Female Trouble

Caused by men who won’t mind their own business about women's bodies

Because of the relentless, highly-organized rightwing crusade to control American women’s bodies, access to essential medical care during pregnancy is disappearing in a number of states, before most residents realize what is happening.

Anya Cook, who nearly died after she was denied an abortion under Florida’s existing 15-week ban in 2022, had a message Monday for women in the Sunshine State who now encounter pregnancy complications after the six-week mark.

“Run,” she said. “Run, because you have no help here.”

Cook was turned away from a hospital in December 2022 when her water broke around 16 weeks of pregnancy, long before a fetus is viable. Less than 24 hours later, she hemorrhaged on the floor of a hair salon. Her friend, Shanae Smith-Cunningham, was turned away from a different hospital with the same complication less than a week later.

Over a year after that experience, Cook is pregnant again — and consumed by anxiety over what might happen.

“I’m terrified that my life is still at risk,” said Cook, who has been on full bed rest during her pregnancy, determined to take every precaution.

As has happened in other states where abortion is illegal, many women with failed pregnancies in Florida are expected to order abortion pills online rather than making the journey to a bricks-and-mortar clinic — an experience that some find simple, but for others can be confusing and scary amid a fraught legal landscape.

But as you may know, that avenue is on the brink of being choked off too, as far-right activists seek to tighten their grip on women’s bodies. At the top of their wishlist, now that Roe is gone and many states are sharply restricting or banning surgical abortion, is access to the medication abortion drug, mifepristone.

At issue is the availability of mifepristone, the first pill taken in a two-drug regimen for medication abortion that is currently used in nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the United States. More than five million women in the United States have used mifepristone to terminate their pregnancies, and dozens of other countries have approved the drug for use.

Last April, Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk of the Northern District of Texas, a Trump appointee who is a longtime opponent of abortion, issued a preliminary ruling invalidating the F.D.A.’s 23-year-old approval of mifepristone. Days later, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, struck part of Judge Kacsmaryk’s ruling but affirmed major aspects of it, allowing mifepristone to remain on the market but imposing significant restrictions on it.

Now the issue is on the Supreme Court’s docket. The plaintiff is represented by “Alliance Defending Freedom”, founded three decades ago as a legal-defense fund for conservative Christian causes. In the past dozen years, its lawyers have won fourteen Supreme Court victories, including overturning Roe v. Wade; allowing employer-sponsored health insurance to exclude birth control; rolling back limits on government support for religious organizations; protecting the anonymity of donors to advocacy groups; blocking pandemic-related public-health rules; and establishing the right of a baker to refuse to make a cake for a same-sex wedding.

Arguing the case for the ADF was Erin Hawley, wife of Sen. Josh “Craven” Hawley of Missouri, known mostly for cheering the Jan 6 seditionists and then running, tail between legs, as they turned on him.

Erin Hawley is the latest in a long line of Republican women who have built successful careers by destroying the lives of other women. Hawley has been incredibly lucky in life, graduating from Yale Law and clerking at the Supreme Court. She is now using that impressive resume to deny the same opportunities to other women. She was part of the legal team that successfully argued to repeal Roe v. Wade, for example, allowing her home state of Missouri to undermine the futures of countless girls and women through forced childbirth. Tuesday, she took the fight even more national, pretending to believe abortion pills cause "harm."

Every word of her argument was disingenuous. The actual reason ADF wants to restrict access to abortion pills is for the same reason they oppose contraception and same-sex marriage rights: They are theocrats who want to end secular law and impose a far-right Christian nationalist agenda on all Americans. In the original brief Hawley wrote for Tuesday's case, she and the other ADF lawyers argued for a revival of the 1873 Comstock Act, a long-dormant (but never repealed) law that would make it a crime not only to ship abortion pills anywhere in the country, but, as written, would criminalize shipping contraception, or even just information about preventing pregnancy. 

The Comstock Act again. The ‘vice’ act that keeps on giving. Increasingly, it is being dragged out as justification for Republicans to crush 150 years—and more— of hard-fought women’s rights.

Anthony Comstock was a Connecticut native affiliated with Congregationalists, a devout sect of Christianity descended from the Puritans, according to Amy Werbel, a cultural historian and professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology who wrote the 2018 book Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock. 

“They were true believers in the sense that if one wasn’t saved properly as they thought, they would burn in hell. And I think that’s really important to understand – that the root of all of these laws is Christianity, the desire to save souls through the lens of their own religious framework. And that also then will be motivated by this idea of Christian nationalism,” Werbel said.

Comstock spent his life spreading his view of moral superiority. Congregationalists believed that sex was a sin and people should only have intercourse for procreation, Werbel said. After serving in the Civil War Comstock and others turned to other tactics to “sanctify” the nation. “An abortion wasn’t seen as a sin because it was the death of a person. It was seen as taking away the punishment for sex” because procreation was the sole purpose of intercourse, Werbel explained.

