We need to acknowledge self-centered individualism as the destructive force that it is. I encounter its effects far too frequently.
Author: Chloe Nazra Lee
Chloe Nazra Lee, MD, MPH, is a resident physician in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York. Her professional interests include women’s mental health, trauma disorders, and working with survivors of abuse.
The Paradox of JD Vance’s Misogyny
The collective female rage in response to JD Vance using the “childless cat lady” archetype as an insult is driven by shared hurt at the mockery that reduces us to our reproductive capacity in a political context where women are already devalued. It demeans our dreams and aspirations outside motherhood. It seems small, but those three words carry so much emotional weight for us.
The fight is exhausting and there will come a time when I stop. But I pray that other women fight. All of us—intentionally childfree, mothers, delayed in motherhood, deprived of motherhood, stepmothers, more—certainly have a stake in the future: a hope that we may be cherished, not for the services our bodies offer men and society at large, but merely for our humanity and the women we are.
Will Divorce Be the Next GOP Target Against Women?
For many women, divorce means escape. Right-wing Republicans like JD Vance and Mike Johnson are targeting it.
Vance said leaving “unhappy or even violent” marriages “didn’t work out for the kids,” suggesting that people trapped in violent marriages should stay in them to preserve family stability. You know what’s worse for children than divorce? Domestic violence.
Institutional Courage: What It Takes to Keep Harvey Weinstein, and Men Like Him, Behind Bars
Former Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance’s opinion piece in The New York Times on Harvey Weinstein’s appeal offers an excellent opportunity to interrogate the larger systems in the U.S. that enable violence against women. But Vance’s article excluded a critical piece of the story: his decision not to press charges against Weinstein in 2015 after Ambra Battilana Gutierrez presented a recording of Weinstein admitting to groping her breast.
Women who experience sexual and physical violence are often criticized for delays in reporting. But if institutional inaction and underhandedness are more common responses than not when women do report, then why would they?
Overturning Harvey Weinstein’s Conviction Shows Poor Understanding of Violence Against Women
Context is everything when it comes to sexual and physical violence against women. Harvey Weinstein had more than a “propensity” for sexual assault; he demonstrated a serially predatory pattern of behavior of targeting and violating women and learned from the systems that enabled him that he could get away with it. Knowledge of this pattern is not prejudicial; it is necessary for a thorough understanding of the perpetrator.
The overturning of Weinstein’s conviction merely emphasizes the degree to which protection of sexual predators at their victims’ expense and permissibility of male violence against women are entrenched in our institutions. If our legal system cannot appreciate the relevance of historical patterns of behavior, we can never combat violence against women successfully.
A Thousand Little Moments: The Insidious Loss of Women’s Freedom to Christian Nationalism
Leaving a toxic marriage also meant temporarily abandoning my dream of motherhood. I grieve the loss of the future I imagined. Perhaps one day, I will have my own baby who will know how much she was wanted and loved. That dream is deferred. But the dream is altogether shattered for many women, in the wake of the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos are considered children. Republicans cannot ignore their role in this devastating turn.
Women are losing both the right to end unwanted or dangerous pregnancies and the right to become pregnant. The common factor is the loss of women’s choice. If our country’s concept of family stability relies on depriving women of their choices, we do not have stable families; we have prisoners.
Abortion Bans Increase the Need for Survivor Support
The best thing that we as physicians can do is to believe women, holding their hands and offering our unconditional support as we guide them through the pain and connect them to the healthcare resources that suit their best interests. This includes access to safe, legal abortion, a narrow avenue for recourse that recent and current GOP candidates threaten to narrow further.
But I am one doctor. There is only so much that I can do. I cannot single-handedly change our society.
Right-Wing Hubris Puts Ideology Over Medical Expertise—And Women Suffer
Texas anti-abortion lawmakers’ decisions enforce inferior medical care that harms women, prioritizing personal belief over evidence-based medicine and codifying misogyny into standard of care. The most recent decision by the Fifth Circuit, which allows denial of an emergency abortion to a critically ill pregnant patient, highlights the chilling truth that the life of the mother is not, in fact, a priority in the eyes of the law.
As physicians, we can follow neither our ethics nor appropriate standard of care if uninformed politicians flagrantly disrespect our training. If they can undermine our careful decision-making with brute force and no medical qualifications, then what is the point of our expertise?