The Republican party of the United States remains the party of denying women fundamental human rights. The US press as a whole remains the instrument of softening up or ignoring this reality.
“Trump has long been criticized for his public treatment of women,” ran a CNN headline. “The ones in his life argue he’s different in private.” What follows is a puff piece in which prominent Republican women say nice things about him, and his history of alleged sexual assault is mentioned several paragraphs down.
The first Mrs Trump is no longer in his life, though she’s buried on his New Jersey golf course, but she charged him with raping her – at home, in private – in her 1990 sworn divorce testimony. E Jean Carroll is only casually in his life, but she won a civil lawsuit against him for sexual assault in the privacy of a department store dressing room and a second one for public defamation, and he owes her tens of millions of dollars for these cases. CNN does get around to mentioning Carroll in passing, but praise from Trump’s protege Sarah Huckabee Sanders and his lawyer and daughter-in-law get the lionesses’ share of attention, and headlines are often all viewers read.
Rape is an assault on the victim’s body but also on her (or his or their) agency and right to bodily autonomy, though the assault on agency and autonomy can and does take many forms – and the Republican party and its candidates for president and vice-president support many of them. The Republican party has uncomplainingly offered up an adjudicated rapist as their presidential candidate and rallied behind a vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, who has shown great enthusiasm for denying women basic rights and safety and sometimes survival.
One of the crucial ways Vance has sought to deny women basic rights is by what has been dubbed menstrual surveillance. In 2023, the federal Department of Health and Human Services proposed a revision to medical privacy regulations “to shield the protected health information of patients seeking lawful reproductive health care from disclosure for the purpose of criminal, civil, and administrative investigations”. Vance was one of the eight Republican senators who filed a letter of protest declaring: “Under the Proposed Rule, however, States would be forced to cede their powers to investigate criminal abortion-related activity.”
In other words, the revision would protect women’s right to privacy around pregnancy and birth control-related healthcare, and Vance was having none of it. As Talking Points Memo put it: “The news has been filled with proposed or actual laws which would attempt to restrict travel to receive abortions in other states, charge those who travel or criminalize those who might facilitate such travel or facilitate the legal shipment of prescribed abortion drugs through the mail. But to enforce these laws or know when there’s something to enforce you really need access to medical records. You need to know and be able to prove when a woman was pregnant and then, before the end of normal gestation, stopped being pregnant.”
In other words, to carry out these laws, the state needs to criminalize being female and fertile and put those who are under surveillance. Vance is an anti-abortion hardliner who supports a national abortion ban with no exceptions. He’s also taken to sneering at women who don’t have children, which is, I suppose, consistent with his attacks on reproductive rights and advocacy of regressive gender roles.
Another way Vance supported violence against women is with his infamous 2022 declaration that women should stay in violent marriages for the sake of the kids. “This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that, like: ‘Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy,” but ending them “didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages”.
It’s an astonishing statement if an insufficiently unusual one, the idea that the heterosexual two-parent household is somehow so magically beneficent that even if the dad is beating the mom, it’s better for the kids than having an unbattered mom and a peaceful home.
Vance defended his statement by saying: “In fact, modern society’s war on families has made our domestic violence situation much worse,” which is outrageously untrue. The feminist movement brought attention to domestic violence, created domestic violence shelters, put pressure on law enforcement to address that violence, and worked to give women the economic equality and rights that give them more power to leave abusers. The cumulative effect of these measures has, along with a new ethos recognizing that women are possessed of certain inalienable rights, reduced the incidence of this often-hidden crime.
What breaks up families in which there is violence is the violence, not the victims’ ability to escape that violence. The man who is beating his wife is often also beating his children, and intimate-partner violence all too often ends in the victim’s death, especially if there are guns on hand. One parent killing the other is bad for the kids, too, and male partners are the leading cause of death for pregnant women and women who have recently given birth in the USA, which the right-to-life advocates should show an interest in – but don’t.
This is why coercive control, including intimate-partner violence (IPV), and abortion are not separate issues. The man who is beating his wife may also be raping her or engaging in sexual and reproductive coercion, in this country where feminists first made marital rape a concept and then got it recognized by the law (only in 1993 did all US states recognize marital rape, but there are still many loopholes, including states that don’t recognize marital rape in cases when the partner was unconscious or incapacitated). And that brings us back to reproductive rights.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists notes that reproductive coercion includes “explicit attempts to impregnate a partner against her will, control outcomes of a pregnancy, coerce a partner to have unprotected sex, and interfere with contraceptive methods”.
The college’s website adds: “One quarter of adolescent females reported that their abusive male partners were trying to get them pregnant through interference with planned contraception, forcing the female partners to hide their contraceptive methods,” and: “One study found that women with unintended pregnancies were four times more likely to experience IPV than women whose pregnancies were intended.”
In other words, a lot of unwanted and unplanned pregnancies are the result of male coercion, not, as the right would have you believe, female carelessness. Which is why abortion is a crucial part of reproductive rights; a person whose pregnancy was the result of the violation of her rights needs to retain the right to terminate it. Pregnancy, as many women who have borne children have reminded us recently, is a life-changing experience that can result in incapacitation, lasting injury, economic hardship including the inability to work and care for other children, and sometimes death, especially in the absence of adequate medical care.
The denial of access to abortion is bringing women in states such as Texas and Idaho to the brink of death – as the journalist Jessica Valenti recently reported.
Idaho women are weekly being airlifted to states where they can receive life-saving healthcare and doctors are sometimes recommending they buy evacuation insurance. Valenti also reports: “Rape victims are being denied emergency contraception in medical centers and hospital emergency rooms” because the war against reproductive rights is expanding to go after in-vitro fertilization and birth control, two more ways women can choose whether and how to have children.
In his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance writes of his grandfather: “I couldn’t believe that mild-mannered Papaw, who I adored as a child, was such a violent drunk.” In the next sentence, he blames his grandmother: “His behavior was due at least partly to Mamaw’s disposition,” adding: “she’d fight back. In short, she devoted herself to making his drunken life a living hell,” itemizing more of her violence than his, though he does mention in passing the grandfather also gave his own daughter a black eye when she tried to break up a fight between the couple. It’s not hard to imagine this poor woman first impregnated by this man when she was 13 stayed with him for lack of better options; it’s clear Vance approves of her staying.
The November election is a referendum on major issues – the climate, the economy, the survival of democracy in America, the makeup of the supreme court – other than the personalities of the candidates on the top of the ticket. The horse-race journalism and its relentless focus on Biden’s age and oratorical shortcomings obscured that. But those personalities connect to the issues, and while perhaps Biden’s decades of leadership on legislation on violence against women is no longer relevant, the bill itself is.
It was reauthorized and expanded in 2022 to add protections for Native American, trans and immigrant women, and to address cyberstalking and cyberporn. The majority of Republicans in the House and Senate voted against it. On the other hand, we now have a race for the presidency between a prosecutor and a man convicted of 34 felonies, with a Yale law school graduate on the ticket with Trump: the JD Vance of 2016 tweeted: “What percentage of the American population has @realDonaldTrump sexually assaulted?” but the JD Vance of 2024 has made it clear he doesn’t care.
