By Jennifer Weiss-Wolf for Ms. Magazine.
Broadcast version by Eric Galatas for Colorado News Connection reporting for the Ms. Magazine-Public News Service Collaboration

The United States was designated a backsliding democracy in late 2021, when it appeared on a prominent European think tank’s annual global ranking. Today, half of the world’s democratic governments are on the decline, according to The Global State of Democracy, a report released by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) this past November.

Six months before the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, with Texas SB 8 already in effect—the U.S. made its disconcerting debut on the list. Advocates raised real-time questions about the correlation between regression on abortion rights and degraded democracies. A New York Times article asserted that such a descent is precisely when “curbs on women’s rights tend to accelerate.”

We think that’s a proposition worth flipping on its head. What if, instead, we looked at the United States’ persistent abysmal track record on gender equity as the potential smoking gun for its downward spiral? While the timing of the United States’ inaugural inclusion on the IDEA list made it easy to point to the grift of Trump and the rise of Trump-ism as the culprit, the hard truth is that our democracy has been flailing—by failing women, particularly women of color—as it has designed to, since the nation’s founding.

Equal Rights Amendment

Let’s start with the century-long fight to enshrine equality in the U.S. Constitution.

Eighty-five percent of United Nations member states currently have explicit constitutional provisions that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex and/or gender. The United States is an outlier. Even as the federal Equal Rights Amendment navigates the path to ratification—and some 30 states have ERAs or comparable language in their own constitutions and/or active mobilization efforts—women in this country have no guarantee of equality.

Women’s Political Representation

The United States also lags in meaningful political representation.

We’re currently experiencing an uptick in women’s leadership on Capitol Hill, with an all-time high in the 118th Congress, where just over 28 percent (149 members) are women. In the House, women broke records in the 2022 midterms, with 124 now serving, 27 of whom are Black and 18 are Latina. On the Supreme Court, women account for four out of nine justices, two of whom are women of color. Vice President Kamala Harris is the first woman (and person of color) to serve in the role. 

At the state level, more than 30 percent of elected executives are women, including 12 serving as governor—a new record. Nevada is the first state to have a majority women legislature, followed by Colorado just this year; Michigan has a trifecta of women at the helm in the roles of governor, attorney general and secretary of state. Last year also marked the first time in U.S. history where at least one LGBTQ+ candidate ran for office in every state. In California, 10 percent of the state legislature is LGBTQ; across the country nine trans lawmakers now serve in state legislatures.

But these raw numbers are a far cry from robust or even remotely relative representation. There remain zero Black women in the U.S. Senate beyond Kamala Harris, who leads the body in her role as vice president; a Black woman has never served as a state governor. And the U.S. totals pale in comparison to women’s leadership and authority in much of the world, especially among our peer democracies.

Reproductive Freedom

The United States performs dreadfully on myriad ingredients needed to ensure equitable participation in the body politic.

While maternal mortality rates have decreased globally, they remain on the rise in the United States, which by the most recent count is ranked 46th in the world—a crisis that is exponentially acute for Black women, who are three times more likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth in the United States than white women.

Globally, paid maternity leave averages 29 weeks; the United States is one of only six countries, and the only wealthy nation, without national paid leave.

Across federal and state agencies, abusive institutional practices are all too common, from compulsory sterilization and forced induction of labor, to the denial or withholding of menstrual products and even the practice of shackling women during childbirth.

U.S. Abortion Rights Backslide

And then, of course, there is our current standing on abortion. For the past two decades, as much of the world has expanded access, the United States is one of just four countries—joining El Salvador, Nicaragua and Poland—actively rolling back rights. Though most Americans support legal abortion, and even well before the Supreme Court wielded its sledgehammer in its majority ruling in Dobbs, we’d witnessed then-unconstitutional laws glide through state legislatures only to be met with staggering indifference in the courts.