Comstock’s crusade eventually influenced Congress, who named the 1873 anti-obscenity laws after him. First-time violators faced up to five years in prison. The federal government soon hired him to serve as a Post Office special agent with the authority to carry weapons and make arrests — and enforce the law that carried his name. Then he traveled across the country — even into private homes, sniffing and pawing through mail and personal effects, exposing people’s most intimate business.

Comstock boasted about the number of arrests he made and the number of suicides his crusade had brought about.

He bragged about the number of suicides he caused. Of course he did, right? What a totally on-brand “conservative” thing to do.

Culturally, the newfound interest in the late-19th century anti-obscenity codes revives a stunted view of sexual morality, said Priscilla Smith, a Yale Law School professor and director of the Information Society Project’s study of reproductive justice program. “They’re rooted in archaic views of women’s sexual expression and their subservient role in the family. They really were designed to control women’s sexual activity.” 

“All of these things go together,” Werbel said. “The suppression of teaching about LGBTQ history, the suppression of access to abortifacients. All of these things go to this belief that is also woven into this particular Christian evangelical idea: God creates Adam, woman is born from man, and I’m just going flat out say it –  a white man has dominion over all else in the world, including women.”

Comstock also bans the delivery to hospitals of surgical instruments needed to terminate life-threatening pregnancies, even in states where that is still legal. Every time I write those words, it takes my breath away. Yes, there are states that would allow a woman who could easily be saved to die, rather than abort a pregnancy that is killing her. Even more cruel, sometimes the fetus is already dead.

Naturally, the next item on the wingnut wish list after medication abortion is hormonal birth control. It’s an obvious leap from one pill to another, for them to be conflated, when most people really don’t know they work. So it’s easy to muddy the waters and create doubt and fear in the ignorant, to demonize and chip away support.

Charlie Kirk, the head of the MAGA propaganda behemoth Turning Point USA, recently unveiled a novel theory as to why young women tend to vote for Democrats. Unwilling to admit that women can think for themselves, Kirk floated the theory that birth control pills cause brain damage.

“Birth control like really screws up female brains,” he falsely claimed before a crowd at a recent church event streamed on the far-right site Rumble. Claiming the pill “increases depression, anxiety [and] suicidal ideation,” he then blamed women's voting patterns on hormonal contraception. “It creates very angry and bitter young ladies and young women,” Kirk argued. “Then that bitterness then manifests into a political party that is the bitter party. I mean, the Democrat Party is all about ‘bring us your bitterness and, you know, we’ll give you free stuff.’”

Of course, the real reason MAGA leaders don't like birth control is they oppose the freedom and opportunities that it has afforded women. Kirk barely bothers to hide that this is his real agenda. In the very same talk, he also tries to threaten women who hold out for Mr. Right instead of settling for Mr. Incel: “In their early 30's they get really upset because they say the boys don't want to date me anymore because they're not at their prime,” he claims, echoing the revenge fantasy that dominates misogynist message boards. 

“Bitter” is rich, coming from the perpetually angry and aggrieved incels who make up most of the Republican base.

Search for “birth control” on TikTok or Instagram and a cascade of misleading videos vilifying hormonal contraception appear: Young women blaming their weight gain on the pill. Right-wing commentators claiming that some birth control can lead to infertility. Testimonials complaining of depression and anxiety.

Instead, many social media influencers recommend “natural” alternatives, such as timing sex to menstrual cycles — a minimally effective birth-control method that doctors warn could result in unwanted pregnancies in a country where abortion is now banned or restricted in nearly half the states.

And here is the crux of it, the heart of the matter. Restoring men’s “role” to primacy and control — and undermining women’s independence and autonomy.

On his show, Ben Shapiro, another right-wing pundit, called discussing birth-control side effects a “political third rail,” while interviewing a guest who proclaimed that women on birth-control pills are attracted to men who are “less traditionally masculine.”

The backlash to birth control comes at a time of rampant misinformation about basic health tenets amid poor digital literacy and a wider political debate over reproductive rights, in which far-right conservatives argue that broad acceptance of birth control has altered traditional gender roles and weakened the family.

This is a battle those of us who are older fought hard for and thought we won. The simple human right to control your own fertility and make your own choices about when or if to have children, a career, a life of your own.

But now all that is once again at risk. Some of these “influencers” may be sincere even if misinformed— and while it always important to educate yourself about any medication you take—there is an enormous amount of disinformation and flat-out lies and snake oil being peddled.

Evie Martinez Martinez and her husband, Gabriel Hugoboom, run a magazine called Evie, a kind of anti-woke, right-wing alternative to traditional women’s magazines; it regularly publishes anti-abortion, anti-LGBT, and, of course, anti-birth-control content. She co-founded a menstrual cycle tracking app called 28 that is backed by conservative billionaire and tech mogul Peter Thiel, who has funded dozens of anti-choice candidates.

