Dear John,
If you visited the U.S.’s capital city this week on Wednesday, you might have noticed what looked like an unusual piece of public art: a giant blow-up IUD, towering over D.C.'s Union Station. But the inflatable was no advertisement—it was a political message, erected by Americans for Contraception, encouraging the Senate vote to pass the Right to Contraception Act.
Of course, if you’ve been following the current Senate’s track record on reproductive rights, you might have an idea of how that went. Senate Republicans blocked the legislation—which would have codified the right to contraception into federal law—from passage. Just two Republicans, Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, joined Democrats and Independents in support of the bill.
Just yesterday, we marked the 59th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Griswold v. Connecticut—a landmark case that affirmed the right to privacy and ruled that a Connecticut law that had outlawed contraceptives was unconstitutional, under the 14th Amendment. That a right that has been presumed settled for over half a century, and which over 80 percent of Americans support, should be called into question in 2024 is absurd—but unfortunately unsurprising.
“[The Right to Contraception Act's] passage was a long shot, pending any last-minute changes from Republicans looking to toe the party line, but it was a savvy political move by Democrats that aimed to get Republicans on the record against birth control ahead of the 2024 elections,” reported Ms.’s Livia Follet, in the wake of the Act’s failure to pass. With a significant majority of Americans in favor of increasing access to birth control, ignoring the 20-foot-tall IUD in the room isn’t exactly a good look for Republicans ahead of November.
While women in the U.S. continue to endure assaults on our rights from conservative legislators who completely disregard our needs and wants, our neighbors to the South saw some progress: Mexico elected their first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum, this week. The move marked a stark contrast from just over the border in Texas, where the state’s Supreme Court ruled last week against a group of women who had been denied medically necessary abortions. In testimony last year, a number of them had recounted to judges how they had suffered life-threatening medical complications—and in some cases, loss of fertility and other permanent consequences—as a result of being denied abortions.
“Three Texas Supreme Court justices—Jimmy Blacklock, John Devine and Jane Bland—are up for reelection this November. This decision from the court serves as a grave reminder of the importance of mobilizing around judicial elections,” writes Ms.’s digital editor Roxy Szal. “And the victory in Mexico, the opposite: how representative and diverse democracies with active electorates bring women and women’s issues to the forefront of elections.”
And finally, we are, as many, hopeful that the war that has taken tens of thousands of lives and caused a humanitarian crisis in Gaza will soon end, given President Biden’s new push for a ceasefire, humanitarian aid surge, release of all remaining hostages and regional coalition to rebuild Gaza as proposed last week. I encourage you to read our detailed account in the Summer print issue about the efforts of Jerusalem-based scholar, Cochav Elkayam-Levy, who created an independent nongovernmental commission committed to documenting war crimes and advocating for justice on behalf of women, children, and families. In describing her attempts to account for sexual violence perpetrated against Israeli women by Hamas on and since October 7, the article notes how "feminist lessons of war are traumatically and often fatally difficult to come by."
Onward for equality,
