Under Trump, attacks on women’s safety, healthcare and economic security are escalating, making the U.S. an increasingly perilous place to be female.
This column was originally published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette.
In America’s hyper-macho, gun-drenched culture, growing up female has never been safe. But under the Trump administration, America is becoming a much more dangerous place for women and girls.
Approximately 41 percent of women in the U.S. have experienced sexual violence, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One-third report severe assault by a husband or boyfriend. Around 16 million women first experience intimate partner violence before the age of 18. CDC reports the cost of intimate partner violence over a woman’s lifetime averages $103,767.
One reason intimate partner violence is so lethal in America? Guns.
Everytown Research and Policy reports, “Guns amplify the inherent power and control dynamics characteristic of abusive intimate relationships, whether as lethal weapons to injure and kill or as a tool to inflict emotional abuse without ever firing a bullet.”
Sexual assault is also widespread in America. One in five women will be raped in their lifetime. One in four girls is sexually abused before age 18, with more than one third abused by family members. Rape costs the U.S. more than any other crime: $127 billion annually, followed by assault ($93 billion), murder ($71 billion) and drunk driving ($61 billion), reports the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. Shortly after taking office, Trump eliminated protections against campus sexual harassment and assault. Meanwhile, violent pornography is proliferating, normalizing sexual choking that endangers the lives of women.
Exacerbating this violence, male-dominated legislatures in 18 states have passed abortion bans that endanger women’s lives. In states banning abortion, intimate partner violence has risen across the board, with the sharpest increases among women ages 25 to 34. In the first year after Dobbs, calls to the National Domestic Violence Hotline involving reproductive coercion doubled.
Abortion bans are also increasing maternal mortality, which is already higher in the U.S. than other industrialized countries. In states with abortion bans, women are twice as likely to die during pregnancy. As doctors flee abortion-ban states, women are losing the basic care they need to stay healthy and carry a pregnancy safely to term. Between August 2022 and December 2024, Idaho lost 35 percent of its OB-GYN physicians, lengthening wait times for reproductive healthcare, forcing longer travel time for basic care and closing maternity wards in rural areas. Texas is seeing similar departures, and abortion bans are driving away medical residents.
In addition to high rates of maternal mortality, U.S. women face dangerous, often unnecessary surgeries. American physicians perform 1.2 million cesarean deliveries each year—close to one-third of all births—far above rates in other industrialized countries. Too many are performed without adequate anesthesia, reports The New York Times: As many as 100,000 women experience significant pain during cesarean sections each year. Hysterectomies are also overperformed: Doctors remove the uteruses of over 40 percent of American women by age 75. Antiabortion politics has blocked the development of mifepristone, which is highly effective for treating the conditions that lead to hysterectomies.
Under the Trump administration, American women are losing access to reproductive healthcare and family planning services. The Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill signed by Trump in July blocked Medicaid coverage of contraception, cancer screening and STI testing and treatment at the nation’s largest, single provider—Planned Parenthood—jeopardizing access to over one million women nationwide. This attack on access to contraception will mean more unwanted pregnancies and higher abortion rates.
Republican states are also passing laws to isolate and punish women seeking abortion healthcare. In Texas, the governor just signed a new law that authorizes lawsuits against anyone who helps a woman obtain abortion care, promising a $100,000 award to encourage lawsuits. Women are increasingly being criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes, including prosecutions for miscarriage, even in cases where doctors refused lifesaving treatment. Meanwhile, Trump’s FDA is now touting the unproven claim that taking Tylenol during pregnancy causes autism, pressuring women to endure pain during pregnancy and blaming mothers for autism.
For women and infants who survive childbirth, the Trump administration is slashing food subsidies and child care programs that keep young mothers afloat, including WIC, Head Start and SNAP. Why? The conservative Christians driving Project 2025 reject single parenthood and are trying to force all Americans into “biblically based marriage”: heterosexual two-parent households with a male breadwinner and a stay-at-home mother.
The Trump administration and Republicans are pursuing this goal by dismantling longstanding protections against workplace sex discrimination and targeting more recently-developed protections as well, including the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act—the 2023 law guaranteeing reasonable workplace accommodations for pregnant and postpartum workers to protect their health and keep their jobs.
And it’s working: Since January, over 330,000 women have left the workforce, and the share of working mothers has hit its lowest levels since the COVID-19 pandemic. This trend leaves women more economically vulnerable and more exposed to the violent men in their lives.
America is dangerous for women and girls—and more dangerous by the day—because our leaders choose to make it so. So we must choose new leaders.
