Because I don't follow right-wing groups or pages on Facebook (I know, I know - Facebook is old hat: for "boomers") and because, by now, I've unfriended or been unfriended by just about anyone who does, most of the memes that show up in my newsfeed align with my own point of view. It's not that I'm living in one of the "echo chambers" or "filter bubbles" that social scientists are always warning about: Facebook is not where I get my news - it's just where I get my memes. And yet, politically cocooned as my social-media experience may be, there are still memes that reappear regularly, like comets, that are sufficiently offensive that eventually I get around to writing a rebuttal.
Today's example of the sort of meme I have in mind is this:
Taking this statement at face value, it's easy to appreciate the principle here: it is the height of injustice when someone in a position to legislate should not have to suffer the consequences of that legislation himself. To put that in more general terms, it violates basic fairness when those who create or enforce rules that others have to follow don't have to live by those rules themselves. Although I do not have ovaries and although this meme obviously is referring to abortion restrictions, I, like many New Yorkers, have experienced this sort of unfairness every time I received a parking ticket from the police department while the police themselves park their cars illegally (including in front of fire hydrants), flagrantly (by placing a 5 x 10 placard conspicuously on the dashboard identifying the owner of the private vehicle as a cop so the car will not be ticketed or towed) and with complete impunity. This double standard is so offensive to my sense of justice that it is actually one of the reasons I decided to leave New York City (my home town) twenty years ago.
The right to own one's own body is incomparably more important than the right to park one's car on a city street - that's a given. Yet that is one of the reasons why this meme is so problematical. Instead of making a positive argument for a right to abortion by grounding it on the fundamental right to bodily self-ownership, it makes a negative and far more narrowly circumscribed argument against restrictions of that right and, then, only when these restrictions are imposed by men. This begs the question: is the purpose of this meme to advocate for women's right to abortion or is it simply to bash men? It also leads to the companion question: is a law enacted by women (or, to be consistent with the language of the meme, people with ovaries) that restricts a woman's access to abortion any less an abridgment of her freedom than a law enacted by men that accomplishes the same thing?
That's not a purely theoretical question. The implication of this meme is that it is men who are primarily if not exclusively responsible for curtailing women's reproductive rights in the United States. And although I am focusing here on this meme only, this is an assertion that I have seen made again and again in one form or another on social media. The facts, however, do not support this contention. As far as public attitudes are concerned, according to the Pew Research Center, as of 2024, 61% of men believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. While that number is less than the percent of women who believe the same thing - 64% - that's not a large difference and certainly not large enough to justify the implication that men are the problem and that it is men (and only men) who are standing in the way of women's reproductive rights.
The notion that it is men who are responsible for restricting women's access to abortion in the U.S. also wholly discounts the critical role that women have played and continue to play in the ongoing campaign to deprive (other) women of their reproductive rights. Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, for example, was founded and is run by women. One of the founders and earliest presidents of the National Right to Life Committee, Mildred Jefferson, was a woman (and was, in fact, the first Black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School). Likewise, NRLC's current president (Carol Tobias) and Federal Legislative Director (Jennifer Popik) are women. Students for Life of America, another major, national player in the anti-choice movement, has a leadership that consists overwhelmingly of women, including its current President, Executive Vice President, National Field Director and Director of Leadership Initiatives. The current CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) is a woman and so was her predecessor. Out of thirteen sitting AAPLOG board members, ten of them are women. Feminists for Life of America is yet another prominent anti-choice organization founded and run by women.
Then there are the legislators themselves. Here a case for male culpability for abortion restrictions is easier to make. Currently, out of over 7,000 state legislative seats across the country, a mere 32.8% are held by women. Significantly, as of June 2023, out of the 1,573 legislators across the country who, since Dobbs, have voted to restrict women's access to abortion, the vast majority of them were men - 1,347. (It's probably not worth mentioning but 225 of those politicians who voted to restrict or eliminate access to abortion are women - 214 Republicans and 11 Democrats.) Clearly, there should be more women holding elected office.
