Women Will Die Because of This
To some degree, the Trump administration’s daily assault on women is not a surprise. Republicans have a notoriously terrible record on women’s rights, or as some radicals like to call them, human rights. Their “family values” — opposition to abortion rights, paid family leave, the equal pay act, comprehensive sex education, Planned Parenthood, universal coverage of birth control disproportionately hurt women — women of color, immigrant women, LGBT women, disabled women especially.
And it’s not like Trump didn’t tell us who he was — over and over and over again. In his campaign announcement when he called Mexican immigrants drug dealers and rapists, in the Access Hollywood tape when he described how he grabbed women “by the pussy” and claimed they’ll let you do anything when you’re famous. When he called Venezuelan Miss Universe contestant, Alicia Machado, “Miss Housekeeping” and “Miss Piggy.” When twelve women came forward accusing him of sexual harassment, misconduct, and assault.
But at times, it can be particularly awful. A 20-week abortion ban, the ridiculously named and scientifically absurd Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, passed the House of Representatives. In addition, the Trump Administration implemented a policy that allows any employer to refuse to cover birth control for “religious or moral” reasons, which, as Erin Gloria Ryan points out in the Daily Beast, means that your boss’s discomfort with women who have sex can be a good enough reason. And the Department of Health and Human Services has issued a strategic plan which defines life as beginning at conception, and the implications for women’s health are nothing short of catastrophic (you can tell them what you think of this idea here).
And as allegations against Harvey Weinstein multiplied and gained traction, women across the internet have chimed in with their own stories or silently scrolled passed others keeping their own locked up in that knot in their stomachs. And the women who accused Trump wonder why no one believed them, why their abuser is now allowed to decide their access to birth control, to healthcare, to abortions. We all live with the daily insult of a sexual abuser in the White House, but for these women, that trauma is tenfold. And we all live with the knowledge that many of those in power care more about the political affiliations of the abuser than about those who have been abused.
Finally, in a memo exclusively obtained by Crooked Media, the Trump administration outlines an even more dramatic battle plan in their war on women. From calling for sex education that only promotes the rhythm method (which fails in 25% of cases) to abstinence only education, to eliminating the Let Girls Learn initiative and programs fighting and studying teen pregnancy, the memo is a strident battle cry against women’s agency and established science.
Undergirding all of this is the knowledge that these practices hurt some women disproportionately more than others — women whom people in power are much less likely to believe because of their race, gender identity, sexual orientation, profession, disability, or immigration status.
Women like Jane Doe, in what is perhaps the most horrifying and dystopian of the many current cases against women. Jane Doe was caught crossing the border as an undocumented, unaccompanied minor. She was transferred to an immigration “shelter” where she discovered that she was pregnant and requested access to an abortion. Abortions are notoriously difficult in Texas where minors cannot seek an abortion without parental permission, but because of new rules put in place by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (which oversees unaccompanied, undocumented minors) wherein each case must be decided personally by the Office’s director, Jane Doe’s case is exponentially and unnecessarily more difficult. It thus became an object for the courts.
The first judge who oversaw the case, United States District Judge Tanya Chutkan, ordered that the federal government to allow Jane Doe the procedure, but the Trump administration appealed, and an appeals court granted the government until October 31 to transfer custody of Jane Doe from the shelter to a sponsor who can help her get access to the abortion. While Jane waits for a sponsor, she also gets ever closer to the 20-week abortion ban, already the law of the land in Texas.
While Jane Doe’s case is the most prominent, it is certainly not the only of its kind. In a Vox rundown of the issue, they highlight another even more horrifying case in which a young woman was granted access to an abortion by medication. After she had taken the first dose, however, officials from the Office of Refugee Resettlement forced her to go to the emergency room to see if the abortion could be reversed. She was ultimately allowed to take the second dose to finalize the procedure, but the administration’s desire not only to prevent but also reverse bodily autonomy for women is at its darkest in situations like these.
While the Trump administration seeks to limit women’s access to abortions across the board, and while states have been slowly stripping this right of its efficacy since Roe v. Wade was first decided, their appalling, brazen denial of this young woman’s right to an abortion cannot be divorced from the racial animus of their immigration policy. The Trump administration is full of xenophobes, cowards and racists who see men and women with darker skin as less deserving of Constitutional protection.
But it is not just black and brown women who face the violence and indignity of the Trump administration’s misogyny. As Ryan points out in another Daily Beast article (what, she does good reporting!) the memo obtained by Crooked Media is rife not only with misogyny, but Islamophobia as well. And the two are inextricably linked.
“The spectre of sexual abuse by Muslim men has long been used by those pushing an Islamophobic agenda to drum up fear of immigration. The administration’s sudden concern for women would feel less disingenuous if the Trump administration cared about sexual assaults committed by anybody who wasn’t brown (perhaps by somebody who was more, uh, orange, for starters), but as it stands, this concern trolling is very of-the-Breitbart-playbook.”
This recalls the same tactics as they were (and are) deployed against black men, when the ideal of the purity of white women perpetuated racist, violent imagery. It recalls Donald Trump’s campaign announcement when he called Mexican immigrants “rapists,” and it reminds that the moments most dangerous for Trump’s campaign were not this overtly racist imagery or his mockery of norms and institutions, but the accusations of assault by white women.
All at once, Trump attacks women’s autonomy, our rights, and our health, while using perceived fragility or sacredness (thanks for that one General Kelly) to enforce a racist, fear based campaign against anyone with darker skin than a peach crayon.
White women have been notoriously bad allies — whether in the suffragette movement or the recent Twitter boycott, we have a bad habit of making it all about us. We can make sure not to do that this time. The Trump administration is attacking women — attacking us at every level, from our bodies to our relationship with our employers and we have to work against that. But we also have to remember that we cannot, we cannot let them use us to further their xenophobic, racist war. We have to remember the women in detention centers, women in prison, women who can’t take time off work to drive to Planned Parenthood, to cross state lines, to get new jobs with employers who will cover their contraception. While we fight for our right to work instead of staying home, we have to remember the women working three jobs because they can’t afford to make that choice.
If feminism is the radical notion that women are people, than the Trump Administration is about as far from that as they can be. They aren’t content with restricting our healthcare, our education, or our resources the way previous Republican administrations have. No, they are actively seeking out men to whom they can give control over our bodies. Whether it’s our access to abortions, our access to Planned Parenthood, or our access to contraceptives, it is clear that the Trump Administration sees women as objects — objects for sex, objects for pregnancy, objects for holding, objects for grabbing.
Does this seem overzealous to you? Does it feel like I’ve taken it too far?
At every step, this administration is a forced intrusion into our bodies. Women have long sought the ability to control our own destinies — to have kids or not, to stay work or not, to build homes or not. None of these choices are moral ones. None of them are any of your business. But as the Trump administration continues to funnel their money, time, energy, and considerable power into stripping women of their choices, into forcing them to carry pregnancies to term, and then abandoning them as soon as babies are born, into dismantling our schools and our communities, into turning us against each other — it shows us over and over again that it hates women. It seeks to control women.
They hate us. And they have thousands of years of culture and history to back them up. But we have ourselves, and we have each other, and we are going to fight back. We have to. Our lives are at stake.
