[[link removed]] Ms. Memo: This Week in Women's Rights
January 25, 2023
From the ongoing fight for abortion rights and access, to elections, to the drive for the Equal Rights Amendment, there are a multitude of battles to keep up with. In this weekly roundup, find the absolute need-to-know news for feminists.
Are Women’s Rights the Canary in the Coal Mine of a Democracy in Decline? [[link removed]]
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An abortion rights demonstrator holds a sign near the U.S. Capitol during the annual Women’s March on Oct. 8, 2022, one month before the midterm elections. (Roberto Schmidt / AFP via Getty Images)
BY JENNIFER WEISS-WOLF | 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.
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The Supreme Court Dobbs Leak Never Really Mattered. They Just Told Us So. [[link removed]] Employers, Take Note—Young Women Are Planning Their Lives Around State Abortion Laws [[link removed]]
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New York State Assembly Considers Groundbreaking Equal Rights Amendment [[link removed]] New York Shield Law Would Protect Clinicians Mailing Abortion Pills to Patients in Red States [[link removed]]
What we're reading
Because it's hard to keep up with everything going on in the world right now. Here's what we're reading this week:
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"New
York
City
starts
offering
free
abortion
pills
at
sexual
health
clinics"
—
CNN
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[link removed] [[link removed]] Tune in for a new episode of Ms. magazine's podcast, On the Issues with Michele Goodwin on Apple Podcasts [[link removed]] + Spotify [[link removed]] .
Before Roe v. Wade , if you were in need of an abortion in Chicago, there was a number you could call, run by young women who called themselves Jane. They’d provide abortions to women who had nowhere else to turn. It was started by Heather Booth when she was 19 years old. In this episode, Booth joins Dr. Goodwin to discuss the history of the Jane Collective and the connections between our pre-Roe past and post-Roe future. Where do we go from here?
We hope you'll listen, subscribe, rate and review today!
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