From state houses to the Supreme Court, women remain second-class Americans to men | Opinion

The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to reenter the debate around abortion, this time considering the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, one-half of the abortion pill regimen that can be taken up to 11 weeks after a missed period.

A decision on the legality of the clearance of the pill is expected next summer. According to NBC News, the court has agreed to consider appeals from both the Biden administration and a drugmaker that makes a brand version of mifepristone, defending the Food and Drug Administration decisions that made it easier to access and use the abortion pill, and potentially overturn a lower court decision that White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said “threatens to undermine the FDA’s scientific independent judgment and would reimpose outdated restrictions on access to safe and effective abortion medication.”

However, in the aftermath of their decision on the Dobbs case last year, which overturned federal constitutional protections for abortion, many expect the Supreme Court to rule in favor of prohibiting the sale of mifepristone.

Opinion

The Guttmacher Institute — a leading research and policy organization that seeks to improve sexual health and expand reproductive rights — found that medical abortion (i.e. abortion pills like mifepristone) accounts for more than half of all U.S. abortions performed in medical facilities.

Mifepristone is necessary for a safe medical abortion. But the dirty little secret that anti-abortionists don’t want you to know is that if you remove it from the equation with its sister pill, misoprostol, women can still achieve a medical abortion — but it’s so much more painful.

So this case isn’t about banning abortions, it’s about making women’s health care as painful as it can possibly be.

And this conservative court seems ready to create more laws that hurt women.

But this upcoming fight isn’t just about this set of justices debasing the court even further. According to the Pew Research Center, public opinion of the court is at a historic low — only 44 % of the country maintains a favorable view of the court and 54 percent have an unfavorable view.

Nor is it about bolstering talking points for Democrats in an election year that creates a voting bloc of angry white women in swing states. Nor is it about conservatives losing their minds as the courts hand down yet another incredibly unpopular decision so close to a presidential election — though those would be nice consolation prizes as women have another fundamental right stripped from them.

This fight is about America’s medical misogyny and the bias women suffer from every day when seeking basic health care, much less reproductive medicine.

Women are considered second-class citizens when it comes to research that focuses on our specific needs. Reproductive health care is just the tip of a very large iceberg.

Anecdotally, ask just about any woman you know if she feels she’s been treated unfairly by a doctor on account of her gender, and chances are she’ll have a story.

The Kaiser Family Foundation reported that nearly one in 10 (9%) women ages 18-64 say they’ve experienced discrimination because of their age, gender, race, sexual orientation, religion or because of another personal characteristic during a health-care visit in the past two years.

“(Nearly one-third) of women report that their doctor had dismissed their concerns in that time period, 15% reported that a provider did not believe they were telling the truth, 19% say their doctor assumed something about them without asking, and 13% say that a provider suggested they were personally to blame for a health problem,” reports KFF.

A lack of knowledge — or perhaps a lack of empathy — for treating women sets their experiences apart from male patients and is what’s led us to this point. So, I’m completely unsurprised that such a distinctly feminine issue as reproduction and abortion is so misunderstood and vilified.

Every day I see the outrage from women — but where is the outrage from men? Men in power on both sides of the political spectrum only vaguely acknowledge that this violation is occurring, and only use women’s lives as minor talking points while running for office, never as a point of main contention.

To that point, 14 U.S. states now ban abortion completely — Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming — despite just 13% of surveyed Americans in a 2023 Gallup poll agreeing that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances.

Another two states — Georgia and South Carolina — ban abortion by the sixth week after a missed period, even though most women don’t realize they’re pregnant until sometime between the fourth and seventh week after a missed period.

These laws are cruel on purpose and rely on most Americans’ fundamental misunderstanding of reproductive timelines and women’s health.

It is very likely that, come next summer, the Supreme Court will eliminate another avenue to a safe and effective method of abortion for women across this country, and we will be powerless to stop it, thanks to the lifetime appointment of these justices.

The best possible scenario, albeit a long shot, is that the rights of women are enshrined as equal to men in the Constitution. Many people mistakenly believe that this is already the case. It’s not.

The Equal Rights Amendment just marked its 100th anniversary, but it has still not been ratified by enough states to be adopted into the Constitution, and women are still not recognized as whole people under American law.

Don’t believe me? Just watch what happens next year.