About That War On Women…

Yesterday, I was honored to keynote NOW’s state convention. Here’s the message I delivered. (And yes, it’s another long post. Sorry…)

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These really are the times that try women’s souls.

I don’t need to tell this audience how long and hard women have fought to be treated like human beings entitled to the Equal Protection of the Laws. And I don’t need to explain to anyone here why this is an incredibly dangerous, pivotal moment—not just for women’s rights, but for the entire American experiment.

As I wrote in a recent book, we are living in a time when the defenders of patriarchy are arguing for a return to traditional family roles; a time when the US Supreme Court is dominated by rogue justices who are overprotective of claims that women’s rights are inconsistent with religious freedom and who are dramatically under-protective of women’s basic civil liberties. We live in a time when a once-respectable political party has morphed into a profoundly racist, misogynist Christian Nationalist cult with retrograde beliefs about “women’s place.”

All of these efforts are part and parcel of a hysterical resistance to the social changes that have accompanied modern life– resistance to America’s growing diversity and especially to the progress of women and minority groups—a resistance led by men (largely but not exclusively White men) who resent the loss of the automatic social and legal dominance they once enjoyed simply by virtue of their skin color and gender.

So—how did we get here? Specifically, how have women gotten here? How have we advanced, and how threatening is the current, massive opposition to our hard-won status as almost-equals?

Let me begin by suggesting that there’s a very good reason that those waging a war on women have focused so single-mindedly on reversing our reproductive rights. It is impossible to overstate the effect that reliable birth control—control of reproduction—has had on women’s fight for equality.

The original longtime subservience of the female gender was the result of two major biological facts: first, women, on average, have less brute strength than men on average; and second, we get pregnant. During the many decades that workforce participation largely required brute strength, men were advantaged. And when any sexual encounter could result in pregnancy, women were disadvantaged; as a result, for generations, the female of the species was largely confined to childbearing and child-rearing.

Both of those things have changed.

Over the years, as technology has advanced, fewer and fewer jobs have required physical strength—instead, today’s work world overwhelmingly requires education, intellect and a variety of specialized skills, qualifications that are distributed far more equally between the sexes. I don’t want to minimize the importance of that changing work environment–as a result of those changes in the economy, women have been able to enter the workforce in ever greater numbers.

But by far the most important advance—the development that has allowed millions of women to navigate the economic waters—was the birth control pill and other associated innovations that gave us the tools to control our own reproduction. Before the advent of reliable birth control, every sexual encounter carried the risk of pregnancy, and pregnancy generally meant the end of women’s economic independence.

A pregnant woman was almost always unemployable, and so was a married woman in her childbearing years, since there was always the threat of pregnancy—and childcare was seen (and let’s be honest, is still largely seen) as a uniquely female responsibility. As a result, most married women were entirely economically dependent upon their husbands.  If the marriage was unhappy—or worse, violent—a woman with children was literally enslaved. Since she was unable to enter the workforce to support herself or her children, unless she had independent means, she was totally dependent upon her husband, no matter how abusive or otherwise inadequate that husband might be.

Once women had access to reliable birth control, the whole world changed. If women could choose when to procreate, we could also choose when NOT to procreate. We could schedule our reproduction around educational and career opportunities. And even beyond the economic tsunami caused by the availability of birth control, the widespread use of contraception coupled with Supreme Court decisions in Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade accompanied significant changes in social attitudes that led to legal changes advancing women’s ability to participate not just in the economy, but also in America’s political and civic life.

Those changes that benefitted women, however, ran headlong into fundamentalist religion and Christian Nationalism. And if you think these fanatics simply oppose abortion—that their opposition to birth control has moderated—be disabused. Let me share just two examples of the zealotry with which the Right is attacking not just abortion but contraception. A bill recently introduced in South Carolina would criminalize hormonal contraception, defining birth control as abortion. The “logic” of the bill comes straight from fetal personhood dogma, which is a theological rather than a scientific concept, and it isn’t limited to South Carolina. There are plenty of other Red state legislators—including here in Indiana—who support legislating that theology into state law. And just last week, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration had destroyed ten million dollars’ worth of birth control pills and other contraceptives that had been destined for people in low-income countries. The administration also announced that the U.S. would no longer fund the purchase of birth control products for low-income countries. What is even more egregious, the government was determined to destroy these contraceptives despite the fact that several international organizations, including the Gates Foundation, had offered to buy them, which would have allowed the government to recoup taxpayer funds. Instead, the administration was willing to spend $167,000 to destroy them and make sure no one used them. Interestingly, after the media reported the destruction, officials in Belgium reported that they were holding them in a warehouse and trying to facilitate their sale so that they could eventually be used in low-income countries. So far, it’s a standoff with the Trump administration continuing to insist that they be destroyed.

