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After Dobbs, the ERA Offers a New Path to Abortion Rights
For 250 years, women have been fighting for inclusion in the nation’s founding promise of equality. The Equal Rights Amendment would finally guarantee that equality under the U.S. Constitution—and could give Congress and the courts powerful new tools to address discrimination in education, employment, healthcare and safety. It could also provide a constitutional basis for challenging abortion bans and restrictions as forms of sex discrimination.
But feminists do not have to wait for federal recognition of the ERA to put equality guarantees to work. State constitutions are already providing a path forward.
In Nevada, advocates successfully challenged the state’s ban on Medicaid funding for abortion under its Equal Rights Amendment; in Pennsylvania, courts have opened the door to treating restrictions on abortion funding as sex discrimination; and in Colorado, feminist lawyers are arguing that parental-notification requirements impose unequal burdens on young women while placing no comparable restrictions on young men.
At a moment when abortion rights no longer have federal constitutional protection, state ERAs offer feminists another constitutional path—not only to challenge abortion restrictions, but to confront the stereotypes and unequal burdens beneath them. Building strong interpretations of equality at the state level can protect women now while laying the groundwork for the expansive vision of sex equality a federal ERA could one day deliver nationwide.
(This essay is part of FEMINIST 250: Democracy’s Feminist Future, a special series examining the next chapter of American democracy through a feminist lens. As the nation marks its 250th anniversary, the series taps the thought leaders of today to debut game-changing ideas for the next 250 years.)
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I Want an Oura Ring. As a Reproductive Health Lawyer, I Know Better.
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Back to School Means Back to Sex Ed. Fathers Need to Be Part of the Conversation.
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Keeping Our Eyes on the Prize: Building a Future Beyond Roe
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What the Lindsay Clancy Trial Reveals About America’s Failure to Support Mothers in Crisis
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‘It’s Killing the Women You Represent’: Texas Widower’s Plea to Lawmakers to End Abortion Ban
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Skye Perryman on How We Turn ‘Anger and Sorrow’ Into ‘Action’
“I know how you feel—because I’ve been there there too. On a bad day, and there are many bad days, our nation’s backslide from democracy into autocracy accelerates … Untrained, masked federal agents are running roughshod in our streets, terrorizing communities. Peaceful protesters have been killed. The government has been weaponized, and the Supreme Court feels stacked … It’s almost impossible to keep up; even harder to know what to do.”
So begins Skye Perryman’s sobering but hopeful and practical new book, Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times. Though this handbook for hard times is elevated by a we’re-all-in-it-together spirit, Perryman, an attorney and president and CEO of Democracy Forward, doesn’t sugarcoat what we’re all facing.
“We have to acknowledge that there is no cavalry coming to protect us,” she writes. “No knight in shining armor to save us from the situation we are in. It’s up to us. We are the people who decide what happens next.” And while daunting, she says “it can also be empowering to know how essential we are in the fight for freedom and our democracy.”
Perryman fervently believes that action is antidote. By “reclaiming our collective power,” and by using the “tools that ordinary people have used in extraordinary times before us,” she insists that together we can “fight for freedom today, build for a better tomorrow.”
Matilda Joslyn Gage: The Most Radical Suffragist Written Out of History Is Still Urgently Relevant
Matilda Joslyn Gage was one of the most radical voices of the 19th-century women’s rights movement—and one of the most deliberately forgotten. Alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, she helped build the suffrage movement, but Gage pushed further, challenging not only women’s political exclusion but also patriarchal religion, sexual violence, economic inequality and the erasure of women’s accomplishments from history.
Gage paired those radical ideas with bold action. She protested the 1886 unveiling of the Statue of Liberty because women themselves had no political liberty; refused to pay taxes without representation; and wrote Woman, Church and State, a blistering critique of Christianity’s role in legitimizing women’s subordination. Her willingness to confront institutions other suffragists feared alienating ultimately helped push her out of the movement’s mainstream history.
A century later, Gage’s warnings feel strikingly current. As voting rights, bodily autonomy and the separation of church and state once again come under attack, her insistence that women understand their own history—and see themselves as part of a struggle extending across generations—offers both a warning and a call to action.
