Biden declares Equal Rights Amendment adopted, sparking a debate about his abortion legacy

The move has no immediate legal force but will likely spark lawsuits that advocates hope will restore abortion rights.

By Alice Miranda Ollstein
01/17/2025

President Joe Biden’s Friday announcement declaring the Equal Rights Amendment part of the U.S. Constitution is reviving long-simmering tensions in the abortion-rights movement about the outgoing president’s legacy on reproductive rights.

The last-minute move, three days before the end of Biden’s term, has sparked arguments between Biden’s defenders and his detractors over its significance, since even the White House acknowledged the announcement does not have the force of law. And the president’s declaration is also fueling a broader debate about whether Biden did enough to prepare for and respond to the fall of Roe v. Wade.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/17/biden-era-abortion-legacy-00199115

A State Supreme Court Just Issued the Most Devastating Rebuke of Dobbs Yet

BY DAHLIA LITHWICK AND MARK JOSEPH STERN
JAN 30, 2024

The Supreme Court’s eradication of the constitutional right to abortion in 2022’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization had an immediate and devastating impact on gender equality in the United States. … [Alito] dismissed his ruling’s ruinous impact on gender equality in a single conclusory paragraph asserting that abortion restrictions could not possibly discriminate against women.

… This week the Pennsylvania Supreme Court responded to that conclusion: no. On Monday, the court issued a landmark opinion declaring that abortion restrictions do amount to sex-based discrimination and therefore are “presumptively unconstitutional” under the state constitution’s equal rights amendment. The majority vehemently rejected Dobbs’ history-only analysis, noting that, until recently, “those interpreting the law” saw women “as not only having fewer legal rights than men but also as lesser human beings by design.” Justice David Wecht went even further: In an extraordinary concurrence, the justice recounted the historical use of abortion bans to repress women, condemned Alito’s error-ridden analysis, and repudiated the “antiquated and misogynistic notion that a woman has no say over what happens to her own body.”

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/01/pennsylvania-supreme-court-dobbs-sam-alito-abortion.html

ERA and Abortion Are Key to Women’s Vote in 2024

The overturning of Roe v. Wade was a wake-up call and the Equal Rights Amendment is needed now more than ever.

KATHY SPILLAR
Oct 29, 2023

In the majority decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning the federal right to abortion, Justice Alito purported that the electoral and political process are a sufficient antidote to the Court’s stripping away of privacy rights. Women got the message, loud and clear. Despite warnings from mainstream pundits that outrage over the ruling and commitment to the cause would fade, voters indeed turned out in force in support of abortion rights – again and again, in the 2022 midterms, in judicial elections, and in ballot measure after ballot measure.

As executive editor of Ms. magazine, I have long known the centrality of abortion in U.S. politics. The inaugural issue of Ms. in 1972, for example, featured a group of influential women who signed a petition “We Have Had Abortions” — at great personal risk, as abortion was outlawed in many states at the time. This set the stage not only for Roe v. Wade a year later, but organizing strategies that are still employed today. The Washington Post reported last year that the Ms. petition “changed the course of the abortion rights movement,” as it made visible that which had been invisible — the women who had abortions and the benefits to their lives.

Continued: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/era-abortion-rights-2024

USA – The 2024 Election Will Be a Referendum on Abortion and Women’s Equality, According to New Ms. Poll

10/9/2023
by ROXY SZAL, Ms. Magazine

Abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment are strong voter turnout issues separately, but even more powerful when combined, according to a new national poll by Lake Research Partners for Ms. and the Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF), publisher of Ms.

In particular, candidates talking about abortion and the ERA together is a powerful combination to mobilize Democrats and Independents (especially Independent women), younger women, voters who support abortion rights, college-educated women, Latinas and Black voters, and voters ages 30-39.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2023/10/09/2024-election-women-voters-equal-rights-amendment-abortion/

09.10.2023

News

Eleanor Smeal

Equal Rights Amendment

Feminist Majority Foundation

Lake Research Partners

Federal judge says constitutional right to abortion may still exist, despite Dobbs

The judge said the Supreme Court’s ruling concluded only that the 14th Amendment included no right to abortion, but stopped short of definitively ruling out other aspects of the Constitution.

