This election is about whether American women are more than breeders

My paternal grandfather was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force and the personal pilot for the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 1967 to 1970. My father actually graduated from the American School in Kabul in 1970 before he, his sister and my grandparents returned to the United States. I grew up hearing about a very different Afghanistan than the one we see today.

Afghanistan of the 1960s and 1970s was still patriarchal, but women were a part of society. Beginning in 1959, women appeared in public unveiled. They participated in drafting the 1964 constitution. They were doctors and nurses; they served in Parliament and as government ministers. Under the Taliban — first from 1994 to 2001 and now after the disastrous U.S. withdrawal in 2021 — women are being erased from public life.

Today, Afghan girls are banned from schools beginning at age 10. Afghan women are banned from working outside the home. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Women and girls in Afghanistan are banned from public parks and from playing sports. They are not allowed in public without a mahram (a husband or male blood-relative). Women are barred from driving, taking public transportation, visiting health clinics or leaving the country without a mahram.

According to United States Institute of Peace, the Taliban has gone so far as to require nongovernmental organizations remove the word “woman” from their organizational names. And just this week, the Taliban issued a new rule forbidding women from speaking loud enough for other women to hear their voices. It is unsurprising that women’s suicide rates have dramatically increased.

“American women would be wise to take note of how quickly and how completely Afghan women’s rights have been obliterated.”

American women would be wise to take note of how quickly and how completely Afghan women’s rights have been obliterated.

The lawsuit no one is paying attention to

The current election in the United States is a lot of things to a lot of people and it can be hard to hold the weight of all the ways in which this election matters. Even so, we cannot lose sight of the fact that — by the GOP’s own rhetoric — this election is overwhelmingly a referendum on women’s roles within American society.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out a lawsuit filed by a number of rightwing medical groups against the Food and Drug Administration over access to the abortion drug mifepristone. The lawsuit challenged the FDA’s decision to remove in-person dispensing requirements for patients, thus allowing patients to receive the medication by mail.

The FDA’s decision was initially issued during the COVID-19 pandemic at the request of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine. The pandemic forced medical professionals to remove barriers to care for a variety of health care needs, abortion being one of them. After seeing no significant downside to making the medication available in this way, the decision to eliminate the in-person dispensing requirement was made permanent in December 2021.

When the Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit in June, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the court, said the medical groups that filed the lawsuit against the FDA did not have standing: “Because plaintiffs do not prescribe or use mifepristone, plaintiffs are unregulated parties who seek to challenge FDA’s regulation of others” (original emphasis).

In a brazen effort to put the issue of access to abortion medication back in front of the court, on Oct. 11 the Republican attorneys general of Missouri, Kansas and Idaho filed their own lawsuit. Because the original lawsuit was thrown out over the petitioners’ lack of standing, the attorneys general have presented why it is that they have standing and should be allowed to regulate access to the drug via mail.

Their filing has not generated nearly enough attention.

While abortion is banned in Missouri and Idaho, the right to abortion is enshrined in the Kansas Constitution and Bill of Rights. In fact, voters in 2022 defeated a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would have restricted access to abortion, making the Kansas Republican attorney general’s participation in this lawsuit particularly hypocritical. So much for the will of the people.

The argument presented by the attorneys general against their constituents receiving abortion medication by mail is based on their notion of state sovereignty. One particular section of the filing is titled “Sovereign Injuries to Plaintiffs’ Population Interests.”

It is worth quoting this portion of the filing in its entirety. The attorneys general use the Dobbs decision and another Supreme Court ruling on interstate commerce to justify using women and girls for breeding:

• “Plaintiff states also suffer injuries from the loss of fetal life and potential births, leading to a resulting reduction in the actual or potential population of each state.”
• “Defendants’ actions are causing a loss in potential population or potential population increase. Each abortion represents at least one lost potential or actual birth.”
• “Defendants’ efforts enabling the remote dispensing of abortion drugs has caused abortions for women in plaintiff states and decreased births in plaintiff states. This is a sovereign injury to the state in itself.”
• “One study highlighted that the removal of in-person follow-up visits has an effect on birth rates. In Missouri, state laws result ‘in an average increase in driving distance of 2.2 miles’ for an in-person out-of-state dispensing of abortion drugs, ‘compared to a 453-mile increase in Texas, illustrating that states with the greatest increases in driving distance also tend to have the greatest estimated increases in births. That is because it is relatively easy for a Missouri woman to drive to Illinois or Kansas than for a Texas woman to drive to New Mexico or Colorado. Reflecting the ease of driving to another state to receive abortion drugs, it is estimated that just 2.4% of abortion-minded women were prevented from getting abortions’ in Missouri after Dobbs. This data thus reflects the FDA’s removal of a requirement for three in-person doctor visits.”
• “These estimates also show the effect of the FDA’s decision to remove all in-person dispensing protections. When data is examined in a way that reflects sensitivity to expected birth rates, these estimates strikingly ‘do not show evidence of an increase in births to teenagers aged 15-19,’ even in states with long driving distances despite the fact that ‘women aged 15-19 … are more responsive to driving distances to abortion facilities than older women.’ The study thus concludes that ‘one explanation may be that younger women are more likely to navigate online abortion finders or websites ordering mail-order medication to self-manage abortions.’ This study thus suggests that remote dispensing of abortion drugs by mail, common carrier, and interactive computer service is depressing expected birth rates for teenaged mothers in plaintiff states, even if other overall birth rates may have been lower than otherwise was projected.”