Now that the protections afforded by Roe have been eviscerated, we exist in an ever more dangerous and cruel orbit—one where the threat of criminalization for pregnancy outcomes, including stillbirths and miscarriages, looms large; where a 10-year-old is transported across state lines to obtain an abortion amid a media maelstrom (while her status as a rape victim is called into question—as if a pregnant child could be anything but); where people experiencing ectopic and unviable pregnancies are left to bleed, suffer and deteriorate before doctors can provide life-saving care.

As we approach the 50th anniversary of the Roe decision and continue to grapple with the new status quo, this much is clear: The tenets of reproductive health, rights and justice—and those of a healthy democracy—are not only inextricably interconnected, but essential to our nation’s promise. The country’s status as a backsliding democracy says as much about the symptom as it does the disease. And our simultaneous failure to curb democratic dysfunctions, like partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression, inevitably go hand in hand with our failure to ensure women and girls have an equal chance to engage in and contribute to civic life—or to live freely at all.

Bringing us back to the original proposition: Are we merely witnessing the byproducts of a democracy on the decline, or are each of the examples above the drivers of our current status? The 2020 United Nations report suggests that the trajectory of “de-democratization” is rarely analyzed initially through the distinctive lens of gender equity and there are insufficient efforts to systematically examine the current implications.

Which is precisely why we plan to pursue this conversation, starting with a symposium at NYU School of Law this spring. We will bring together academics, advocates, policymakers and pundits to explore what it means to measure the ebb and flow of inclusive democracy, in the United States and globally, with principles of gender equity at the center. Ms. magazine and Rewire News Group will co-host, and we look forward to sharing a steady stream of content as we tackle these questions in the weeks and months to come.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf wrote this article for Ms. Magazine.



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By Shoshanna Ehrlich for Ms. Magazine.
Broadcast version by Freda Ross for Texas News Service reporting for the Ms. Magazine-Public News Service Collaboration

The state of Texas does not believe its overflowing arsenal of antiabortion laws-including a near-total ban on abortion, the infamous SB 8 that turns private parties into bounty-hunters by offering them cash prizes for turning in abortion "aiders and abettors," and municipal travel bans that similarly encourage vigilante justice against anyone using local roads to transport abortion seekers across state laws-has done enough to strip pregnant people of control over their bodies.

Represented by antiabortion warrior Attorney General Ken Paxton, Texas is suing the Biden administration in a challenge to the Title IX rule that abortion-related discrimination is prohibited sex discrimination. Two professors from the University of Texas-Austin-John Hatfield, a professor of finance, and Daniel Bonevac, a philosophy professor-subsequently joined the suit as named plaintiffs.

As stated in their court declarations, the two professors object to and refuse to comply with the "Biden Administration's recently announced edict ... [which] represents an attempt to force every educator in the United States to conform to a highly contentious interpretation of ... abortion rights."

Although identified as a "recent edit," abortion-based discrimination has been prohibited since the Title IX regulations first went into effect in 1975.

While my focus is on the challenge to abortion protections, the lawsuit also challenges the 2024 Title IX regulations affirming that discrimination and harassment based on "sexual orientation, gender identity and sexual characteristics" are prohibited under Title IX due to the multiple harms, including bullying and harassment, of not having one's identity recognized or respected.

In virtually identical court declarations, the professors declare that they will not "honor any student's demands to be addressed by the singular pronoun 'they'" to avoid being made "a fool of ... to accommodate a student's delusional beliefs," and that teaching assistants will not be permitted to "engage in cross-dressing while teaching my classes or interacting with ... students."

To make sense of this case, originally filed at the end of April in the Amarillo division of the federal district court for the northern district of Texas, let's start by taking a quick look at some of the key players. Once again, older white men are leading the charge-this time, by bringing the patriarchal surveillance state into the classroom.

