Power & Control: The Authoritarians’ War on Women (video)

Authoritarians worldwide are attacking women's rights. The patchwork of US abortion policies shows widespread state-based sex discrimination.

Women's Rights Shouldn’t Change at the State Line

Forget about the authoritarian-led wars raging around the globe. Americans need to focus on and stop our home-grown authoritarians’ war on our rights.

From Republican presidential candidates and Supreme Court Justices to local governments, authoritarians are waging a nationwide battle against the personal freedom and medical self-determination of 51 percent of the population ... women … also known as, people born with a female anatomy and the ability to conceive and give birth¹.

When Roe v Wade was in place, there was a nationwide standard for abortion care. Yes, many backward, repressive states like Arizona did everything they could to restrict legal abortion, but we still had some basic level of reproductive choice.

Before June 2022, Americans were able to choose if they wanted children, when to have children, how many children to have, and who to have children with. These are the ultimate parental choices. Now, Arizona women are not allowed to make those choices due to government intervention.

The US Supreme Court’s short-sighted decision to end Roe v Wade on June 24, 2022 gave the state governments the power to decide the fate of pregnant women and their partners who are living or stationed within their borders. Freedom of reproductive choice disappeared immediately for pregnant people in some states, including Arizona.

Look at the patchwork of abortion laws in the map above, thanks to the SCOTUS decision. Women’s rights shouldn’t change when we cross a state line. Name ONE LAW that specifically takes away the rights of American men — and not women — and that changes from state to state. There aren’t any laws like that.

Medically, it makes no sense to deny care. Healthcare should not be a states rights issue. States like Arizona have proven they can’t be trusted to put the health and welfare of the residents over ideology and lucrative business deals. For evidence, just look at Arizona’s unnecessarily tragic death rate during the COVID pandemic or the continued poor birth outcomes due to underfunding of maternal and child health. Republicans in the Arizona Legislature would rather crow about tax cuts than budget appropriately and govern.

How is it even legal that women can be jailed in one state for something that is perfectly legal and protected in another state? That is government-based discrimination on account of sex.

Hmmm… does that wording sound familiar? It should.

The Equal Rights Amendment reads: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of sex.” The underlying premise of the ERA is that sex should not determine the rights of men or women. Anti-abortion laws target only women. There is one man involved in every unwanted pregnancy.

If we had the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), women wouldn’t be forced into state-mandated pregnancy and childbirth, as we are now. Some might argue that these laws are not state-based sex discrimination because only women have abortions. Let’s not forget that every abortion involves at least one man. If pregnant women, their doctors and others who help them can be jailed for seeking or assisting in an abortion, the men who impregnated them should be jailed also.

Or the government could just back off and let people make their own personal decisions and let doctors care for their patients.

By eliminating the filibuster in the US Senate, Democrats in Congress could have passed the ERA and protected women’s reproductive rights, voting rights and many other things back in 2021. “Moderates” like Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema and WV Senator Joe Manchin blocked a lot of progressive legislation by clinging to the filibuster, along with the Republicans. (Check out my podcast on this topic here.)

---

How Do We Get the Republicans Out of Our Bedrooms?

There are just three of the many authoritarians in the Republican Party. Many authoritarian Republicans like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (center) want a nationwide ban on abortion.

Thanks to ongoing Congressional inaction on reproductive healthcare protections and a flurry of anti-abortion action in courts and state Legislatures, life is rapidly getting more restricted, more dangerous and more stressful for women in the US.

Although we make up 51% of the population, we continue to be attacked by governments at all levels, and our rights continue to be stripped away in the name of mystical religious beliefs about conception and the beginning of life.

American women are facing not only widespread medical discrimination, they also are facing potential jail time for seeking an abortion, for helping someone else get an abortion or for providing abortion care in some states. No one behind these heavy-handed, sexist state laws EVER addresses the lifelong emotional, physical and financial hardships the government is forcing upon women and their children when the government mandates pregnancy, regardless of the circumstances.