This section of the filing concludes with the impact teenage girls not being forced to give birth means to the states: “A loss of potential population causes further injuries as well: the states subsequent ‘diminishment of political representation’ and ‘loss of federal funds,’ such as potentially ‘losing a seat in Congress or qualifying for less federal funding if their populations are’ reduced or their increase diminished.”

It would be a mistake to dismiss this lawsuit with its explicit legal rationale as simply a creative but misguided legal game.

Using the bodies of women and girls for breeding

Pronatalism is a movement that, as journalist Margaret Talbot recently wrote, “typically combines concerns about falling birth rates with anti-immigration and anti-feminist ideas. It champions not just having children but having many — large families for the sake of large families, reproduction for reproduction’s sake. Except that, in this worldview, not all reproduction is equal. Pronatalism favors native-born baby makers.”

“Pronatalism favors native-born baby makers.”

This week, The New York Times published a story about pronatalist and Trump megadonor Elon Musk, who has repeatedly asserted that “smart people” need to have as many kids as possible. He’s even offered his own sperm to friends to help in the effort.

Musk also has proudly contributed to the movement by fathering at least 11 children with three women and is building a compound in Austin to house them all.

Musk is just following in the footsteps of his father, Errol Musk, who fathered seven children with three women (including two with a former stepdaughter). The elder Musk is quoted as saying: “You breed horses. People are the same. If you have a good father and a good mother, you’ll have exceptional children.”

This notion of using women (and girls) for breeding isn’t limited to attorneys general or to creepy billionaires and their families.

Just months ago, the far-right think tank The Edmond Burke Foundation hosted the fourth annual National Conservatism Conference. There, the topics of immigration and gender identity were front and center because of the perceived dangers both pose to the nativist, pronatalism movement. The themes were woven throughout the entire conference as noted by female journalists Annika Brockschmidt and Sarah Jones who each dared to attend the conference catering to the mostly white male attendees who celebrated the rise of nationalist movements around the world.

Anti-choice activist Tom McClusky, in a panel titled Post Dobbs, joked about “progressives” and their support for the LGBTQ community: “One thing that our side does better than the other side is we breed — they don’t. They neuter their children. They sterilize their children in all their efforts of justice.”

Yoram Hazony, an Israeli American philosopher, emphasized that having children is the only “honorable” thing for someone to do in life.

“If you’re not teaching people to have children, you’re not in the game. You don’t understand what this is all about. … We’re down to 1.6 children per woman in the United States. … The only honorable thing is to get married and have children — lots of children, and raise them right. And if you’re not doing that, then what you’re doing is dishonorable, all right.”

“One thing that our side does better than the other side is we breed — they don’t.”

Hazony concluded his marks by telling the “young men” in the audience to go out and “get a young woman, get married.” As if women are some sort of object to be obtained.

It should be noted that Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance also was one of the speakers at the conference.

Vance has not been shy about sharing his extremist, Opus Dei-inspired views on women and the role they should occupy in breeding. He’s derided women who prioritize having careers over having children. He holds the controversial viewpoint that the whole point of postmenopausal women living past the age of childbearing, evolutionarily speaking, is to care for other people’s children. And, of course he advocates for weighting the votes of those who choose to procreate so that they count more than the votes of those who choose a different path.

Vance also wrote the foreword to the now-delayed book by Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, the extremist organization behind Project 2025.

As I and others have documented, Project 2025 calls for rolling back the rights of a number of groups in the United States — especially those of women.

The manifesto asserts that the Department of Health and Human Services should be renamed the “Department of Life,” that abortion should be rejected as a health care procedure, that the 1873 Comstock Act should be revived to ban “every obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article, matter, thing, device or substance” from the mail (that, in theory, could include birth control pills as well as abortion medication).