But would the outcome of these votes to restrict abortion rights have been different if the number of women serving in state legislatures was proportional to the 50.5% of the population that is female? One would certainly hope so, but then there is also the structural obstacle to electing pro-choice legislators - of either sex (or intersex) - that has been created by Republican gerrymandering. As Sonali Seth and Michael Li point out,
The majority opinion in Dobbs asserts that women need not worry about the impact of the decision on reproductive autonomy because they can turn to the political process and vote out lawmakers who pass abortion restrictions and bans. But the reality is that by failing to rein in partisan gerrymandering and consistently gutting voting rights protections, the Supreme Court has rendered that impossible.
One researcher looked specifically at the influence of gerrymandering on abortion policy in the United States and found that
states with a pro-Republican gerrymander were considerably more likely to impose a pre-viability abortion ban in 2023. Across the 50 states, the logistic regression results suggest an increase in the odds of an abortion ban by more than 40 times as a result of a pro-Republican legislative map gerrymander. Notably, a pre-viability abortion ban is in place in nine of the 10 states where public opinion favors abortion rights but where the legislative map is biased toward Republicans.
It's not news that Republican gerrymandering in red states has resulted in the imposition of abortion restrictions that, at least in some cases, a majority of those states' citizens do not want. This has been confirmed by popular votes, since Roe was overturned, in favor of abortion rights in such decidedly red states as Kansas and Kentucky. But Republican gerrymandering creates "affirmative action" for Republicans - not for men. If Republicans were overwhelmingly male and Democrats overwhelmingly female in red states, then the effect of Republican gerrymandering would clearly be to disenfranchise women. Yet if one looks at the constituencies, by sex, of the Republican Parties in each of the fourteen states with the most restrictive abortion laws ("total" bans, as defined by The Fuller Project), it turns out that, with only a few exceptions, there is a fairly even distribution of women and men among Republicans. Two of these states have noticeably lopsided constituencies in which a sizable majority of Republicans are men: North Dakota and Oklahoma; but in three of these states (Arkansas, Idaho and Kentucky), Republican women outnumber Republican men. Here is a table showing the breakdown of Republicans by sex in these fourteen states. (These figures come from the Pew Research Center.)
Women as a Percent of Those Who Identify as Republican or Who "Lean" Republican in States With Total Abortion Bans
Alabama............. 49%
Arkansas........... 52%
Idaho.................. 53%
Indiana .............. 47%
Kentucky............ 52%
Louisiana ........... 50%
Mississippi.......... 50%
Missouri.............. 50%
North Dakota...... 40%
Oklahoma.............43%
South Dakota .......48%
Tennessee.............47%
Texas....................49%
West Virginia.......49%
For all their success at unleveling the playing field, then, Republicans have, for the most part, not privileged the views of men who oppose abortion rights but of Republicans who oppose abortion rights. And before they could create those political gerrymanders, Republicans first had to get elected to office. There isn't a single congressional district in the United States in which women do not have the same right to vote as men have. And if the votes of pro-choice women now effectively count for less than the votes of anti-choice men because of Republican gerrymandering, that is no less true of the votes of pro-choice men relative to the votes of anti-choice women in these same districts.
The reason we're where we are today, of course, with women being denied access not just to abortion but to life-saving reproductive healthcare, is because of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Dobbs swept away a fundamental right that had been recognized and reaffirmed by the Supreme Court for nearly half a century. The person who made that possible was Donald Trump. The people who made Donald Trump possible (that is, made it possible for Trump to eliminate the right to abortion) was every person who voted for him in 2016. How many of those voters were women? Depending upon which source one uses, of all the women who voted in the presidential election in 2016, as many as 42% of them voted for Trump. The Pew Research Center puts that figure lower: 39%. But, since women made up 55% of the electorate in 2016, what that means in raw numbers is that, out of the nearly 70 million votes cast by women in that election, approximately 27 million of these women's votes were for Trump. That's 27 million votes by women for a candidate who explicitly and repeatedly promised to appoint supreme court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. (Worse, more White women voted for Trump in 2016 than voted for Clinton.) Lest anyone forget, Trump was the candidate who stated on national television in March of that year that "there has to be some form of punishment" for women who obtain abortions. In contrast to Trump's promises during the campaign to overturn Roe if elected, Hillary Clinton, Trump's opponent, unambiguously and repeatedly promised to defend a woman's right to choose.
