Are Women's Rights the Canary in the Coal Mine of a Democracy in Decline?

Last edited Fri Jan 27, 2023, 02:33 PM - Edit history (1)

(an extremely informative, lengthy, depressing read)


Are Women’s Rights the Canary in the Coal Mine of a Democracy in Decline?
1/19/2023 by Jennifer Weiss-Wolf
U.S. democracy has been failing women, AS IT HAS BEEN DESIGNED TO (emphasis mine), since the nation’s founding.



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)

This article was co-published with Rewire News Group.

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 BEEN DESIGNED TO (emphasis mine), since the nation’s founding.

Equal Rights Amendment

Let’s start with the century-long fight to enshrine equality in the U.S. Constitution.

Eighty-five percent of United Nations member states currently have explicit constitutional provisions that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex and/or gender. The United States is an outlier. Even as the federal Equal Rights Amendment navigates the path to ratification—and some 30 states have ERAs or comparable language in their own constitutions and/or active mobilization efforts—WOMEN IN THIS COUNTRY HAVE NO GUARANTEE OF EQUALITY (emphasis mine).
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Protesters gather during a rally for women’s rights in Foley Square on Oct. 8, 2022 in New York City. (Jeenah Moon / Getty Images)

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As we approach the 50th anniversary of the Roe decision and continue to grapple with the new status quo, this much is clear: The tenets of reproductive health, rights and justice—and those of a healthy democracy—are not only inextricably interconnected, but essential to our nation’s promise. The country’s status as a backsliding democracy says as much about the symptom as it does the disease. And our simultaneous failure to curb democratic dysfunctions, like partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression, inevitably go hand in hand with our failure to ensure women and girls have an equal chance to engage in and contribute to civic life—or to live freely at all.

Bringing us back to the original proposition: Are we merely witnessing the byproducts of a democracy on the decline, or are each of the examples above the drivers of our current status? The 2020 United Nations report suggests that the trajectory of “de-democratization” is rarely analyzed initially through the distinctive lens of gender equity and there are insufficient efforts to systematically examine the current implications. Which is precisely why we plan to pursue this conversation, starting with a symposium at NYU School of Law this spring. We will bring together academics, advocates, policymakers and pundits to explore what it means to measure the ebb and flow of inclusive democracy, in the United States and globally, with principles of gender equity at the center. Ms. magazine and Rewire News Group will co-host, and we look forward to sharing a steady stream of content as we tackle these questions in the weeks and months to come.

https://msmagazine.com/2023/01/19/democracy-usa-womens-rights-abortion/