"War on women" is a slogan in United States politics used to describe certain Republican Party policies and legislation as a wide-scale effort to restrict women's rights, especially reproductive rights, including abortion. Prominent Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer, as well as feminists, have used the phrase to criticize proponents of these laws as trying to force their social views on women through legislation.HoustonOn International Women's Day NOW Calls for End to the "War on Women": Statement of NOW President Terry O'Neill (National Organization for Women), March 8, 2011 , as accessed December 12, 2013 (probably press release). The slogan has been used to describe Republican policies in areas such as access to reproductive health services, particularly birth control and abortion services; the definition of rape for the purpose of the public funding of abortion; the prosecution of criminal violence against women; and workplace discrimination against women.
While used in other contexts, and prior to 2010, it became a common slogan in American political discourse after the 2010 congressional elections.The Atlantic: The GOP's Totally Reactive Reaction to the War on Women. Garance Franke-Ruta, August 2013. The term is often used to describe opposition to the contraceptive mandate in Obamacare and policies to defund women's health organizations that perform abortions, such as Planned Parenthood. The concept again gained attention in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, when Republican nominee Donald Trump drew notice for a history of inflammatory statements and actions toward women.
The phrase and the concept have been criticized by Republicans and some anti-abortion Democrats. Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus described it as an over-simplified fiction advanced by Democrats and the mediaK Jensen, Priebus Says Gender Battle Fictional as Caterpillar War in Bloomberg while other Republicans contended that such rhetoric was used as a distraction from President Barack Obama and the Democrats' handling of the economy. In August 2012, Todd Akin's controversial comments regarding pregnancy and rape sparked renewed media focus on the concept. Republicans have tried to turn the phrase against Democrats by using it to argue hypocrisy for not critiquing sex scandals of members within their party who have cheated, sexted, and harassed women, and for not supporting bills to combat sex-selective abortion.
Development of the term
In 1989, radical feminist Andrea DworkinThe Nation: Seeing Eye to Eye; A Radical Feminist Who Could Dine With (Not On) Conservatives, in The New York Times, § Week In Review, April 17, 2005, as accessed May 9, 2010. wrote in a book introduction about "war on women"Dworkin, Andrea (1989). Beaver Talks. In Dworkin, Andrea (1997 ()). Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women (New York: Free Press), p. 89. and, in 1997, she collected that and other writings in Life and Death, for which the subtitle was Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women.Dworkin, Andrea. Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women, op. cit., cover I. Feminist Susan Faludi's 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, argued that throughout the 1980s the media created a "backlash" against the feminist advances of the 1970s. Former Republican political consultant Tanya Melich's 1996 memoir, The Republican War Against Women: An Insider's Report from Behind the Lines, describes the incorporation of the anti-abortion movement and opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment by Republicans as a divergence from feminist causes.
George W. Bush's administration met with resistance from feminists and women's rights activists throughout his presidency. In 2004 The Feminist Press published Laura Flanders' collection of essays The W Effect: Bush's War On Women. The same year, Sylvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch used "war on women" as a framework for analysis of the restructuring of gender relations in early modern Europe. In 2006 economist Barbara Finlay's critique of the Bush administration's treatment of women was published by Zed Books under the title George W. Bush and the War on Women: Turning Back the Clock on Progress.
In the 2010 midterm elections, the Republican Party (GOP) won the majority in the House of Representatives. On January 4, 2011, the day after Congress convened, Kaili Joy Gray of the liberal Daily Kos wrote an opinion piece titled "The Coming War on Women". In the article, she outlined many of the measures that Republicans intended to push through the House of Representatives, including personhood laws, fetal pain laws, and the effort to defund Planned Parenthood. In February 2011, an AlterNet article by Sarah Seltzer and Lauren Kelley entitled "9 New laws in the GOP's War on Women" began to document state-level legislation restricting abortion access and rights. That same month, New York Representative Jerrold Nadler referred to the proposed No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, one of the Congress's first actions and one that would have changed policy to allow only victims of "forcible rape" or child sex abuse to qualify for Medicaid funding for abortion, as "an entirely new front in the war on women and their families". Florida Representative and Chair of the Democratic National Committee Debbie Wasserman Schultz began using the term "war on women" in March 2011.
Reproductive rights
The "war on women" slogan was used often when describing the unprecedented rise in the passage of provisions related to women's health and reproductive rights in 2011 and 2012. In 2011, state legislatures across the United States introduced over 1100 provisions related to women's health and reproductive rights, and in the first quarter of 2012 an additional 944 provisions were introduced in state legislatures, half of which would restrict access to abortion. Legislation has focused on mandatory ultrasounds, narrowing the time when abortions may be performed and limiting insurance coverage of abortion.
