “Terfs Take Back Abortion Rights.”
Faludi, Susan. 1991. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. Crown Publishing Group.
Dansky was working with a coalition of groups on the Idaho bill banning males from competing in female sport when she left WoLF and came to WHRC USA. She wished to continue that work, and offered WHRC USA full disclosure: the Title IX coalition includes Heritage Foundation, ADF, and CWA. As WHRC USA board president, Dansky regularly networks with these groups.