Forced pregnancy in the name of religion in the United States would have been unfathomable a decade ago. Taking abortion laws back to the early industrial age is absurd, but that’s what the courts and the states are proposing. In Arizona and in New Mexico, state supreme courts are considering reversing 100+ years of newer regulations and going back to abortion laws back to 1864 and 1873 respectively.

If women are being told they have to live like it’s 1864, it’s only fair to go “old school” with men’s reproductive health also. No Viagra. No penile implants. No date rape drugs. No pornography. No voyeuristic social media. No testosterone boosters. No dating apps. No NSA sex. After all, none of this is in the Bible², right?

Check out my abortion prevention ideas in the next section, meanwhile, here are some recent stories about abortion access.

Republicans Are Now the ‘Liberty for Me But Not for Thee’ Party, The Big Picture on Substack, December 2023. This excellent article goes beyond reproductive choice. It shows that although Republican authoritarians talk about “freedom,” their policies “pick winners and losers,” offering freedom to some and more restrictions to others. They’re “Little Napoleons.”

Texas Supreme Court Rules Against Woman Who Sought Court-Approved Abortion, New York Times, December 2023. There has been a huge court battle during the past two weeks regarding a pregnant Texas woman who wanted permission from the Texas courts to have an abortion since her fetus had a fatal condition. There were extreme medical ramifications if the woman carried the fetus to term, including losing the ability to have any other children. The first Texas court gave her a waiver on Texas’ onerous anti-abortion laws. Days later the Texas Supreme Court ruled against her. She fled to another state to have an abortion. Why was this woman and her family put through this expensive, time-wasting court process? Look at the abortion services map. It’s hundreds of miles from Dallas to a state where abortion is protected. Why can’t women in the US make their own medical decisions without governmental or judicial intervention? This case could have happened in Arizona.

Supreme Court Will Hear Challenge to Abortion Pill Access, New York Times, December 2023. Having a surgical abortion is much more painful, expensive and potentially damaging to the woman than a medical abortion, induced by taking pharmaceutical medication. That is why the abortion pill has become so popular since it was approved by the FDA in 2000. An Appeals Court ruled that the drug mifepristone (AKA the abortion pill) was inappropriately approved by the Food and Drug Administration years ago — ignoring safe use by tens of thousands of people since in its approval almost 25 years ago. The Alliance for Defending Freedom is arguing that the FDA hurt women with its approval. The Appeals Court has restricted use … just cuz they can. The Biden Administration asked the Supreme Court for a decision.

Arizona Supreme Court Hears Case that Could Decide Future of Legal Abortion in State [and take Arizona back to 1864], AZCentral, December 2023. You may remember that former Attorney General Mark Brnovich argued that Arizona’s 1864 abortion ban should take precedence over Arizona’s more recent³ and somewhat less oppressive anti-abortion laws like the 15-week abortion ban and the ban on abortions based upon the physical disabilities and projected longevity of the fetus beyond birth. (The Texas woman would most likely denied an abortion based upon Arizona laws also.)

New Mexico Supreme Court to Consider Obscure 1873 Law Used to Ban Abortion, The Guardian, December 2023. New Mexico has a state supreme court case related to an 1873 anti-abortion law. There are a few local NM governments that have more restrictive anti-abortion laws that the rest of the state. Will NM go back to 1873? The Center for Reproductive Rights Map above shows NM as an unprotected state. If NM and Arizona both fall with these court cases, a huge, contiguous swath of the US will have no abortion access..

Arizona’s Supreme Court Is Considering Abortion Law. Lawyers Arguing the Case Are All Men. AZCentral, December 2023. Court teams representing Attorney General Kris Mayes, Pima County Attorney Laura Conover and Planned Parenthood argued that after the fall of Roe v Wade, Arizona’s 15-week abortion ban (which is sill bad) is the law of the state. Attorneys from the national special interest group Alliance for Defending Freedom and two straw men from Arizona said that Arizona’s 1864 ban on abortions, which jails doctors, should be the law. [Watch the Fox News video embedded in this story.]

The Alliance for Defending Freedom was mention in the abortion pill news article and in the articles about Arizona’s 1864 abortion law. You may remember that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson was a lawyer for the Alliance for Defending Freedom. [This is scary. What are they setting up?]

