<mediadc-video-embed data-state="{"cms.site.owner":{"_ref":"00000161-3486-d333-a9e9-76c6fbf30000","_type":"00000161-3461-dd66-ab67-fd6b93390000"},"cms.content.publishDate":1656596307518,"cms.content.publishUser":{"_ref":"0000017a-8cb2-d416-ad7a-beb7278f0000","_type":"00000161-3461-dd66-ab67-fd6b933a0007"},"cms.content.updateDate":1656596307518,"cms.content.updateUser":{"_ref":"0000017a-8cb2-d416-ad7a-beb7278f0000","_type":"00000161-3461-dd66-ab67-fd6b933a0007"},"rawHtml":"
var _bp = _bp||[]; _bp.push({ "div": "Brid_56525200", "obj": {"id":"27789","width":"16","height":"9","video":"1043265"} }); ","_id":"00000181-b4d5-d578-a1dd-beff95600000","_type":"2f5a8339-a89a-3738-9cd2-3ddf0c8da574"}”>Video EmbedPresident Joe Biden has been MIA since convening with the G-7 in Germany, leaving Vice President Kamala Harris to deal with the fallout of the Supreme Court’s decision to nix Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Despite controlling the FDA, which has the power to deregulate oral contraceptives so millions of uninsured women can obtain them over the counter, the president evidently doesn’t have much of a plan, and the vice president is doing what she does about every crisis: whine about it.
In a CNN interview on Monday, the highest-ranking woman in the history of the country claimed that her 23-year-old stepdaughter should be able to “make decisions about her own body” the same way her octogenarian grandmother did.
“The court actually took a constitutional right that has been recognized for half a century and took it from the women of America,” Harris told Dana Bash. “That’s shocking, when you think about it, in terms of what that means, in terms of democratic principles, in terms of the ideals upon which we were founded about liberty, about freedom.”
Let’s ignore the fact that by turning the abortion issue back to the states, the Supreme Court actually democratized the question. Harris’s conflation of abortion access with the right “to make decisions about her own body” is a false equivalency, and her canard that our mothers’ generations had more bodily autonomy than women today is even more ridiculous.
First, just consider the history of federal law. While an unmarried woman had the federally protected right to terminate her unborn children, she had no such right to open a credit card, sue an employer for discrimination, or actually have her own children without the threat of being fired. When the Supreme Court decided Roe, federal law allowed banks to deny women lines of credit on the basis of their sex or marital status, and employers could discriminate against prospective or current mothers on the basis of their pregnancies or parental status.
Just one year after Roe, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia tried the nation’s first sexual harassment suit, ultimately ruling that a female EPA employee who had been fired after refusing a superior’s unwanted advances was not discriminated against. It would take more than a decade before the Supreme Court would put the onus of curbing workplace sexual harassment on employers, and it was only when Harris’s stepdaughter was 5 years old that the court ruled that retaliation against someone reporting sex discrimination is yet another form of sex discrimination prohibited by Title IX.
But much more than the federal government, women have capitalism and modern medicine to thank for further agency over family planning and choice before conception. Our mothers’ generation had three main birth control methods: first-generation, high-estrogen oral contraceptives, which had a much higher risk of blood clotting than anything on the market today; the copper IUD, which, while highly effective, can result in much heavier and painful periods; and physical barrier methods such as diaphragms and condoms, which leave room for human error. Compare that to today’s options, which don’t just include the likes of hormonal IUDs, which have a near-zero failure rate and actually decrease the severity of periods for most, but also emergency contraception, which are non-abortifacients available over the counter across the country.
(Credit where it’s due: While the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate was a legal and economic disaster, it did succeed in reducing the abortion rate by cajoling private insurers, most of whom already covered relatively cheap oral contraceptives, into covering more expensive IUDs.)
All of this ignores the slew of private preferences and behaviors that have overwhelmingly trended toward respecting women’s bodily autonomy. The notion of “bodily autonomy” itself, if it really is to be a feminist concept, ought to include women’s right to choose in all things. Whereas the immediate post-Roe era effectively demanded that any woman who wanted to remain in the workplace ought to kill her own children and put up with sexual subjugation, today’s women are allowed, if not encouraged, to pursue motherhood alongside their careers, with scientific advances further enabling family planning before any prospective fetus even exists.
The Roe generation of boomer women didn’t want to have it all, if only because Roe created the false premise that they couldn’t. Gloria Steinem encapsulated the bind with her concession that perverts and predators like Bill Clinton got to violate the sexual autonomy of women with one free grope, so long as they violated the bodily autonomy of babies by protecting abortion. Today’s girls will have to make no such concession.
