The War on Women

When we said women and people who loved them needed to vote like their lives depended on it in 2024, it wasn’t hyperbole. Despite the hole the Dobbs case, which reversed Roe v. Wade, tore in the heart of so many Americans and the women who have suffered and even died since then from the unavailability of basic medical care, not enough Americans understood how precarious the world had become for women.

Women got the right to vote in 1920. Economic equality came more slowly. It wasn’t until 1974 that women gained banking access when Congress passed The Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974. It gave American women, regardless of whether they were married, the right to open a bank account or a credit account in their own names, outlawing discrimination based on sex as well as race in banking. That was only 50 years ago. Even today, American women, on average, make 85 cents for every dollar made by a man. That gap has been slowly closing for the last two decades, but Trump tried to roll back protections in 2017, and now the future is uncertain.

Women have struggled for equality in America and, until recently, have made at least slow, incremental progress, whether it was suffragettes in their white dresses or Hillary Clinton in her white pantsuits. But we live in an era where the unthinkable is newly possible, and part of that unthinkable, relegating women to second-class citizenship, is clearly on the table again.

George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress).

Trump is waging war on women in ways both big and small, subtle and obvious. When federal employees are fired, women lose jobs that permit them to support their families. When Medicaid gets cut, single moms, who are just trying to get by, are burdened. DEI gave woman a path to higher paying jobs. Now it’s being closed down. He’s trying to make it harder for us to vote with his Executive Order on voting and the SAVE Act.

But above all, it’s been abortion, the right that both kept women safe and made it possible for them to set the course of their own lives and families. This is an administration that not only wants to end abortion, but has also set its sights on contraception. There is talk of resurrecting the Comstock Act with the complicity of the Supreme Court. That would make it illegal to mail material that talks about family planning, let alone the drugs like mifepristone that are essential for medication abortion. That means women who need access to medical care to prevent serious infection or death due to medical complications in pregnancy may no longer be able to get it.

The party that claims to be pro-life isn’t. It’s not just the misbegotten refusal to provide abortion, which can be lifesaving in a pregnancy gone wrong. The culture war against women is in full-blown progress.

But now in Tennessee, they’re taking it a little bit further. Unmarried? Pregnant? Sorry, no healthcare for you. According to footage shown by the Tennessee Holler, and originally reported by TN Repro News, an unmarried woman who was pregnant was denied medical care by a doctor who didn’t want to treat her. She didn’t want an abortion. She wanted to carry the baby to term. He denied her care because she wasn’t married. It offended his Christian beliefs. We’ve heard about Christian bakers not wanting to bake cakes for gay couples. This is the next logical step in the Supreme Court’s permissive politics towards Christianity. Except that this doctor seems to have forgotten that Mary was an unmarried, pregnant woman when Jesus was conceived.

Apparently, the Hippocratic oath no longer matters, at least not if your patient is an unmarried woman who’s pregnant. Women in Tennessee have suffered in the past for being denied an abortion while carrying a nonviable pregnancy, only to lose their fertility as a result. But this is next level. This is a doctor denying a patient care because he, HE, doesn’t approve of the way she is choosing to live her life.

We have the opportunity to end this now. There is an election coming in 2026. An election where we will have to fight to register, stay registered, vote, and ensure our votes get counted. But it’s our fight. It’s the fight for democracy. Unlike 2024, when Americans failed to vote in sufficient numbers to keep Trump out of office because they somehow didn’t understand the stakes, we have to make sure every single person who cares about our country—and thinks women shouldn’t slide into second-class citizenship where they can be denied basic, noncontroversial medical care—is on the front lines in this election. In 2024, too many people thought they could use their voice to protest, whatever the issue, by staying home or voting for a candidate other than the one committed to democracy. The results have been tragic, just six months into Donald Trump’s second administration. It’s dangerous to be a woman. It’s dangerous to be an immigrant. It’s dangerous to be a member of the LGBTQ community. It’s dangerous to be someone who has devoted your life to government service if your work involved investigating Donald Trump or promoting DEI. It’s now dangerous to fall outside of Trumpism’s rigid definition of what’s right.

That’s wrong for all of us. If you’re concerned about the serious challenges our democracy is facing, you’re not alone. I’m committed to doing the work—digging into the facts, explaining the legal and political developments that matter, and giving you the timely information you need to stay informed and engaged. If that sounds like something worth supporting, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber.

We’re in this together,

Joyce