Ken Paxton has served as attorney general of Texas since 2015. According to Texas Monthly, he "has used his office as a cudgel in the culture wars for the Christian right," including an unrelenting legal campaign against abortion. Celebrating the fall of Roe, he declared June 24 the annual Sanctity of Life holiday to memorialize the "70 million babies that have been killed in the womb," and proclaimed that he looked "forward to defending the pro-life laws of Texas and the lives of all unborn children moving forward."

In a move the Washington Post characterized as "unnecessary, inexplicable cruelty," after a lower court ruled that Kate Cox, whose fetus had a lethal anomaly, could obtain an abortion under the state's narrow medical emergency exception, Paxton wrote to the hospitals where her doctor had admitting privileges warning them that the court's order would not insulate them from criminal and civil liability, including "first degree felony prosecutions."

The lawsuit was presumably filed in Amarillo because Trump appointee Mathew Kaczmaryk, who is notoriously antiabortion, is its sole presiding judge. Kaczmaryk ruled in favor of the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine in its challenge to the FDA's approval of mifepristone and its subsequent relaxing of regulations in an opinion that was permeated with both "junk science" and "misleading antiabortion tropes." The case was just dismissed by the Supreme Court based on the lack of "legal standing to bring the lawsuit because they were not harmed by the FDA's loosening of restrictions on mifepristone over the last eight years."

Bonevac has been one of Trump's most prominent academic supporters, according to an article that calls him one of "the only conservative [scholars] on campus." During Trump's last campaign, Bonevac "became a spokesman of sorts for the Scholars and Writers for America group, which argued that the property tycoon was 'the candidate most likely to restore the promise of America.'"

Hatfield and Bonevac are represented by Jonathan Mitchell, Trump's attorney before the Supreme Court in his case to stay on the presidential ballot-and more locally as the legal strategist behind both SB 8 and municipal travel bans, which promote vigilante justice against those aiding or transporting abortions seekers. Through these efforts, Mitchell has been instrumental in transforming Texas into an abortion desert. Adamant about keeping it this way, he is representing several men intent upon punishing their ex-partners for having had abortions. Mitchell is also a key strategist in the growing conservative push to resurrect the moribund 1873 Comstock Act as the basis for imposing a national abortion ban.

Title IX forces Texas educators to "protect women who abort their pregnancies even when doing so violates Texas law," the lawsuit alleges, such as by requiring them to excuse abortion-related absences as they would any other health-related absence. They say Title IX prohibits discrimination against students who "have engaged in the shipment or receipt of abortion pills and abortion-related paraphernalia in violation of federal law." (Emphasis added.)

The above reference to federal law points to the Comstock Act-Mitchell's favorite Victorian era purity law, which was intended to cleanse the nation of sexual corruption by prohibiting the sending of obscene materials, including contraceptives and anything that could be used to cause an abortion. The resurrection of this moribund law has become the conservative backdoor strategy for imposing an abortion ban on the country as a whole. This plan is now firmly embedded in Project 2025-the "unprecedented effort being orchestrated with dozens of right-flank organizations" in order to "dismantle the U.S. government and replace it with Trump's vision," according to the Associated Press.

Let's look more closely at what Hatfield and Bonevac are apparently so upset about when it comes to Title IX's non-discrimination protections for those who have had abortions or have sent or received abortion pills or "abortion-related paraphernalia" such that they have openly declared their intent to flout federal law.

One key objection is that abortion-related accommodations make them "complicit" in criminal activity. They also apparently hold their students to the same standard by expecting "their teaching assistants to obey and respect the laws of Texas and the laws of the United States"-so presumably they screen and reject prospective TAs for any kind of legal infraction, such as a speeding ticket or smoking weed.

Additionally, while the professors claim they will accommodate students who need "medically necessary abortions," they refuse to "accommodate a purely elective abortion that serves only to kill an unborn child that was conceived through an act of voluntary and consensual sexual intercourse."