They’re coming after contraception, and they haven’t reduced their  focus on abortion. Despite the deeply dishonest rhetoric of Justice Alito in Boggs, that opposition is historically relatively recent; state laws forbidding abortion were scarce until the late 1800s. After their passage, however, women could only end unwanted pregnancies in overwhelmingly dangerous and unsafe ways. As officials at Planned Parenthood like to remind us, Roe wasn’t the beginning of abortion; it was the beginning of medically safe abortions.

Together with ready access to birth control, the ability to obtain safe, medically appropriate abortions empowered women to control their own lives to an extent that had previously been unthinkable—and I would suggest to you that it is women’s increased ability to exercise personal autonomy that really powers the forced birth movement.

Even though public opinion is strongly opposed to the ruling in Dobbs, what is not widely recognized is that the forced birth movement that finally toppled Roe did not grow out of genuine religious sentiment, as most people assume, but out of resistance to racial integration.

As noted religion scholar Randall Balmer has reported, America’s anti-abortion movement began in 1979—a full six years after Roe v, Wade was decided. Evangelical leaders, goaded by Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion as a rallying-cry in what was actually a segregationist effort to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term—an effort that was in reaction to the passage of civil rights laws during the Carter administration. Objecting to abortion—talking piously about “baby killing”– was seen as “more palatable” than what was really motivating the Religious Right at the time, which was protection of the segregated schools they had established following the decision in Brown v. Board of Education. 

Both before and for several years after the decision in Roe, evangelical Christians had been overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject of abortion, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.

As Ballmer and other historians have reported, what really prompted Evangelical participation in politics was anger at tax and civil rights laws aimed at their segregation academies. Falwell and Weyrich decided to tap into the ire of the racist evangelical leaders who had established those schools, but they were savvy enough to recognize that organizing grassroots evangelicals to defend racial discrimination would probably be a non-starter. The anti-integration message worked for evangelical leadership, but they needed a different issue to mobilize evangelical voters on a large scale. Abortion fit the bill.

In short, historians agree that the catalyst for the Christian Right’s political activism was not, as often claimed, Roe v. Wade and opposition to abortion. The real roots of Christian Nationalism are found in the movement’s racism—and in the furious resistance of White males to the social changes that had allowed women, gay citizens and people of color to exercise increased autonomy and to compete with straight White men on an increasingly level playing field.

As Morton Marcus and I wrote in our recent book on the women’s movement, the Dobbs decision was nothing less than a frontal assault on human liberty. The decision is generally—and accurately—seen as an attack on women’s right to self-determination, but we need to recognize that it was much, much more than that. It was the expression of the growing, profoundly anti-liberty worldview that permeates Project 2025 and poses an existential danger to America’s constitutional values.

What Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade had recognized was the importance of a constitutional doctrine called substantive due process. Dobbs was a frontal attack on that doctrine, which we often call the “right to privacy.” Substantive Due Process, or the right to privacy, confirms the American principle that certain “intimate” individual decisions—including one’s choice of sexual partners or the decision to use contraception– are none of government’s business.

Most constitutional scholars agree that the individual’s right to personal autonomy has always been inherent in the Bill of Rights, but it was explicitly recognized in the 1965 case of Griswold v. Connecticut. Connecticut’s legislature had passed a law prohibiting the use of birth control by married couples. The law prohibited doctors from prescribing contraceptives and pharmacists from filling such prescriptions. The Supreme Court struck down the law, holding that whether a couple used contraceptives was not a decision government is entitled to make. (Fortunately, Samuel Alito wasn’t then on the Court..)

The court’s majority recognized that a right to personal autonomy—the right to self-government—is absolutely essential to the enforcement of other provisions of the Bill of Rights.  Justices White and Harlan found explicit confirmation of it in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment—which is where the terminology “substantive due process” comes from. Wherever it resided–in a “penumbra” or the 14th Amendment—a majority of Justices agreed on both its presence and importance.

The doctrine of Substantive Due Process draws a line between decisions that government has the legitimate authority to make, and decisions which, in our system, must be left up to the individual. I used to tell my students that the Bill of Rights is essentially a list of things that government is forbidden to decide. What books you read, what opinions you form, what prayers you say (or don’t)—such matters are far outside the legitimate role of government. The issue isn’t whether that book is dangerous or inappropriate, or that religion is false, or whether you should marry someone of the same sex, or whether you should procreate:  in America, the issue is who gets to make that decision. And in America, it is the individual, not the state.

