Just as the coronavirus pandemic brought into glaring focus inequities in health care, criminal justice, public education and economic opportunity, it has also highlighted systemic inadequacies that keep women from attaining full equality.
In the first place, women have been disproportionately harmed because they hold the majority of jobs in fields most affected – healthcare, hospitality and leisure, education – and are the majority of low-income, minimum wage, frontline and essential workers who are either losing most of the jobs (women represented 100 percent of the 140,000 jobs lost in December) or are put in the most vulnerable positions to get sick or die.
Women have not only lost their jobs in greater numbers – women have lost 5.4 million jobs during the pandemic, 1 million more than men – but have had to give up jobs for fear of exposing their families to COVID (3,300 health care workers have lost their lives to COVID) and for the need to home school children or care for elderly parents. Even before COVID, there was a shortage of affordable or accessible child care. (www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/reports/2021/02/01/495209/women-lose-jobs-essential-actions-gender-equitable-recovery/)
And after former President Trump planted three anti-abortion judges on the Supreme Court, states are racing to get cases to the court, which they expect will finally overturn Roe v Wade entirely – a 6-3 majority that has already demonstrated preference for state-sanctioned religion over equal protection and civil rights. (Limiting the size of gatherings in church during a pandemic is tyranny, but forcing women to undergo vaginal probes for no medical reason is not.)
More than 60 bills have been introduced or passed in state legislatures this year to restrict abortion. (https://chicago.suntimes.com/politics/2021/3/2/22309404/abortion-rights-battle-roe-versus-wade-supreme-court)
Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, who just signed one of the most restrictive abortion laws, believes a 15-year old who is raped by her brother must be forced by government to give birth to her rapist’s child. He is gleeful that the egregiousness of the unconstitutional ban will bring the Arkansas case to the Supreme Court where he expects the Trump acolytes (“abortion no, guns yes”) to fully repeal Roe v Wade and five decades of legal precedent upholding a women’s right to control her own body and destiny.
The abortion fight is more than women’s reproductive rights, their right to control their own bodies, to make their own choices and not about “pro-life.” Those who would take away that right are basically saying women don’t have the same sentient ability, the same judgment as men. It is about controlling women – and their options, their ability to achieve their full professional and economic potential and political power.
If this were about “pro-life,” these same people wouldn’t be restricting contraception or, for that matter, facilitating gun violence by blocking commonsense measures to keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers when women and children are most likely to be murdered and refusing to renew the Violence Against Women Act.
If these anti-abortion radicals really cared about “life,” they would be promoting universal health care, infant and maternal care, child care and universal pre-K, parental leave, anti-poverty measures and alleviating all the other systemic obstacles to women having the same opportunities as men.
The way states are chipping away at access to reproductive care mainly affects women who lack the means to travel to another county, state or country to obtain the services they need. In effect, they do not have the same access to their constitutional rights and if that is not the definition of violating Equal Protection, what is?
Meanwhile, the record turnout in the 2020 election – 158.4 million ballots, the highest turnout rate, 66 percent, in 120 years and the election of the first woman vice president a century after women got the right to vote – has unleashed a tsunami of voter suppression laws – 253 of them in 43 states.
The focus is on how the laws disadvantage voters along racial lines because that is what the Voting Rights Act prohibits (the Supreme Court has no quarrel with partisan gerrymandering). But make no mistake, with women credited with putting Biden in the White House, these voter suppression laws are aimed at stripping women of their voting rights.
The initiatives – the worst since Jim Crow, with measures that go so far as to make promoting absentee voting a felony (in Texas); prohibiting the “souls to the polls” bus (Georgia); purging voter rolls, and reducing hours and places to vote in ways that give advantage to rural and suburban voters over urban voters (black, young, Democrats) – are a reminder that the Constitution does not actually protect one-person, one-vote nor does it acknowledge women as equal persons with the same equal protection under law.
The fact that the Biden Administration has been trying to reverse the damage of the Trump administration is further proof that women’s rights need to be codified in the Constitution, so they can’t be reversed with every new administration.
When you don’t have the right to control your own body, the right to choose your future, the right to self-determination or the same opportunity to cast a ballot, you are not an equal person.
So in addition to passing the We the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, the Democratically controlled Congress needs to finish the ratification and adoption of the Equal Rights Amendment.
The ERA simply specifies that women are entitled to the same legal rights as men: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”
Last year Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the amendment, the last state needed to meet the two-thirds threshold. By 1977, 35 states had ratified the ERA; but the three most recent states—Illinois, Nevada and Virginia—didn’t ratify it until 2017 onward, beyond the 1982 deadline that Congress put in the 1972 bill (there is no deadline specified in the Constitution)
In 2020, 100 years after women got the right to vote, the House voted to rescind the 1982 deadline for ratification, though this was yet another bill that then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked.
So, despite being ratified by two-thirds of states, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras set it aside, ruling that an arbitrary deadline for ratification had passed. (www.newsweek.com/equal-rights-amendment-cant-ratified-judge-rules-case-could-head-supreme-court-1574206)
Congress needs to amend its own deadline and make the Equal Rights Amendment part of the Constitution.
