Ch 3.6 |♀️Women's rights

Women are distinctly not a “disenfranchised minority.”  In fact, women have accounted for approximately 51 percent of the population since 2013. How can it be that women’s rights are being trampled upon in America from all sides?  It's not solely a GOP issue. The progressive approach coming out of the left wing of the Democratic Party, while different and at least striving towards inclusiveness, often overcompensates and fails to find common sense solutions.

The right is trampling women's rights

It's no surprise that Trump, an obvious misogynist, would lead a reversal in women's rights.  And of course, both his alleged and self-reported sexual abuse of women shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.  On the eve of the #MeToo era, Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress repealed transparency safeguards designed to protect from sexual harassment the hundreds of thousands of people working for companies bidding for federal contracts. Business groups vehemently opposed the requirements, which they dubbed the “Blacklist Rule,” arguing that the regulation was so broadly worded that potential contractors could be barred from doing work with the government based on allegations alone. 

However, the goal of the rule was to prevent federal money from flowing to firms with a history of such infractions. The original Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces Executive Order also barred companies with federal contracts of more than $1 million from requiring that workers address claims of sexual harassment or sexual assault in private arbitration, taking away their option to sue in court.

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health

Let me start with my perspective.  I am pro-choice — not only because I believe in the right of a woman to choose, but because I value liberty, I believe that from a legal and constitutional perspective the government should not have a role in this decision. I think this decision should be between a mother, her medical professional and her god. 

I know that millions of sincere people are in the pro-life camp. Please know that if you are anti-abortion, my intent here is not to condemn you or to take away your agency when it comes to this issue. But I do intend to challenge the policy decisions and the manipulative ways that this issue is being weaponized to divide us.

This issue will not go away.  So we need to find a reasonable, common sense approach and a compromise that will work for the majority of Americans. To start, I do believe that it is more than reasonable to apply limits on abortion.  

But finding that middle ground is going to be difficult, to put it mildly, because the duopoly has intentionally framed this issue to divide us. 

In terms of the GOP, from a purely political perspective, I once again find myself scratching my head. First, I find it a contradiction for any "conservative" person who believes in small-government to promote state intervention on issues with a great deal of moral ambiguity and a divided public.  

It seems that I'm not alone.  It has become abundantly clear that the GOP is making a strategic mistake with its approach to this issue.  It's impossible to ignore the political ramifications of Republicans’ embrace of unreasonable policies around abortion.  Democrats are gaining ground in elections nationwide when it comes to their stance on abortion rights.

But, inadvertently, they are opening a potential pathway to empower the common sense majority!  The GOP's radical stance on abortion has proven to be a gravitational force dragging some Republican voters towards the center, as they seem to be rejecting the extreme ideologies that are driving bad policy decisions in red states — including Florida!

The Bible and abortion

Here again lies a very interesting study in perception and distortion. It is commonly understood that the anti-abortion movement is rooted in a belief that abortion is a sin and that the Bible says a fetus is considered alive. Yet the Bible seems to state the opposite point of view. Here’s what I have uncovered.  I'm not a priest or a rabbi, so if you are, please tell me where I'm misinterpreting scripture.

After God formed man in Genesis 2:7, the Bible states that he:

breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and it was then that the man became a living being.

Although the man was fully formed by God in all respects, he was not a living being until after taking his first breath.   The Bible continues in Job 33:4:

The spirit of God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty gives me life.

Again, to quote Ezekiel 37:5-6:

Thus says the Lord God to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.   And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.

Exodus 21:22 states that if a man causes a woman to have a miscarriage, he shall be fined; however, if the woman dies then he will be put to death. It should be apparent from this that the aborted fetus is not considered a living human being since the resulting punishment for the abortion is nothing more than a fine;  it is not classified by the Bible as a capital offense.

As I said at the outset, I’m not a student of theology, so I welcome your thoughts in the comments on my interpretation of scripture. 

Tangle, as always, did a fantastic job in 2021 of providing context on the history of abortion in America, telling the story of how Roe v. Wade came to be.

