A Post-Roe Overthrow of Violence vs. Women: Harris Makes History.
A Post-Roe Overthrow of Violence vs. Women: Harris Makes History.
The overturning of Roe vs. Wade in 2022, the earthquake for fundamental human rights ripped away by Trump & his trolls, and an extremist hate campaign vs. women, will elect Kamala Harris President.
I walked up to a a group of women waving “Harris/Walz” banners this weekend, joyous over what they sensed was happening.
They carried home made signs stating: “Real Men Vote Harris,” “Roe, Roe, Roe Your Vote,” “I’m Not Going Back to 1950”, and “When We Fight We Win.” Cars drove by, with drivers honking car horns, and passengers waving in support.
I was wearing my “White Dudes for Harris” baseball cap, and a rainbow-colored“Ka-Ma-La” button on my sweatshirt. The women let out a big cheer when they saw me, and I thanked them, and said, “We are ALL going to win!”
I chatted with a number of pro-Harris supporters who, while enthusiastic, expressed some nervousness about the outcome of the election. I said that I believed Harris/Walz would win at least 320 Electoral Votes and Democrats would take back the House of Representatives and keep control of the US Senate—defeating both Donald Trump AND Ted Cruz in the same election— if we kept working hard up until the last vote is counted.
What these women understood, and what many male political pundits, and polls (with the exception of the latest poll out of Iowa conducted by a highly regarded woman pollster) were failing to see, was that this was the culmination of a decades long-rumbling revolution, which would no longer be postponed: Women were not going to tolerate the denial of their rights anymore, and would take control of the levers of power to guarantee that themselves.
Many of these same women, and their male allies, marched together on January 21, 2017, the day after Trump’s Inauguration, in defiance of the election of the most extreme, misogynistic, racist & rhetorically violent President in US history. In small towns, as well as larger cities across the nation, thousands upon thousands of women of all ages, races and backgrounds marched arm in arm along with men who would fight to our last breath for our partners, mothers, daughters, granddaughters and friends.
Together we fought every anti-democratic action, every violent utterance (and as would later be proven in the E. Jean Carroll case —Trump’s abusive physical actions) against women, and every one of Trump’s anti-Roe. v. Wade appointments to the US Supreme Court and other federal courts. Kamala Harris, then our Senator from California, led those fights for women’s rights, as a fearless member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Her leadership on the issue prompted Joe Biden to select her as his choice for Vice President in 2020.
Roe had been a brilliant judicial balancing act of a woman’s right to make her own decisions about reproductive rights, decided 51 years ago. It found practical, medically supported common ground for a fundamental individual right: splitting the legally permissible period for an abortion between competing religious and personal beliefs. Many Christians believed that life began at conception; while Jewish law emphasized the supremacy of the existing life of the woman, requiring abortion as a necessary medical procedure if the life of the woman was ever at risk, even up to the moment of birth. Roe v. Wade established a careful legal and medical procedure to be followed.
From Shirley Chisholm to Bella Abzug, Sandra Day O’Conner to Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, many devoted much of our adult lives to achieving equal rights for women, and dismantling the rotting infrastructure of discriminatory laws which dating back over 200 years.
For me, the clarity and simplicity of a woman’s right to fundamentally make decisions about her own body, came down to a Hula Hoop and a large, white bedroom pillow, with a leather belt tied tightly around its’ waist to underscore the question of when life actually begins.
That visual image and message were implanted in my brain 54 years ago, when I sat in the New York State Senate gallery, witnessing the live debate on New York’s liberalized abortion law, enacted in 1970.
I was a 21-year old Legislative Assistant that spring in Albany, and marveled at how a liberal Republican State Senator from Manhattan, Roy Goodman, had perfectly framed the issue of when, precisely, life began.
“Imagine this is the unfertilized egg,” Goodman said, holding up a Hula Hoop for all to see. Then, with his other hand he held up a white bedroom pillow, with a leather belt tied around the pillow’s middle.
“And, imagine this is a sperm cell, looking for an egg to fertilize,” Goodman smiled, knowing all eyes were riveted on him. Laughter rippled throughout the gallery where I sat. Think Woody Allen’s parachuting sperm in his movie “Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex.”
Goodman began to guide the “pillow”—with its leather spermatozoa tail-- into the opening of the Hula Hoop.
“At what point does actual life begin?” he bellowed throughout the Senate Chamber? “Here?” He brought the belted pillow across the bottom of the Hula Hoop.
“Here?” he pushed it all the way through. “Or, someplace else, way down the road?”
Goodman’s brilliant and simple illustration of a complicated question was clear to everyone. If a potential life began immediately at conception, what about the life of a sperm cell or an egg before conception? How far back before conception were religious fundamentalists willing to go to mark the “potential” for life? Pre-ejaculation? Pre-menstrual cycle? He reduced the anti-abortion absolutists screed to the theatre of the absurd, with the help of a Hula Hoop, a pillow, a leather belt and common sense.
The New York State Legislature settled on 6 months after the moment of conception, as the precise time of fetal viability, despite the fact that Senator Goodman’s own Jewish faith taught that life did not begin until the moment of birth. It would be three more years before Roe v. Wade settled upon that same 6-month standard.
