If you find yourself needing to convince anyone that the War on Women is real, EMILY’s List has put together this handy interactive timeline.
I realize there are some who will nevertheless refuse to be convinced — or who will discount anything from this source — but you might change a few minds.
Or, you might look at it yourself and realize HOLY FUCK IT’S WORSE THAN I THOUGHT.
It would be interesting to see a list like this expanded over time so we could see if there were any trends when it comes to the timing of these kinds of attacks. Obviously a year and a half worth of data points isn’t enough to make any real conclusions, but I would wonder if substantive legislative attacks tended to cluster in late Q1 or early Q2 because they’re chronologically furthest from national elections.
What that graphic did hammer home is how much the war on reproductive rights focuses on the margins and on procedural limits that might be easily overlooked if someone isn’t careful.
Interesting if a bit limited: It starts 2011 and does not include state level action.
Yay! I’ve been wanting something like this for months and never quite got it together to make one. Thanks for sharing!
It’s just depressing to see it laid out so clearly.
A “War on Reproductive Rights” is hardly the same as a “War on Women”. I support those rights, but not all women do, and I think it’s disingenuous to imply such.
I’m glad this was put together and thanks for sharing!
But, why not also share HOW we can change this? WHO is getting involved? WHERE I can go to offer support or WHAT I can do?
I agree, this is depressing news, even more so when one feels incapable of making a difference, but we can, we just need to gather and advocate – but I would hope that Feministe could lead us in the right direction, please!
When the war on the reproductive rights is conducted as a backhanded way to keep women under the thumb of men, then it becomes a war on women.
Not every woman supports reproductive rights, but when they are curtailed every woman is substantively and materially deprived of the rights we associate with basic humanity. If thats not a war on women I’m not sure what would be.
Just because some women don’t support them doesn’t mean it’s not still an attack on them. There were women who opposed women’s suffrage, too. I don’t think that “all women” support anything; that seems like a really high standard.
The reproductive rights under attack are those rights exclusively in the set of rights belonging to women, by dint of their bodies being what they are.
How have men’s reproductive rights been attacked? Has any church decided they don’t want to pay for Viagra prescriptions? Are pharmacies refusing to sell condoms to men under the age of 18? This not merely a War on Reproductive Rights, although that would be serious enough.
Some women may have been hoodwinked or feel religiously obligated to buy into the sort of thinking that would take choice away from all women. That doesn’t change this state of affairs from being a War on Women.
Dank, everything in America seems to be phrased as war on something or somebody (war on terror, war on women, war on Christianity, war on traditional marriage and war on drugs come to mind). That’s strange of course because veritable wars are given cute nicknames like Operation Noble Anvil, Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Freedom Falcon.
Why do all these bills have parentage and life threat exceptions to abortion? If fetuses are human beings (which I do not support), according to the right to life movement they have all rights human beings have, including that (1) you may not kill them based on their parentage, (2) you may not kill one person (the fetus) to save another (the mother) – just like I may not throw a person off a life raft to put someone else in their place. Otherwise conservatives are just defining a fetus as half a person or some lesser being with some subset of arbitrary rights. I would at least like the debate framed with some logical consistency by them, but that is asking too much.
Also would be nice to have Emily’s list document the fate of these bills, as many readers may not understand that legislation passed by the house is not a law until passed by the senate and approved by the president (unless they have a super majority). Did any become law?
oh and as an addendum, if a famous woman sells pictures of herself pregnant to a magazine, does the fetus have to pay income taxes? Arguably it’s responsible for at least half the income from that photo shoot.
“The reproductive rights under attack are those rights exclusively in the set of rights belonging to women, by dint of their bodies being what they are.”
Just the usual PSA that biology =/= gender identity. Replacing “exclusively” with “predominantly” or “commonly understood” or other framing that acknowledges this fact will do the trick.
While I grant you that the people who generate & pass these laws, rules and regulations are perfectly happy to erase trans* experiences, we who uphold SJ principles should NOT be guilty of the same thing.
Henry, more and more of the bills no longer have exceptions. Slippery slopes and all that.
A few comments mentioned that not all women support reproductive rights, so the term “war on women” isn’t accurate. But the timeline isn’t just about women’s reproductive rights. It’s about the right to access health care. Every time Congress tries to defund Planned Parenthood, they’re not trying to defund the abortion part of it. Zero federal dollars go to abortion services at Planned Parenthood. Defunding Planned Parenthood would take away access for low-income women, college students and more to annual pap smears, mammograms and other services that are provide with or without health insurance. Read Mimi Swartz’s recent article in Texas Monthly, Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, Wives. The other health clinics in Texas can’t possible accommodate the influx of patients they’d see if Planned Parenthood closed.
Ditto IrishUp’s comment. Surely the objection to the ‘War on Women’ label is that not all of the people who need abortions and ‘women’s’ healthcare are self-defining women.
Reproductive health services are part of women’s health care. Reproductive health services are the ones under attack, and affect women whether or not they support abortion.