None of this is meant to suggest that there isn't a "gender gap" in politics or that men, as a group, aren't even more culpable for ending the constitutional right to abortion in the U.S. than women are. After all, 52% of male voters voted for Trump in 2016 as opposed to the 41% of them (including me) who voted for Clinton. But, notwithstanding the effect that the electoral college has in facilitating (and increasingly guaranteeing) minority rule in the U.S. (Clinton got about 3 million more votes in 2016 than Trump did), the fact remains that were it not for the approximately 27 million women who voted for Trump in 2016 Roe would be the law of the land today. Numerically, there simply aren't enough eligible male voters in the United States to prevent women from electing pro-choice legislators and presidents if only they chose to do so.
Even if the prevailing opinion among men weren't solidly in support of abortion rights, and even if much of the organizational leadership of the anti-abortion-rights movement weren't comprised of women, and even if the votes and party identification of women weren't necessary to install anti-choice politicians in legislatures and in the White House, there still would be a compelling reason not to reduce (and to misrepresent) the conflict between abortion-rights opponents and abortion-rights supporters as a conflict between men and women (as this meme and others like it do). The reason is simply that a person's values and beliefs are not determined by that person's sex. To assert that they are is to engage in the most basic sort of stereotyping, namely, that a person's sex is more determinative of their beliefs (and temperament and intellectual ability) than anything else. Women, as a class, have never benefited from that kind of stereotyping. Nor does the fact that they have been justify turning the tables on men and doing the same thing to them. The logical inference of this sort of essentializing or generalizing, after all, is that a person's sex may legitimately be regarded as a disqualifying characteristic. Not only disqualifying insofar as voting is concerned (as women were disqualified until ratification of the 19th amendment), and not only disqualifying insofar as enacting legislation is concerned (as the meme that I have been discussing here proclaims) but even disqualifying insofar as having an opinion on abortion is concerned. Explicitly expressing this attitude is this meme:
Speaking of opinions, if male legislators are obligated
to abstain from votes that affect women's bodies and women's lives (as the first meme urges),
presumably, male jurists, too, should be expected to recuse themselves
from any legal proceedings concerning abortion and abortion rights
(hence my allusion in the title to Harry Blackmun, the author of the 1973 Roe v. Wade opinion). By that logic, no woman jurist could fairly preside over a case concerning male bodies,
no LGBTQIA+ judge should rule on a case concerning a hetero person (and
vice versa), etc. But what is the argument that a judge should be
disqualified on the basis of sex, religion, ethnicity or any other
characteristic if not a validation of Trump's claim that he could not get a fair trial from a judge who is "of Mexican heritage"?
I do not mean to create a straw-man argument here, nor am I so naive as to think that these memes do not arise from the sense of injustice that I described at the beginning of this essay when I alluded to the practice of the police not being subject to the same parking rules (or to the same penalties for violating them) as the rest of us are. When someone says "He who is without ovaries shall not make laws for those who do," it's probably a safe bet that she is referring not to any law on abortion but only to laws restricting or banning abortion. Likewise, I'd like to think that the person who posted the meme just above was reacting to the expression of anti-choice opinions by men who will never need an abortion rather than to opinions by men that express support for a woman's right to choose. But if that's the case, why post these memes to spaces on social media where the vast majority of men who are likely to see them are supporters of abortion rights?
Wittingly or unwittingly, memes that lay the blame for abortion restrictions at the feet of men while making no mention of the role that women, themselves, have played in restricting abortion rights reinforces the false and unproductive notion that it is not sexism that is the problem but men who are the problem. I am reminded by this of something one of my favorite feminist authors, bell hooks, wrote in her Introduction to Feminism Is for Everybody (which is true). I will give her the last word.
"Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression." I love this definition, which I first offered more than 10 years ago in my book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. I love it because it so clearly states that the movement is not about being anti-male. It makes it clear that the problem is sexism. And that clarity helps us remember that all of us, female and male, have been socialized from birth on to accept sexist thought and action. As a consequence, females can be just as sexist as men. And while that does not excuse of justify male domination, it does mean that it would be naive and wrongminded for feminist thinkers to see the movement as simplistically being for women against men. To end patriarchy (another way of naming the institutionalized sexism) we need to be clear that we are all participants in perpetuating sexism until we change our minds and hearts, until we let go of sexist thought and action and replace it with feminist thought and action.
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