Sorry, Bill Maher, There Really Is a War on Women

Republicans Want to Eliminate Every Aspect of Reproductive Autonomy

A recent Bill Maher schtick is that the Barbie movie’s attack on the patriarchy is just plain wrong: there isn’t any war on women going on.

Putting aside the ridiculousness of using a film about a doll to critique claims about the patriarchal structures of the U.S. (Greta Gerwig’s feminist take notwithstanding), a GIANT hole in Maher’s argument, and one he never bothers to reference, is the Republican assault on women’s reproductive autonomy, beginning with the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022.

To counter anyone taking Maher’s word for it, I just want to do a quick hit of some recent, extremely disturbing developments in the world of women’s reproductive health.

Trump Now, Seemingly, Backs a 15-Week Abortion Ban

Here’s the word salad from the New York Times: “’The number of weeks, now, people are agreeing on 15, and I’m thinking in terms of that, and it’ll come out to something that’s very reasonable,’ [Trump] said. ‘But people are really — even hard-liners are agreeing, seems to be 15 weeks, seems to be a number that people are agreeing at. But I’ll make that announcement at the appropriate time.’”

This is alarming not because Trump has any moral investment in the issue of abortion (remember he’d initially backed a 16-week ban, which he arrived at because 16 is a nice, even number), but precisely because he doesn’t and thus will do whatever furthers his power and gets him elected. Once elected, as he did with his Supreme Court picks, Trump will do what his MAGA crew wants him to, including signing terrible things such as national bans on abortion or even contraception into law.

Trump’s takeover of the GOP means that making abortion largely illegal nationally is within reach of its most zealous patriarchs.

Fetal Personhood Laws Are Quietly Sweeping the Country

According to Anna North in Vox, the battle over IVF that was sparked by the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling last month that frozen embryos are legally “children,”

also revived interest in — and concern over — so-called “fetal personhood” laws, which give fetuses, and in some cases embryos, the legal rights of a person. These laws, on the books in more than a third of states, have long worried reproductive rights advocates because they can be used to prosecute pregnant people for miscarrying or potentially for undergoing necessary medical procedures. While IVF impacts a relatively small number of families across the U.S.—but has support from a large majority of Americans—the concept of fetal personhood affects everybody who can get pregnant, whether they want to or not.

Not only can these laws lead to people, primarily women, being potentially prosecuted for miscarrying, but they could also be used to criminalize them for seeking an abortion or possibly charge them with murder if they have one.

As North goes on to note:

Personhood laws and related legislation can have other consequences, too. Fetal homicide laws, for example, which treat the fetus as a separate crime victim, have already led women to be arrested for experiencing a miscarriage or for using drugs during pregnancy. Some fear that under personhood legislation, pregnant people could be prosecuted for taking medications like antidepressants that may carry risks during pregnancy, or simply for failing to get adequate medical care.These laws, in short, could be used to finally, fatally outlaw abortion in any form, which would mean untold numbers of women would be forced to carry a pregnancy to term.

Many Republicans Are Drooling Over the Prospect of Outlawing Contraception

As Kathy Rissman reported in The Independent in February, it’s not just Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who wants to challenge the legality of contraception. Many Republican legislators are trying to figure out ways to get rid of it as well, despite overwhelming support for contraception across the United States, as Michael Smolens points out in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Rissman notes that in 2022, most Republican House members voted against the Right to Contraception Act, which Rachel Fey, Vice President of Policy and Strategic Partnerships at the nonpartisan nonprofit Power to Decide, observes was “as simple as it gets.”

However, while this law passed the House, Republicans in the Senate blocked it, halting it in its tracks. Increasingly, contraception is intersecting with the Republicans’ anti-abortion agenda. As Rissman observes:

Indeed, spreading misinformation and disinformation about contraception seems to have become a Republican strategy. Some have been “purposefully” pushing misinformation and disinformation around contraception “in order to have a more expansive set of restrictions on reproductive health,” Ms Fey said.

She added, “Policymakers who want to go after contraception have found that an expedient way to do that is to link it to abortion by claiming that methods of contraception are actually methods of abortion.”

Tucked away in some pieces of federal and state legislation are definitions of pregnancy, stating that pregnancy begins at fertilization rather than implantation. While these definitions are typically found in abortion bills, this language threatens some common forms of contraception, like IUDs and emergency contraception. It could also potentially stop the use of IVF entirely.

As goes contraception, so goes a person’s ability to control their own body.

Did You Know that Missouri Banned Divorce During Pregnancy?

Yes, it’s true. As Lizzie Tribone reports in The Guardian, since 1973, Missouri has had a law on the books (and Texas and Arkansas have similar ones, of course) that requires “every petitioner for divorce . . . to disclose their pregnancy status. In practice, experts say, those who are pregnant are barred from legally dissolving their marriage.” Even in instances of violence and abuse.

Why would such a law exist, one might ask? Tribone answers: “The original intent of the statute in Missouri . . . was “noble”, Ashley Aune, a Democratic representative, said, as it tried to ensure that a mother and her child were provided for by settling custody arrangements and child support after the child’s birth.”

But of course, it’s been terribly harmful as it has created barriers for pregnant women trying to get a divorce from abusive spouses. Further, many warn that the law “can enable reproductive coercion,” i.e. control over someone’s reproductive self—to the point of forced birth or forced abortion or even deliberately getting a partner pregnant to keep them in the marriage.

This is a law that specifically, while perhaps unintentionally, ties reproductive control to sexual violence, where a married woman literally has no power over her own body.

And Finally…

While many Republicans don’t agree with all of these restrictions and have either supported legislation to uphold bodily autonomy or at least voted against the most extreme bills, the anti-woman, anti-reproductive rights, anti-gender and sexuality rights arm of the GOP is growing and continues to chip away at fundamental freedoms people have to control their bodies.

As the always prescient Arwa Mahdawi puts it in The Guardian:

Bill by bill, ruling after ruling, the anti-abortion movement in America is chipping away at everything from access to fertility treatments to birth control. There may be a lot of uncertainty around the ruling in Alabama but one thing is very clear: anti-abortion extremists in the US are waging a holy war against women.

So, Bill Maher, you can stuff it.