---

Prevent Abortion by Preventing Unwanted Pregnancy

Every unwanted pregnancy starts with an unwanted sperm in the wrong place at the wrong time. There is at least one man involved in every abortion. Whether he knows it, acknowledges it, or takes responsibility for it is a whole other matter. The bottom line is: men shouldn’t father children they don’t intend to help raise or can’t help raise.

Why do anti-abortion laws focus solely on pregnant women? If the goal is ending abortion in the US, the strategy should be prevention of unwanted pregnancy — not taking away pregnant people’s rights.

For decades, public health workers have been educating women around the globe about being intentional about their pregnancies, using birth control to space pregnancies out, and delaying the first pregnancy. In many developed countries, birth rates are down for a variety of reasons. (Birth rates and global comparisons are discussed in the video about women in South Korea, below.)

In Arizona, the good news about about birth rates being down is that teen births are way down, births to women without a high school diploma are down and Arizona women are delaying their first child. When women delay the first child until they are older, they are less likely to have children with multiple men. Also, delaying pregnancy often means the mother will have at least a high school education and hopefully be more emotionally and financially stable by the time she has her first child. This progress was made possible by access to affordable contraception, access to abortion and related health education.

Some authoritarian governments are wringing their hands and offering childbirth incentives to encourage women to have more children. Short-term or one-time cash payments to encourage motherhood are a joke. In countries like South Korea, incentives haven’t worked. Women in South Korea and China cite the high costs of living and other pressures put on women, besides childrearing; I think many American women would agree with these sentiments. Sixty-five percent of South Korean women say they do not plan to have children. (Check out the video below.)

Look at the state of the world with economic strife, wars, hate and climate change. Many people are choosing not to have children or to have fewer children because of the global situation authoritarians have created in their lust for power and control.

There’s more to having a child than carrying a pregnancy to term and giving birth. A lot happens between childbirth and age 18. Unfortunately, stingy authoritarian governments — like the Arizona Legislature under Republican control — lose interest in fetuses after they’re born.

Strategies & Laws to Prevent Unwanted Pregnancy

There are many strategies that could be adopted to further prevent unwanted pregnancies and the related financial, emotional and physical costs to the parents and to society.

Medically Accurate Sex Education. It’s embarrassing that Arizona is one of several US states that does not offer opt-out, medically accurate sex education in publicly funded schools statewide.

What is medically accurate sex education? In a nutshell, to be medically accurate, the discussion of gender and sexuality would not be limited to sexual relations between a man and a woman and traditional binary gender roles. In in addition to factual discussions of reproduction, intercourse and sexuality, it would also include discussions about relationships, consent and other ways to experience one’s sexuality — with or without another person. It’s better to educate kids about sex, gender and related topics in school than to have them searching the Internet for this information.

In the New York Times article, 8 Sex Myths That Experts Wish Would Go Away, author Catherine Pearson discusses the myths about intercourse and sexuality along with other ways humans can experience orgasm, besides heterosexual intercourse.

In the same article, sex therapist Ian Kerner is quoted as saying, “‘we need to move beyond defining sex by a single behavior [intercourse].’ He noted that this narrow thinking has contributed to the longstanding pleasure gap between men and women in heterosexual encounters.”

Republicans go bonkers when public health advocates and “liberal elites,” who write for the New York Times, talk about medically accurate sex education, the gamut of sexual relations and sexual pleasure without intercourse (and risk of unwanted pregnancy or venereal diseases that can come with it).

When I was still in the Arizona House, I suffered through a lengthy diatribe⁴ by then Rep. Jake Hoffman against woke sex education being taught in Arizona schools. He was already in a lather when he started talking about masturbation and went on to list just about everything people could do in the bedroom. Eventually, another Democrat joined me, as I was standing against the back wall, and asked, “Are you listening to this guy? He must have watched a lot of porn to come up with all of that background!” (Haha.)

What are people like Hoffman afraid of? That kids will learn … that they’re not going to hell for masturbating, that being LGBTQ is OK, that there are many routes to sexual pleasure, that some people just want to cuddle (which is also OK), or that questioning societal “norms” about sexuality and gender is OK? School should be a safe space to discuss these topics with trusted adults like teachers, school counselors or school nurses.

