Women Don't Have Equal Rights In This Country

It's a lot easier to understand this moment when you realize that

Hello friends.

Maybe, by the time she is grown

Seven years before I was born, Roe vs. Wade protected women's fundamental human right to bodily autonomy for the first time in U.S. history. A year after that, women gained the right to open a credit card in their own names. Im other words, I was born into a country where women’s full legal equality was new.

I was raised in a feminist, pro-choice household. As a young girl in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I dressed as the Statue of Liberty and threw condoms off a Mardi Gras parade float in support of Planned Parenthood. But it wasn’t until I became a mother myself that I really understood how vital reproductive freedom is. I learned how serious, how perilous, how totalizing is the experience of carrying the potential for a new life inside your body. I am someone who needed the help of the medical establishment to become pregnant as well as to avoid pregnancy. The protection of these choices was essential to my autonomy and to my dreams.

In 2022 the Dobbs decision overturned Roe vs. Wade. With that decision, women lost full legal equality.

I want to be clear. The decision did not mean that all people with uteruses lost access to medical assistance with ending an unwanted pregnancy. On the contrary. Dobbs was a classic case of unintended consequences. The decision itself publicized the availability of safe, convenient medication abortion prescribed via telemedicine, a modality which was itself newly expanded in the pandemic. It activated networks of community organizations that helped women get that medication.

Dobbs also got more people talking publicly about the fact that abortion is good.

It is lifesaving, life-changing healthcare that is profoundly pro-social; it helps ensure that children are wanted, loved and cared for. Six in ten people who get abortions in this country are already mothers. They do it out of love and concern for the children who are here.

Overall, Dobbs led to more abortions.

According to the Guttmacher Institute:

An estimated 1,126,000 abortions were provided by US clinicians in 2025…an increase of 21% from 2020, the last year of comprehensive national estimates before Dobbs.

We help us. We keep us safe.

And yet, as Jessica Valenti has been tirelessly documenting on Abortion, Every Day, Dobbs also functioned as intended. Women are dying. Even more women are living with fear and anxiety. Obstetricians are leaving red states. And Republicans are moving forward with the Christian nationalist program of criminalizing not just abortion, but birth control, and surveiling people’s sex lives. (Recently, the EPA recommended that states test water supplies for abortion medication and birth control.)

When I look around at the low ebb of relations today between cis men and cis women, I believe the loss of Roe served as a watershed. We may not speak about it this way, or even be entirely aware of it, but a dark cloud hovers over every person with a uterus. It is achingly clear that our self-determination, our dignity, and our lives are not worth as much as men's.

Masks are off. Whether we’re talking about the manosphere; tradwives; Gisele Pelicot; rape academies; uxoricide, the killing of wives by husbands; heteropessimism; the persistently unequal mental and domestic load; the Epstein files; weight loss medication, Botox and cosmetic procedures; or anti-family policies, like devastating cuts of over $1 trillion to Medicaid and SNAP; there is a sourness, a sense of mutual mistrust, a cruelty and even ruthlessness in the air.

In the political arena, there is no steadfast party for women. I am still hurting from Kamala Harris’s loss of the presidency in the wake of Dobbs. Democrats, the default champions of women’s rights, tried to leverage popular support for abortion to electoral advantage. They summoned the specter of women bleeding out in parking lots, in a way that sometimes felt icky, instrumentalist, and performative. When Harris lost to an adjudicated rapist, the message people seemed to take from it was: women can’t win. Our rights are not all that important. Relatedly, I haven’t forgiven influential podcaster Ezra Klein for saying repeatedly that Democrats should run anti-choice candidates for Senate as a calculated move. He was wrong on the politics and wrong morally. The sprint away from support for trans rights, for too many with national ambitions within the Democratic party, is of a piece with this craven capitulation to patriarchy and the status quo.

No woman is being seriously considered at the top tier of candidates for the presidency in 2028, with the exception of Harris herself, and that is an uphill battle.

This past week saw the biggest attack on abortion access since Dobbs. On May 1, a New Orleans-based federal appeals court blocked doctors from prescribing abortion medication via telehealth and dispensing it by mail. This, in response to a spurious lawsuit brought by my hometown state, heavily Catholic Louisiana. Just three days later, on May 4, the Supreme Court restored access to this medication for one week. Partisans will spend that time debating whether absorbing more backlash in the midterms is worth it if they can force more single moms to carry a pregnancy to term.

On the eve of Mother’s Day, I have two positive takeaways from this sorry state of affairs.

First is the power of mutual aid and community networks to sustain access to reproductive justice. If justice and protection doesn’t come from the laws, we have to provide it to each other.

Second, and related, is the imperative to solidarity for cis, white, straight women. I wish all the women in my demographic understood that our bread is buttered on the same side as those who are, as we speak, being disenfranchised by the loss of the Voting Rights Act, the other broadside attack on democracy that happened in the past few days, thanks again to Louisiana. I’m even optimistic enough to ask for solidarity from my male readers, and for any man who loves at least one woman.

We need a new Supreme Court and a restoration of rights, and we have to fight for it all together. That’s my dream for this Mother’s Day.

Masculinity in the Metacrisis

Very much apropos, the Centre for Climate Psychology is holding an online event on Masculinity and the Metacrisis on May 28, in collaboration with DeSmog and the Resonant Man, the men’s initiative co-founded by my friend Matthew Green (we had a chat recently, linked below). Panellists include Amy Westervelt, Indra Adnan, Cadell Last and Jacob Kishere. Should be worthwhile.

Forging a New Journalistic Path │ Anya Kamenetz