Moreover, 90-some percent of women of childbearing age use birth control of some form or another, even those who don’t support abortion. More would probably use oral contraceptives if they were more affordable. And now they are.
So tell me again we don’t have a War on Women.
I have a lot of respect for those who take the hard-line position on abortion even though it’s not popular. At least they’re consistent. At least when they say they think abortion is murder, they’re willing to back that up with advocating for a comprehensive ban.
We have these exceptions for a couple of reasons. One is that the Supreme Court requires them. Another is that there are an awful lot of squeamish people who can’t quite get on board with women having sexytimes without punishment, but they think it would be too, too much if someone for whom the sex wasn’t fun was punished. Or, you know, they want it to be there when they or theirs need an abortion, because unlike all those sluts, they or theirs would be having one for the right reasons.
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“I have a lot of respect for those who take the hard-line position on abortion even though it’s not popular. At least they’re consistent. At least when they say they think abortion is murder, they’re willing to back that up with advocating for a comprehensive ban.”
Even if it means incurring 2 murders instead of 1 (see the Guttmacher, WHO, and Amnesty International reports on countries with full out bans). I have to disagree there. I do not have more respect for people willing to murder more women in the name of preventing “murder”, on the basis of that being less hypocritical. Your fun-to-monkeys ratio may vary, of course.
@blondie
And some women just honestly think they (and everyone else) shouldn’t have that right. They’re wrong, and shitty, but they’re still capable of making decisions and having beliefs. They have agency even if the logical endgame of their position is less agency.
I guess I can respect the fact that they don’t flinch from the consequences of their positions. I don’t think they’re right, not for a minute, but I think that the wishy-washy contingent who want their cake and eat it to are causing a whole fuckload of harm as well. Not to mention avoiding the consequences of their beliefs, or at least their stated beliefs.
I agree with zuzu here…their whole line has been fetuses are people, then they turn around and serve up a “abortions for some, but not for others” menu. Que the Simpsons episode where Kang & Kodos run for president : “Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others!” (yes I’m spinning the quote in the opposite from its original subtext)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treehouse_of_Horror_VII
You advocate a shitty position, you better be willing to eat the turd sandwich when it gets served to you. Otherwise you are a hypocrite who is really advocating the sex is evil, females must be good breeders mantra (whether you realize it or not), which is what this whole fight boils down to. IMO it’s never really been about murder vs. not murder for the majority of the pro-life crowd. Whenever I have questioned a “pro-life*” supporter as I call them, they can never come up with a good reason for the parentage exception – because their isn’t one under their presumptions.
At least they’re consistent. At least when they say they think abortion is murder, they’re willing to back that up with advocating for a comprehensive ban.
Except they’re not consistent at all. Not one of these politicians, no matter how piously they argue that all abortion is murder and there should be no exceptions for race, incest, the life of the mother, or anything else, is willing to advocate that women who have abortions should be sent to prison — let alone sent to the electric chair or given lethal injections. Even though most of them support capital punishment. Doctors, maybe; women, no. Why? Either because in their hearts they don’t really view an abortion as murder in the same way as killing a born person, or because they know that even suggesting such an outcome would be politically unpalatable. Or both.
In any case, they’re all hypocrites.
Oh, I’m not talking about politicians. There aren’t any of those. And even the run-of-the-mill types who can’t conceive (heh) of jailing a woman for murder. Those are the ones who haven’t really thought through their positions, or are simply disingenuous about what they believe to make their position more palatable to those mushy-middle voters who can be persuaded by a “but the poor little babies” appeal.
The people I mean are rare. They *would* jail a woman for seeking an abortion. They *would* let her die. They really do believe it’s murder, and they really would punish anyone involved. And the politicians who write the laws that chip away at abortion rights and use that issue to whip up their base know that these people must never, ever be allowed to prevail because then the game would really be up and the mushy middle wouldn’t feel comfortable going along with them.
That’s true zuzu, yet I would argue that even under those circumstances, they aren’t suffering the consequences – it’s OTHER people who will die, go to jail, leave their families without one parent, & etc. I also am not sure they are so rare; the radical anti-abortion stance seems to be gaining traction in the US.
Of course, unless such people are against ALL killing, they still occupy a hypocritical position. VERY few “no nay never” abortion types are pacifist, no lethal force, anti-capital punishment people (IME, again, variable fun-to-monkeys). There are LOADS of theological justifications for killing being OK in certain circumstances that the majority of anti-abortion people will espouse. So as long as some circumstances warrant use of deadly force, the insistence that NONE of those circumstances include sexually abused people or non-viable pregnancies (whether because of adult or fetus health & welfare*) is NOT about murder per se, but is rooted in misogyny & oppression.
“the politicians who write the laws that chip away at abortion rights and use that issue to whip up their base know that these people must never, ever be allowed to prevail because then the game would really be up”
Oh, absolutely!
(* An aside here; does anyone know of a gender-neutral term equivalent to “maternal” to refer to a pregnant person? “Parental” isn’t specific enough to the purpose of person in a state of pregnancy – parental mortality does not convey the same medical issues that maternal mortality does.)