And, in a draconian attempt at controlling language, Kevin Roberts in his introduction to Project 2025 says the next Republican administration should delete “the terms sexual orientation and gender identity, diversity, equity, and inclusion, gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”

We already have, in the Taliban, a present-day extremist religious regime attempting to erase women by banning the language used to describe them and their needs. The world doesn’t need another.

In Project 2025, it has been noted time and again that the people and funding organizations behind it are on a mission to institute a narrow Christian nationalist vision for the American family and erase everyone else.

Of course, Donald Trump has assured the American people he has nothing to do with the dystopian manifesto, even though more than half of the 320 writers, editors and contributors worked in his previous administration, his campaigns or his transition team.

Since the plan is to purge the government of administrators and install Trump loyalists, it’s a safe bet these same writers, editors and contributors would be brought onboard to implement the plan should Trump win (or steal) the election.

The GOP’s vision for women and girls

It wasn’t all that long ago that American women were first granted entry into public life. For women (or anyone, for that matter) to fully participate in society, they must have personal autonomy.

Lest we forget, oral contraceptives were first approved by the FDA in 1960, but it wasn’t until 1965 that the Supreme Court ruled in Griswold v. Connecticut that married couples had a right to privacy, including the use of birth control.

It would be another seven years before the Supreme Court, in 1972, legalized birth control for unmarried women.

Setting family planning aside, women in the U.S. were unable to access credit in their own names before the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act.

Married women would have to wait until 1981 and the Supreme Court’s decision in Kirchberg v. Feenstra to have any say over the property they jointly owned. The ruling overturned Louisiana’s law that declared a husband “head and master” of the home with unilateral control of any jointly-owned property.

No-fault divorce was first signed into law in California in 1969 by Gov. Ronald Reagan. While many states quickly followed suit, it wasn’t until 1991 that all 50 states allowed for the no-fault option.

“No right related to personal autonomy is settled law.”

But these hard-fought rights can go away in the blink of an eye. The 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned women’s rights to access the medical care provided through abortion should remind everyone that no right related to personal autonomy is settled law.

In his concurring opinion on the 2022 Dobbs decision, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the court “should reconsider all of this court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergfell. …We have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents.”

Griswold enshrined a married woman’s (although not a single woman’s) right to birth control. Lawrence built on Griswold, confirming what happens in the bedroom is no one’s business — even for gays and lesbians. And Obergfell, of course, legalized same-sex marriage.

But it isn’t just Justice Thomas who has attacked women’s access to birth control. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has been on a decades-long crusade to block access to birth control, erroneously calling some forms akin to abortion. And when the House voted in 2022 on the Right to Contraception Act, enshrining the right to access contraception, 195 of the 205 Republicans voted against it.

Another target of the extreme right is no-fault divorce.

Because the no-fault divorce option rolled out in different states at different times, in 2004 researchers were able to review historical outcomes in states with no-fault divorces and those without. They found having the no-fault divorce option reduced intimate-partner violence by 30% and the murder of women by their partners by 10%. They also found it reduced the suicide rates of women by 8% to 16% depending on the state.

No-fault divorces overwhelmingly help women trapped in abusive marriages.

JD Vance is a proponent of eliminating no-fault divorce. So is the Republican Party of my home state of Texas that added to its 2024 platform the desire to eliminate it, saying: “The Texas Family Code shall be completely rewritten with regards to no-fault divorce and child custody. Suits related to these topics shall be delineated in such a way as to remove the need for any but the most minimal judicial interaction and promote the maintenance of the traditional family via required intervention or counseling prior to any decree of divorce.”

As the journalist Tessa Stuart has noted, it isn’t just Texas: No-fault divorce is on the chopping block in other states, too. The Republican parties of Louisiana and Nebraska have both affirmed their commitments to ending no-fault divorce.

American women and the men who care about them should be concerned about the rhetoric constantly in use by the GOP to describe their vision for women and girls. And realize those who are calling attention to it aren’t just a bunch of hand-wringing, liberal, “childless cat ladies.”

The Dobbs decision was not the culmination of the right’s 60-year-war on women’s rights in this country. It was just the opening salvo on a new front.

Now, the GOP is saying the quiet part of their machinations out loud, and we should all listen.

 

Mara Richards Bim serves as a Clemons Fellow with BNG and as program director at Faith Commons. She is a spiritual director and a recent master of divinity degree graduate from Perkins School of Theology at SMU. She also is an award-winning theater artist and founder of the nationally acclaimed Cry Havoc Theater Company which operated in Dallas from 2014 to 2023.

 

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