By KYLE CHENEY and JOSH GERSTEIN
Feb 6, 2023

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., suggested Monday that there may be a constitutional right to abortion baked into the 13th Amendment — an area she said went unexplored by the Supreme Court in its momentous decision last year overturning Roe v. Wade.

In a pending criminal case against several anti-abortion activists, U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization concluded only that the 14th Amendment included no right to abortion but stopped short of definitively ruling out other aspects of the Constitution that might apply.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/06/federal-judge-constitutional-right-abortion-dobbs-00081391

06.02.2023

News

13th Amendment

14th Amendment

Colleen Kollar-Kotelly

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

Equal Rights Amendment

involuntary servitude

USA – Why Same-Sex Marriage Wins and Abortion Keeps Losing

It’s all about family values.

Judith Levine
December 12 2022

ON DECEMBER 8, President Joe Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act, which codifies federal protection of same-sex and interracial marriages and requires every state to extend “full faith and credit” to such licenses granted by other states. The bill passed with bipartisan support: 39 Republican representatives and 12 Republican senators joined all the Democrats to vote yea.

A USA Today op-ed by Evan Wolfson, leader of the Freedom to Marry campaign, called the Respect for Marriage Act “a triumph for families [and] freedom.”

Continued: https://theintercept.com/2022/12/12/abortion-same-sex-marriage-rma/

The language we use to talk about pregnancy and abortion is changing. But not everyone welcomes the shift

By Harmeet Kaur, CNN
Sun September 4, 2022

Across the US, mainstream institutions such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and CNN are increasingly opting for gender-neutral terms such as "pregnant people," "people who get abortions" and "birthing parent" in favor of "women" when referencing pregnancy, fertility and abortion.

These shifts in terminology signal an effort to be inclusive of transgender and nonbinary people who can also get pregnant. But the changes have also prompted pushback -- not just from Republican politicians who are openly hostile to LGBTQ people but also from some cisgender women (women whose gender identity conforms with the sex they were assigned at birth) who consider themselves LGBTQ allies and who support abortion rights.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/04/us/abortion-pregnant-people-women-language-wellness-cec/index.html

The best way to protect abortion rights? Finalize the Equal Rights Amendment

BY KATE KELLY, Los Angeles Times
MAY 23, 2022

When Roe vs. Wade was decided in 1973, it was rooted in rights that flow from privacy — not equality. As the country has now seen in the leaked Supreme Court draft ruling, that right to privacy is about to be demolished.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. bemoans in the draft opinion that Roe “was remarkably loose in its treatment of the constitutional text,” basing the right to abortion on the right to privacy when neither is “mentioned” in the Constitution. While we can’t change the composition of the court poised to overturn Roe, we can change the text they are charged with interpreting. It’s time to finalize the Equal Rights Amendment and enshrine gender equality.

Continued: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-05-23/roe-abortion-equal-rights-amendment

Most Americans Support Abortion. So What’s the Problem?

Protecting reproductive freedom is a winning issue with the American public. So why are we in the midst of an all-out assault on it?

By Ilyse Hogue
August 13, 2020

In political conversations about abortion in the U.S., one critical fact is far too consistently ignored: The overwhelming majority of Americans support—and always have supported—maintaining the legal right to abortion. Right now that support is at an all-time high of 77%. But in 1972, a year before Roe v. Wade, more than two thirds of even Republicans agreed that abortion was a private matter between a woman and her doctor. Protecting reproductive freedom is a winning issue with the American public. So why are we in the midst of an all-out assault on reproductive freedom?

Republican voters, like almost all people, want to believe that their chosen course is the moral one. At the same time, most people choose not to argue morality with others, believing it is a personal code, not a political one.

Continued: https://www.glamour.com/story/most-americans-support-abortion-so-whats-the-problem

USA – How the debate over the ERA became a fight over abortion

How the debate over the ERA became a fight over abortion
Because only women can have abortions, conservatives argue restrictions on the procedure could be found unconstitutional under the Equal Rights Amendment.

By ELEANOR MUELLER and ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN
02/11/2020

Conservative activists waged a successful campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment decades ago by warning it would force women into combat, legalize gay marriage and erode gender roles.

But in 2020, opponents are zeroing in on one line of attack: a claim that ERA would require taxpayer-funded abortions.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/11/abortion-equal-rights-amendment-113505