Enabling autocracy–destroying our current system of a democratic majority restrained by the Bill of Rights—rather obviously requires eliminating substantive due process. The decision in Dobbs thus opened a pathway to an enormous expansion of government power, and that expansion threatens everyone—especially women, but also gay folks and racial and religious minorities.

So much for where we are. The obvious question—the important question—the question with which we are all struggling—is what can we do? What can an individual do in the face of this retrograde MAGA attack on the most foundational principles of the nation?

We can certainly participate in the growing number of protests being organized by groups like Indivisible and others.  (The next “No Kings Day is October 18^th. I hope to see you all there.) Don’t dismiss the efficacy of these events; there is scholarship showing that non-violent protests by a sufficient percentage of the population have succeeded in overcoming autocracies elsewhere. That research pegs a “sufficient percentage” at 3.5% of the population. In the U.S., that comes to just over 11 million people. Estimates of the turnout for the first “No Kings Day”—the first big protest– ranged from five to six million participants.

We can also come together with like-minded citizens who understand what is at stake. For example, it is encouraging to note that genuine Christians are finally challenging the White Christian Nationalists.  Christians Against Christian Nationalism was formed in 2019, and in a very welcome response to ICE and its efforts to rid the country of Black and Brown people by categorizing them as “illegal immigrants,” a network of 5000 churches—many of them Evangelical– has organized to protect immigrant worshippers and frustrate ICE.

There is also the emerging Resolutions Project, patterned after a mechanism that helped build support for the American Revolution. In the runup to that conflict, those favoring Revolution in towns across the colonies introduced, debated and passed so-called “resolutions of condemnation” that focused on the gravity of the “injuries,” “abuses” and “usurpations” of Mad King George III. Those resolutions helped build support for the Revolution by creating local ownership of their big arguments in the fight for independence. As we speak, there are at least 75 resolutions that have either passed or are moving in 23 states + the District of Columbia. It’s an effort that NOW and other pro-democracy Indiana organizations should join!

Longer term, we desperately need to restore civic education and accurate history instruction, and we need to confront the collapse of responsible journalism and the exponential growth of internet propaganda and conspiracy theories. (Don’t ask me how we do that…)

Of course, unless we can stop Trump’s march to dictatorship, we may not have a “long term.” So that brings me to our best chance of derailing the not-so-slow-moving coup we are all watching in real time. That opportunity will come with next year’s midterm elections.

As you all know, more Americans failed to vote in 2024 than voted for either candidate. Getting the rational citizens among those non-voters to the polls next year has to be job number one. In Red states like ours, that means Democrats running a candidate in every district so that disaffected Republicans and apathetic Democrats have someone to vote for. It means a massive effort to increase registration and get out the vote of people who—for whatever reason (but especially the gerrymandering that’s convinced them there’s no point) haven’t been casting ballots; and it means developing messaging that will resonate with them, messaging that will give them both a reason to vote and a reason to believe that their vote will make a difference. And in most parts of the state, it really will make a difference! Let me explain why.

Indiana has long been gerrymandered, but over the years, our rural areas have been steadily emptying out, meaning that the margins enjoyed by Republicans in those “safe” districts have been thinning. That’s one reason. But there’s another. Gerrymandering’s biggest effect is voter suppression. Belief that their district is safe for the GOP, non-voters who might vote for Democrats or Independents have been convinced that there’s no point, so why bother. (When the Democrats fail to run a candidate, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.) In reality, if turnout improved significantly, many of those districts wouldn’t be safe. It isn’t only the demographic shifts; in many districts, there are substantial numbers of Democrats and Independents who have previously failed to turn out.  Gerrymandering requires the line drawers to begin with data from prior elections. The failure of discouraged Democrats and Independents to vote has skewed that data by artificially inflating the Republican advantage. We need to take that message to discouraged Indiana voters.

Just let me conclude with the bottom line:

If there has ever been a time for political activism, this is it. If there has ever been a time for all people who oppose the cult that has replaced the Republican party to come together, to abandon our policy differences and work in concert to save the Constitution and Bill of Rights, it’s now.

I know the people in this room will do that work. We just need to encourage the citizens who have been apathetic to join us—and thanks to the daily, unconstitutional, anti-democratic and absolutely horrific behaviors of the Trump administration, a lot of those citizens are no longer apathetic. We can do this.

Thank you.