Again, it’s better to teach medically accurate sex education in schools than to push kids to the Internet for information.

Free Contraception to Medicaid Recipients. The government is not going to stop people from sexual relations, so let’s help people have safer and healthier relations.

This is a no-brainer. There are so many people living in poverty in the State of Arizona that the state pays for more than half of all live births through the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS or Medicaid). If we want to “contain healthcare costs” as the AHCCCS title implies, we should be preventing unwanted pregnancy and premature birth in the AHCCCCS. The state is losing billions and causing personal hardships by doing neither.

Viagra Regulations. As mentioned above, there are no anti-abortion laws aimed at controlling men’s behavior related to abortion and unwanted pregnancy. Viagra is a widely prescribed anti-impotence drug for men.

If every pregnancy is a “Gift from God,” so is erectile dysfunction. Impotence is often a symptom of greater health problems.

In Prevalence and Risk Factors for Erectile Dysfunction in the US, in the American Journal of Medicine, the authors list a collection of risk factors that predict erectile dysfunction, including: age, cigarette smoking, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and sedentary lifestyle. The more of these risk factors a man has, the more likely he will have erectile dysfunction problems.

Impotence is nature’s way of telling men that their age and chronic health problems can preclude intercourse and fatherhood. With the advent of Viagra, Big Pharma has opened the door to more years of sexual activity and the potential for men to father children long past their prime.

In a Biomedical Reports paper on the father's age and its relationship to genetic abnormalities, perinatal complications and mental health of their children, the authors report: “Paternal age increases the frequency of congenital diseases such as heart malformations as well as oral, palate and lip cleft … [as well as] mental disorders (autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder. low IQ level, as well as ADHD).”

Just because a man can father a child after 50 years old doesn’t mean he should. That man will be 68 when the child graduates from high school, if he’s still alive. Who’s going to pay for college?

I propose that Viagra prescriptions should be more regulated. For example, no Viagra for men over age 45 without proof of vasectomy. For men under 45 or anyone with a vasectomy, the current regulations would apply. The purpose of this regulation would be to stop unwanted pregnancies from men who are too old or too ill to father healthy children and help care for the children until age 18.

OR maybe Viagra prescriptions should be a states rights issue! [Haha.] Or maybe we should let people make their own choices!

Free Voluntary Sterilization. If people don’t want any children or any more children and don’t want to be forced into it by the government, voluntary sterilization for men and women should be easier, cheaper, and fully covered by insurance.

Vasectomy Registration and ID Cards. Women need to know who they’re having sexual relations with. When the government is mandating pregnancy, women have a right to know if potential partners have had vasectomies. This is especially true for men who don’t like condoms. Vasectomy cards could carry a stamp for approved use of Viagra — kind of like a fishing license. We could have sterilization ID cards for women, also.

You may think that these ideas are outlandish and too intrusive into people’s personal lives, but remember, governments and courts are mandating pregnancy and childbirth — even when the fetus is likely to die at birth or soon after. State legislatures have proposed bills that allow corporations to ask female employees personal questions about birth control, menstruation and sexual relations.

In our current repressive social climate, I believe that increasing efforts to prevent unwanted pregnancy is worthwhile goal, and Viagra regulations, Vasectomy Registration and easy access to voluntary sterilization are viable strategies to aid in prevention of unwanted pregnancy.

Every unwanted pregnancy and every abortion includes a man and a woman. Government should focus on preventing unwanted pregnancy — instead of focusing on restricting freedom of choice.

1. For the purposes of this article, I am using “woman/women” to refer to anyone born with female anatomy and the ability to get pregnant and give birth — regardless of how they identify now. Trans men are at risk for forced pregnancy. These are horrible laws. In this article, “man/men” refers to people with a penis.

2. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said if we have questions, we should turn to the Bible.

3. Both of these anti-abortion laws were passed during my time in the Arizona House. My Substack archive has many blog posts and videos about these and other reproductive health battles in the Legislature.

4. The Arizona House had strictly timed speeches, but time limits and rules didn’t apply to Republicans.