I am lucky.
I grew up in a house full of books, governed by educated adults whose focus was on producing useful citizens, not on perpetuating religious dogma. I was provided with sex education, the means to obtain contraception, trust that if I needed help I could ask for it, and confidence that decisions about my person, my health, and my future were mine to make.
I also grew up in a time when, had an unwanted pregnancy resulted from my sexual activity, I had the right to terminate it. I lived close enough to a clinic that I could get there and back in a day if I needed to. I never needed to, because I’ve never been pregnant. Never wanted to be. Chose my partners based, in part, on their acceptance of my rights and willingness to do their part to avoid unwanted consequences.
I obtained a tubal ligation before I was thirty, after years using the birth-control pill and seeing the side-effects accrue. Second-best money I ever spent. The best money I ever spent was on the hysterectomy performed when I was 50, after years suffering with fibroid tumors. I have friends my own age who were denied equivalent care, even here in California, for decades.
All over the country, throughout my lifetime, people with uteruses have been and are being denied contraception (permanent or otherwise). Contraception is medical care. Denial of medical care is discrimination, period.
I believe the only solution that will be effective over the long term is to re-start the fight for a national Equal Rights Amendment, but the current version focuses on ‘sex,’ which as a legal construct is very outdated. It’s also too vague. Our second amendment states ‘A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.’ Everybody who wants a gun ignores the first two clauses, but they are there. It’s specific. The ERA needs to be enforceable legislation, redrafted for inclusivity, and should begin with a restatement of the ‘all men are created equal’ language in our Declaration of Independence. It should be ‘all persons.’
Next on the list would be a statement that no person can be compelled to surrender bodily autonomy. If a person cannot be compelled to receive a vaccine, to be tested for diseases of epidemiological concern, or to sign up as an organ donor, then they cannot be compelled to have their other medical decisions dictated by the state. No medical intervention can be applied or withheld without a person’s consent. (The U.S. is currently reckoning with reparations for people who were involuntarily sterilized. If we can’t justify *that,* how can we justify forcing a citizen to bear a child?)
Following that, a statement that any medication, medical device, or medical procedure approved by the FDA must be made available in every state and must be covered by all insurances.
Then we need a statement that marriage is a legal contract (which it is; you can have all the ceremonies you want, but you aren’t legally married until you execute the license, it’s witnessed, and it’s recorded) that may be entered into freely by any two persons, regardless of gender identity, and must be honored by all states.
The main problem with the anti-equality legislation hitting the books is that it’s motivated by religious dogma, specifically fundamentalist Christian dogma. But we have to take arguments against religion out of the conversation about equal rights, because Americans do have a constitutional right to free exercise of religion. It’s important and valuable (and I say that as an atheist).
What I think would be more effective is to point out the ways in which equality is an American value, and the process by which equality has been incrementally legislated as society evolves.
We need to emphasize the ways in which even white men (if they weren’t land-owners or Christians) had to fight for the right to vote, and relate those events to the end of slavery, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the gay rights and women’s rights movements of the 1970s, the ongoing legal oppression of Native Americans, and the current efforts to restrict or roll back the rights of female, gay, and non-gender-conforming citizens.
It’s very complicated. This is the problem with a federal republic. I personally feel confident there will be another civil war within this century, possibly within my lifetime (I’m 56), and it will come sooner or later depending on the next presidency and whether any of the Western states vote to secede. The conflict will rest on the question of equality.