Opinion: Where are the Angry American Women?

America is the country of the equal and the free. That’s exactly why there’s gender equality, too—but wait. Of course, women have gained suffrage, access to equal education, higher wages, etc. in this country—privileges that are still merely dreams for unfortunate women in other parts of the world. But in modern America, gender equality legally exists. Then surely there must be equal opportunities for both men and women to speak their mind. However, can we really claim both genders get equal say in these united states of America? The ugly truth is, as America’s women take one step forward, conservative Republican men turn to politics to try to push them three steps backward. It’s everyone’s favorite culture war: birth control and abortion.

Looking at the background of the issue exhibits that there is a notable gender gap in politics. This gap covers both politicians and every day women; such conditions have merged to make women a central issue in today’s political atmosphere. Unfortunately, this combination is only making the boiling water spill over. Since 1980, there has been a general trend in which women favor Democratic candidates over Republicans. Another cause for the political gap is that the Republican party has recently been taken over by conservatives, and the entire party is now in favor of right-wing social policies. Such policies include anti-abortion, anti-contraceptive and anti-government funding of Planned Parenthood. Now, when both factors—the politics and the everyday people—combine, we start to worry about the water. It’s finally boiling, and spilling over the rims of the pot in primarily Republican sections of the country, as pro-life legislature and anything along pro-life discourse can be and is passed with little political debate. In primarily Republican sections of the country, predominately male politicians are passing laws that subsume only women and control of their bodies.  

So then, what happens when those men speaking for women take legal action? Gender equality is set back from 2012 standards to 1912. As of right now, a woman’s own opinion is allowed to come into the doctor’s office with her—even if it is religious in nature. No one tells a woman that she is legally obligated to have an abortion; it is up to the woman to do what she feels is right for her. However, whatever her stance on birth control or abortion is, her opinion doesn’t matter when there is legal action. Men, who have a 0.00 percent chance of conceiving a child, are making up the minds of women—who can conceive children—to make abortion illegal. Even so, the violation of rights doesn’t stop there; legal measures have been attempted again and again. Proposition 26 is an amendment that is to be voted on in Mississippi which declares that a fertilized human egg is a person. Therefore, not only does it equate abortion to murder (even though women currently have abortion rights in the first weeks of the pregnancy), it complicates criminal proceedings regarding the issue. Is a woman to be charged with murder for taking a morning-after pill or getting an intrauterine device (IUD)? Doctors will also have serious legal issues to deal with when treating a life-threatening pregnancy, as well as with in vitro fertilization. On top of this, this law does not discriminate between an “accidental” pregnancy and instances of domestic violence, sexual assault, rape or incest. Unfortunately, this isn’t the only bill that has been washing across the state legislatures. About a month ago, the Virginia senate passed a law that requires doctors to perform ultrasounds on women before they have an abortion. Critics declared this “state rape,” but that didn’t stop Alabama, Idaho, Pennsylvania and North Carolina to look into enacting similar regulations.

The fight over abortion greatly hinders women’s rights and the progress we have made in the past century; why turn back? It’s 2012. We should be able to instigate our position on our own health and private lives. When the right to abortion is attacked, it also challenges our rights of reproduction. Abortion is partially fought on a moral basis, but let’s not turn a blind eye to the fight’s major predicament. The protection of unborn babies, such as in the case of the drive for Personhood, is at the expense of the health rights of already living and breathing women. Say there’s a scenario where a woman is pregnant with twins and one of them is stillborn. Is the baby supposed to be kept full term and endanger the life of the other twin as well as herself? There are moral arguments coming in tidal waves to protect the lives of unborn humans, but where are the morals protecting the lives of women?

Women and men are equal under the law in America, yet these gender rights are still violated. State legislatures have passed and are on their way to legalizing a multitude of bills that criminalize standard methods of birth control, turn a blind eye towards women who are in life-threatening pregnancies, disregard rape, complicate relatively simple medical procedures, and ban abortion altogether. Somehow, women in America tolerate this violation in passivity; they ignore the dangers of boiling water. Who’s going to put a brave foot into the kitchen and turn off the water? Women in America tolerate being degraded as subordinate members of society. Where are the angry women in America?