In 2016, in her presidential campaign against Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton prophesied, “In a single term, the Supreme Court could demolish pillars of the progressive movement, and as someone who has worked on every single one of these issues for decades, I see this as a make-or-break moment.” Trump, of course, was elected and proceeded to appoint three justices to the Supreme Court, thus positioning a conservative-majority Supreme Court to rubber-stamp the most arrant conservative nonsense. And top of that Republican wish list was overturning the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade.
In 2024, we’re seeing what happens when women’s bodily autonomy is threatened and stripped away.
Now, in 2024, we’re seeing what happens when women’s bodily autonomy is threatened and stripped away. We’re seeing a striking gender gap when it comes to support for Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump, with early voting polls showing a 10-percentage-point gender gap. And when we look at the policies Trump has helped enact versus the promises Harris has pledged, it’s no mystery why.
Before Roe was struck down, and seemingly as a trial run, in 2021 Texas passed Senate Bill 8, which made abortion after six weeks illegal in Texas. The Supreme Court had a chance to stop the law on the shadow docket. The justices declined, a harbinger of things to come. A year later, the Supreme Court overturned the law that codified abortion.
A sea of trigger laws written for this eventuality followed; some red states banned abortion as quickly as they could. Republicans wrote bills that banned abortion broadly, with little or no cutout for the life of the woman. The idea was simple: make doctors afraid to treat. Texas courts have several times rejected requests to provide specificity about the health exception.
In Louisiana not only can you not get an abortion; you may struggle just to get first-trimester pregnancy care. “We were stunned by just how much regular medical practice for pregnant people has been disrupted,” Michele Heisler, the medical director of Physicians for Human Rights, told NPR. Elsewhere in the country, things are looking similarly bleak. According to a 2023 report from The New York Times, “All told, more than a dozen labor and delivery doctors — including five of Idaho’s nine longtime maternal-fetal experts — will have either left or retired by the end of this year.” Medical care for women is under threat, and it extends far beyond what’s traditionally discussed as abortion, especially by Republicans who demonize an entire category of lifesaving health care.
After Roe was overturned, a lot of us were sure this would mean women would die. We were told we were being hysterical. But “the SB 8 effect” was real. According to Nancy L. Cohen, president of the Gender Equity Policy Institute, “There’s only one explanation for this staggering difference in maternal mortality. All the research points to Texas’ abortion ban as the primary driver of this alarming increase.” And it wasn’t just pregnant women who died. Infant mortality also increased by about 13%, according to a study from Johns Hopkins, which also stated, “This suggests that SB 8 was driving this increase in infant mortality.” It’s now three years later. Women have died.
In the one election since the fall of Roe, the 2022 midterm election, there was warning of a red wave, projecting that Republicans planned to compensate for Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.
But Republicans underperformed, and Democrats kept the Senate and almost kept the House. Two years later, conservative pundits wishcasted that women have gotten over losing that constitutional right. But evidence supports the theory that if anything, women are more enraged than ever.
Women voters, as Justice Samuel Alito said in the Supreme Court opinion that overturned Roe and took away a constitutional right women had had for half a century, “are not without electoral or political power.” Alito likely didn’t mean that statement as a rallying cry, but it seems like a lot of American women took it as such.
If Harris wins the election, it will be because women rejected Trumpism. It will be because they rejected the cruelty, the stupidity and the brazen misogyny of the MAGA reality. And it will also be because a near-flawless candidate ran a near-flawless campaign.