The most liberal abortion law in the nation—following 142 years of New York having one of the most restrictive statutes—was an early earthquake for women’s rights, the right to privacy, and the guarantee for women of equal protection under the law, to exercise a legally protected right of personal control over their own bodies. At last, it was actual life—the woman’s life—not the promise of “potential life,” that mattered.
“Suddenly, New York had the most liberal abortion law in the world, ” said Dr. Alan Guttmacher, a leading pioneer in the field of birth control. Other states—Hawaii, Washington and Alaska—quickly followed suit, passing similar laws before Roe v. Wade was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. Roe clearly drew upon those State Legislative legal precedents and practical experience.
But that was not all. Writing after the repeal of Roe in a New Yorker article entitled “What’s Missing from Alito’s Decision to Revoke the Right to Abortion,” following the majority decision written by US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, Jessica Winter noted that :
“No State law outlawed marital rape until 1975; no man was found liable for sexual harassment until 1977; and, pregnancy was a fireable offense until 1978.”
Ironically, the most recent change in the Rape Laws of New York State, passed earlier this year, is directly attributable to Donald Trump’s legal conviction for the sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll.
After 12 years of failed attempts, New York State revised it’s Penal Code in early 2024, with the State’s first female Governor Kathy Hochul signing the new law and declaring “Rape Is Rape,” expanding the technical legal definition of “rape” well beyond the old, parochial parameters of “vaginal penetration by a penis.”
And none of it could have been done, without a hand from Donald Trump--or, more accurately, a few of his teeny, chubby fingers and, what may or may not have been, a flaccid penis.
Mere days after Trump was found guilty, this year, by a unanimous jury, for repeatedly sexually assaulting and defaming E. Jean Carroll to the tune of $83 million (on top of the $5 million he already lost to her) New York State moved its Rape Law into the 21st Century and into compliance with federal law, practice, and most modern law-enforcement definitions of rape.
The new law—which should, perhaps be named, “The Trump Middle Finger Rape Law,” broadens the definition of “Rape” to include nonconsensual anal, oral and vaginal sexual contact. That means that whether the perp (Trump) forcibly used his or her fingers, a sex toy, a baton or anything else, or his penis in any penetration of a vaginal, oral or anal opening—on a woman or a man—the sex offender is guilty of rape.
New York State’s new definition of rape makes it comport with Federal standards, including those of the FBI, established under former FBI Director Robert Mueller in 2012, whose Uniform Crime Reports define rape as:
“penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”
It took Trump’s adjudicated sexual assault of Carroll, and the first woman Governor in New York State’s history, to change New York’s archaic rape law. If that isn’t a direct example of a specific act of violence against a woman, having a real and revolutionary effect on the law, nothing is.
Now, the continuing acts of violence against the individual and constitutional rights of millions of women in the United States, led by Donald Trump, perpetrated by Donald Trump, his judicial appointees, fanatical Christian Nationalists, and cult-like followers in some individual States, are finally, finally, being held to account.
With Trump’s anti-Roe appointees to the Supreme Court blowing up such a carefully balanced, fundamental right for women, it unleashed two revolutions:
1. Far right lawmakers and Governors in 21 States around the country exposed their own Taliban-like jihad against womens’ basic freedoms, by passing extremist Trump Abortion Bans which imposed severe penalties upon women and their health care providers. Those draconian statutes exacted punitive, and—in some cases deadly—penalties for women’s health procedures as medically straightforward as saving a woman’s life post-miscarriage, ectopic pregnancies, having a standard D & C procedure, or as morally clear and personal a matter as not wanting to bear a child out of rape or incest;
2. The political power of women—young, old, black, brown, white, straight or lesbian—building for decades— exploded into the open, and will no longer be held back at the State or Federal levels anymore.
State after state, including many so-called “Red States” like Kansas & Ohio passed constitutional amendments enshrining into law a women’s right to make her own healthcare decisions. Ballot initiatives were passed overwhelmingly with bi-partisan support.
This year alone, two full years after the repeal of Roe by the Trump Supreme Court, another 10 States, have women’s Reproductive Rights initiatives on their statewide ballots, appearing on the very same ballot with the election for President: : Those States are:
Arizona, Proposition 139;
Colorado, Amendment 79;
Florida, Amendment 4;
Maryland, Question 1;
Missouri, Amendment 3;
Montana, Ballot Issue, 14;
Nebraska, Initiative 439;
Nevada, Question 6;
New York, Proposition 1;
South Dakota, Constitutional Amendment G.
Among those states, six have hotly contested Senate, and House, races in which the issue of Women’s Reproductive Rights may well determine control of Congress. Those states, and their US Senate candidates favoring restoring women’s Reproductive Rights include: Arizona, Reuben Gallego (v. Kari Lake); Florida, Debbie Mucarsel Powell (v. Rick Scott); Maryland, Angela Alsobrook (v. Larry Hogan); Missouri, Lucas Kunce (v. Josh Hawley;), Montana, JonTester, (v. Tim Sheehy;), and Nevada, Jacky Rosen (v. Sam Brown).
Additionally, in Texas, strongly pro-choice candidate Colin Allred, is expected to unseat long-time Women’s Rights opponent Ted Cruz, who has crusaded for a national abortion ban.
Kamala Harris’ election as the first woman President of the United States, is not something which “just fell out of a coconut tree.” It is a monumental movement for human rights, individual dignity and personal freedom which has been growing, and building strength, for a very long time.