The company, 28 Wellness, app’s website declares: “Hormonal birth control promised freedom but tricked our bodies into dysfunction and pain.” The “feminine fitness” app told The Post it has “never been marketed as an alternative to hormonal birth control.” Doctors report that the tidal wave of misinformation about birth control is creating a health care crisis, including women who “come in for abortions after believing what they see on social media about the dangers of hormonal birth control.” 

The influencers’ messaging helps drive potential legislation limiting access to hormonal birth control, said Amanda Stevenson, a sociologist, demographer and assistant professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder who is studying how antiabortion activists and lawmakers are trying to restrict birth control. Already Republican legislators in Missouri have tried, unsuccessfully, to stop the state’s Medicaid program from covering IUDs and emergency contraceptives. A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit this month upheld a Texas law requiring minors to obtain parental permission before accessing birth control.

“It’s terrifying to think about our options being taken away, and misinformation about the things that we still have access to,” she said. “That’s a combination for disaster.”

Although he did considerable damage to women on the abortion issue, it is sabotage of birth control where Comstock probably left his biggest mark.

In her latest book, The Man Who Hated Women, Amy Sohn details how he derailed the nascent family planning movement, and destroyed the lives of several women in the process.

While working for the post office, Sohn says, Comstock “decoyed people” by using the mail to solicit obscenity and contraception.

“[Comstock] was given that [post office] title so that he could have the power to inspect the mail and over time it was expanded to be able to come into people's houses and seize items," she says. "It was a very broad, broad definition of what someone affiliated with the post office could do with regards to individual civil liberties.”

Over time, the scope of the Comstock law expanded: “Its heart was in the mail, but ... it became much broader than that,” Sohn says. “Even oral information, which reasonable people believed was constitutionally protected, turned out that it wasn’t.”

In 1916, feminist activist Emma Goldman was arrested in New York City just before giving a lecture on family planning. One year earlier, birth control advocate Margaret Sanger had been charged with violating the law. Prominent publishers of a feminist newspaper reporting on sexual abuse, Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, he got sent to prison.

One of the repulsive things about Comstock and the women that he went after — is many of them were middle-aged and older, some as old as their late 60s. And so given what life spans were at that time, a 67-year-old woman facing a 10-year prison sentence, was almost certain to die in prison. And that is why some of the women he went after and was able to prosecute took their own lives.

Just last week, in the increasingly unhinged state of Arizona,  women took yet another body blow — this time from a law written by a serial child predator, kidnapper and rapist, William Claude Jones.

Here’s a charming portrait of him, back in the 1800s.

While Jones lived in Arizona, he was elected to represent Tucson in the 1st Arizona Territorial Legislative Assembly. And then, when that legislature convened in 1864, he was elected speaker of the House.

And it was that legislature — the one Jones presided over in 1864, after he had already abandoned his first wife, and married a 12-year-old and was just weeks away from marrying a 15-year-old, though still a few years away from marrying a 14-year-old — it was that legislature that passed a law reading, “Every person who shall administer or cause to be administered or taken, any medicinal substances, or shall use or cause to be used any instruments whatever, with the intention to procure the miscarriage of any woman then being with child, and shall be thereof duly convicted, shall be punished by imprisonment in the Territorial prison for a term not less than two years nor more than five years.”

The 12-year-old and subsequent child brides were believed to have been abducted from their parents, mostly from Mexico. And this paragon of conservative values is whom the AZ high court has now invoked to be the arbiter of reproductive rights for the women of AZ now.

Today, Arizona’s highest court, in a 4-to-2 decision, upheld an Arizona law dating from 1864 that bans nearly all abortions. 

The law, which was on the books long before Arizona achieved statehood, outlaws abortion from the moment of conception, except when necessary to save the life of the mother. It makes no exceptions for rape or incest. Doctors prosecuted under the law could face fines and prison terms of two to five years.

And so now, the conservative obsession with “purity” — both racial and sexual — and control, is being achieved by increasingly punitive means. The war against women — against sex education, against contraception, against access to appropriate healthcare for pregnant women and against the very existence of gay and trans people — is just starting to pick up steam.

As the law journalist Mark Joseph Stern tweeted on 27 March, “The anti-abortion movement’s end goal is to let doctors refuse treatment — including life-saving emergency care — for patients whom they deem to be sinful and morally impure.” The patients are supposed to die for their sins.

As if that weren’t enough, in May 2023, the Heritage Foundation declared on social media, “Conservatives have to lead the way in restoring sex to its true purpose, & ending recreational sex & senseless use of birth control pills.”

Think about that. American conservatives — and the entire Republican party — are absolutely giddy that they finally have the power to take away any joy and intimacy from sex and reduce it to breeding like livestock.

THIS is how your tormentors see the ringleader of their medieval misogynistic cult:

And this is how he actually looks — like a beast dying of distemper, his own feces smeared on his hideous face.

This creature could well be the next president of the United States, if his cretinous cult is successful in stealing the election, as they plan.

Are you angry yet?