Abortion restrictions
Democratic strategist Zerlina Maxwell wrote an editorial for U.S. News & World Report in which she cited a Guttmacher Institute analysis showing state legislatures enacted 135 pieces of legislation affecting women's reproductive rights as evidence that the "Republican 'War on Women' is no fiction." The analysis found that between 2000 and 2011, the number of states hostile to abortion rights have increased markedly, and that in 2011 there was an unprecedented rise in the number of provisions passed by state legislatures restricting abortion.
Many states have adopted model legislation written by Americans United for Life, an anti-abortion advocacy group. In June 2011, Charmaine Yoest and Denise M. Burke of Americans United, acknowledged the expression in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, writing that "Indiana is being threatened with the loss of federal funding for health care and being held up to scorn as having 'declared war on women.'"
Mandatory ultrasounds
In 2011 and 2012, "war on women" was used to describe the legislation passed by many states requiring that women seeking abortions first undergo government-mandated ultrasounds. Some states require that women view the image of the fetus and others require that women be offered the opportunity to listen to the fetal heartbeat. Since many women's pregnancies are not far enough along to get an image via a traditional ultrasound, transvaginal ultrasounds, which involve the physician inserting a probe into the woman's vagina, may be required, but these requirements vary state to state. Critics have questioned the value of having a medically unnecessary procedure, and characterized it as similar to some states' legal definition of rape. Writer Megan Carpentier underwent the procedure and indicated that although it was not comparable to being raped, the process was "uncomfortable to the point of being painful, emotionally triggering... and something that no government should force its citizens to undergo to make a political point." However, in an article critical of the assumptions of those on both sides of the issue, sociologist Tracy Weitz, who opposes mandatory ultrasound, notes that "the use of trans-vaginal ultrasounds is routine among abortion providers."
Virginia State legislators passed a bill in 2012 requiring women to have an ultrasound before having an abortion. The legislation, signed by Governor Bob McDonnell, would require that the provider of an abortion make a copy of the fetal image and include it in the file of the patient. In Louisiana, where pregnant women are already required to view ultrasounds of their fetuses before receiving an abortion, lawmakers proposed a bill that would require them to listen to the embryonic/fetal heartbeat as well. Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett drew criticism when he said of his state's new mandatory transvaginal ultrasound law that "You can't make anybody watch, okay? Because you just have to close your eyes. As long as it's on the exterior and not the interior."
Gestational limits on abortion
In June 2013, Representative Trent Franks of Arizona, passed a national bill in the House Judiciary Committee that would ban abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy. The bill did not include exceptions for rape, incest or health of the mother. In responding to the bill's lack of exception for rape victims, Franks stated that "the incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low," which was compared to the controversial statements made by Todd Akin; studies show that the incidence of pregnancy from rape is approximately equal to or higher than the rate from consensual sex.The claim that the incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy is 'very low' : Washington Post Fact Checker Afterwards, the House Rules Committee added exceptions for rape and incest. Georgia legislators passed HB 954, a "fetal pain bill" criminalizing abortions performed after the 20th week of pregnancy. The bill, which does not contain exemptions for rape or incest, has been referred to as the "women as livestock bill" by opponents after Representative Terry England made a comparison between women seeking abortions for stillborn fetuses to delivering calves and pigs on a farm.
In April 2012, Arizona passed legislation banning abortions occurring 20 weeks after a woman's last menstrual period. A judge from the District Court initially upheld this ban, but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in August 2012 that the ban could not be enforced until an appeal on the law had been decided. The Ninth Circuit then struck down the law as unconstitutional in May 2013. Eight other states, including Nebraska, Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Idaho and Oklahoma, have passed such bills; unlike Arizona, the gestational age in these states is calculated from fertilization (20 weeks post-fertilization-which means 22 weeks LMP). In 2013, Idaho's ban was struck down as unconstitutional by a federal judge. States such as Ohio have proposed six-week abortion bans, the earliest time embryonic or fetal cardiac activity can usually be detected.
Defining the beginning of human personhood
In 2011, voters in Mississippi rejected Initiative 26, a measure that would have declared that human life begins at fertilization, which had drawn support from conservative Republicans and Democrats. Critics of the initiative indicated that the law would have made abortion illegal even in cases where the mother's life is in danger.
Targeted regulation of abortion providers