For the first decades of U.S. history, abortions were legal so long as they happened before "quickening," a time period when women could feel fetal movements, typically around 15 to 20 weeks into a pregnancy.  In the 1850's, The American Medical Association led a significant push to criminalize abortion, saying there was no difference in fetal development before "quickening" compared to after. The movement was supported by a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment, and with the Catholic Church changing its position in 1869 from tolerating early-term abortions to fully against it at all stages of pregnancy, prohibitions on abortion increased.

And it's been a contentious issue ever since!   This is yet another example of where the Founding Fathers understood that we need to have a distinct separation of church and state. Do we need a shared moral framework as a nation?  Sure. But I stand firm in believing that it is unreasonable to use any one religion's viewpoint/interpretation to set policy.

The end of Roe v. Wade

In my section on the Supreme Court, I discussed how the GOP has changed the politics of the court for a generation. One of Republicans’ key objectives in that regard was to reverse Roe v. Wade. 

It should have surprised no one that the Supreme Court, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, officially reversed Roe v. Wade and declared that the constitutional right to abortion, upheld for nearly a half century, no longer exists.

So, for now, this issue has been left to the states.  

State laws currently range from complete abortion bans with criminal penalties to abortion protections that include funding for clinics and legal protections for clinicians. In some states, abortion provision will remain legal and available because the states had policies in place prior to the Dobbs decision that protect access even in the absence of Roe. Other states do not have any explicit laws either upholding abortion rights or prohibiting abortion, and access to services is mixed in those. Finally, after the Supreme Court ruling, several states moved quickly to outlaw abortion, and 17 already had policies in place prior to the decision that would effectively ban abortions as soon as such a decision came down. Many of these states are in the South, which has large shares of Black and Hispanic women and the Plains, where there is a large Indigenous population. To obtain an abortion, women in states with bans would likely have to travel out of state, resulting in disproportionate barriers to accessing abortions for people of color.

But the GOP isn’t satisfied with overturning Roe.  While, initially, Republicans in Congress said abortion rights should be left to the states, now they want to pass a federal ban on abortion.  Does that align with your sense of morality?  Is that a preservation of your liberties?  Is that how we respect 51% of the population?

I find the entire subject to be gut wrenching and fraught with moral hazard.  I’m not saying there shouldn‘t be common sense restrictions on abortion — there absolutely should be.  But what is being proposed by the GOP and by many red states makes no sense to me and screams governmental overreach and a violation of the civil rights of women.   Once again it seems the GOP is out of touch with the majority of Americans. 

Here’s Forbes one year after the the Dobbs ruling:

Gallup polls show 85% of Americans believe abortion should be legal in at least certain circumstances as of May, higher than when polling began in 1975 (76%), and 69% believe abortion should broadly be legal in the first three months of a pregnancy, marking a record high.

To me this is simply another reason we must fix the system and bring fairness and common sense back to this debate. Maybe we can find a fair compromise that puts this issue to rest and we can check off yet another divisive issue.

Intentions aside, the left undermines women's rights

It's not just the GOP. There are significant problems with the way the progressives within the Democratic Party are addressing this issue. But, like all complex issues in civilized society, there are ways to promote tolerance and understanding — and there is a potential for overreach and abuse. 

This is an area where, like the GOP’s overt affront to women, the left is trampling on women’s rights through “tolerance”  and the implementation of its policy preferences.  This is the tyranny of the minority afflicting the majority.  In this case, a small minority of women (transgender women) are being given preference over the rights of the vast majority of cisgender women.

Let’s look at how tolerance can have unintended consequences, starting with sports. Common sense would seem to dictate that it is patently unfair for a biological man who has transitioned to be able to compete in female athletics. Much in the way most people agree that steroid use in sports should not be allowed, it stands to reason, as a general rule, that a man that transitions to a woman would be stronger and/or faster than the biological females she is competing against. 

And in March 2024, a dozen female athletes sued the NCAA for letting transgender athletes compete against them and use female locker rooms in college sports.  

These are very complex issues but a civilized society should be able to find a reasonable, common sense solution. However, when these issues become politicized, and the language used on both sides becomes toxic, we create intolerance and bigotry that is unnecessary and should not be encouraged.  It also gives our politicians fodder to incite anger and potential violence against our fellow man (and woman) that should be condemned!