This sets up a binary when it comes to their understanding of the sexual and reproductive lives of their students-namely, that there are only two kinds of abortions:

• those that are medically necessary (which is an extremely high bar under Texas law), or


• those that, as they seem to suggest, are undertaken in rather 'frivolous' circumstances when weighted against the "act of violence committed against the most vulnerable and defenseless members of the human family."

Assuming the genuineness of their commitment to antiabortion values, one must noneetheless pause to consider whether something more is involved. A perusal of social media comments makes clear this is indeed the case:

• Why would my economics or philosophy professor need to know that I got so much as a pedicure, much less any kind of medical treatment?


• No woman should enroll in a class with these creeps. If this is the amount of twisted control they believe they have over their women students, no parent should want their daughter to go near them.


• Pretty sure dudes like this ultimately don't think women should be educated anyway.


• Never underestimate how much a man hates women and wants to control them.


• How would they even find that information out about someone? I sure as hell hope they're not asking people that about that information. That's just totally wrong and creepy as hell.

At its core, this case is about the surveillance and control of the sexual and reproductive lives of students, and the chillingly privileged view that professors are somehow entitled to this measure of control over students' lives based upon their own views about abortion.




Shoshanna Ehrlich wrote this article for Ms. Magazine.



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Five hundred high school girls from Missouri are the stars of a new documentary.

Girls State is described as a political coming-of-age film. The girls participate in a weeklong, immersive democratic experiment. They build a mock government from scratch and deal with such significant issues as abortion rights and encouraging more women to serve in government.

The film is a companion to Boys State, which won a major film festival prize in 2020. Filmmaker Amanda McBaine, who co-directed both with Jesse Moss, said the comparison between the Girls State and Boys State programs was interesting to observe, as they were held during the same week for the first time.

"The degree of difference was what shocked me and the kids. I think they (the girls) were held back in a lot of ways from forming a government as quickly as the boys were," McBaine observed.

The filmmakers said they chose Missouri because it reflects America's political diversity. Girls State is trending now on the streaming platform Apple TV Plus.

McBaine described the communication among the young women as respectful despite their diverse views, and noted they didn't shy away from big subjects.

"They were empowered to build a Supreme Court, to hear a privacy case that very much mirrored the Dobbs Jackson case," she explained. "They took that moment and ran with it in a way that they recognized in each other, 'Oh, your politics may be different, but I see you in how much we need this empowerment.'"

McBaine added that the Girls State participants highlight the importance of representation in a democracy. According to Pew research, in 2023, only about 30% of state Senate seats were held by women. McBaine calls the documentary "a powerful look at politics through the eyes of young women."

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Results of a new study show more American women are falling behind on getting critical breast cancer scans.

Nowhere is this perhaps more important than in Iowa, a state that is among the nation's leaders in lethal breast cancer cases.

Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death among women in the United States. It claims about 40,000 women every year.

Researchers have historically broken down mammography use by state and demographics, but the University of Iowa's Iowa Cancer Registry Research Director - Sarah Nash - said that for the first time, this study took critical social factors into account when studying mammography use.

"And so they looked at several different things," said Nash, "and the strongest predictors among these social drivers of health were life dissatisfaction, feeling socially isolated, experiencing lost or reduced employment, receiving food stamps, lacking reliable transportation, and reporting cost as a barrier to care."

Nash said the results of this study point to the need to address social drivers and not just health care access when figuring out who needs help and how they can get it.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that only 65% of women ages 50 to 74, with three or more health-related social needs, are up to date with their mammograms.

Despite acknowledging the social determinants that can stand between a woman and her mammogram, Nash and other researchers have said the number one factor is cost.

"So, to address costs, we can think about making sure preventive care remains at no co-pay," said Nash. "We have a program in Iowa called the 'Iowa Care for Yourself' program, which helps provide low- or no-cost screening for Iowans who are under insured."

Scientists estimate early detection and treatment can reduce breast cancer deaths by almost a quarter.




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