Reproductive Freedoms: Hiding Behind States’ Rights
Kamala Harris has defined her candidacy around the freedoms she will fight for as a redress to those that Donald Trump and the new MAGA driven Republican Party are determined to take away from Americans. In the wake of her acceptance speech, she has become, more than ever, the liberty and freedom candidate reversing the Republican Party’s decades long claims on liberty and non-governmental incursions on personal freedoms. Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz also has made it clear the government should not be in our bedrooms. In pledging to rescue reproductive rights, Harris and Walz must focus the nation’s attention on another big lie Donald Trump and the Republican Party are pushing on Americans: the veil of states’ rights.
At the Republican Convention, Presidential nominee Donald Trump tried to evade the question of abortion by claiming that the issue of reproductive rights is all settled because “we’ve left it up to the people to decide.” This is a flagrant lie, in part because if Donald Trump and the Republican Party carry out Project 2025, we can expect a national bill criminalizing abortion. And currently, letting “the people” decide actually means letting state governments decide. In red states, this has meant denying millions their reproductive rights. In short, the people are not deciding.
In the Roe Wade era, the Supreme Court protected not only abortion and abortion medication, but also contraception and in vitro fertilization as the personal decision of individuals, families, and physicians. In the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, fourteen red state governments have taken away women’s freedom to choose. Bans on abortion now deny millions of women in states, driven by religiously extreme legislators and judges, essential medical freedoms and privacy. And for victims of rape or incest or women facing a life-threatening pregnancy, the denial of care is further catastrophic. Roe kept government off the backs and out of the wombs of Americans; it prevented state governments from obstructing this essential personal liberty.
State’s rights are not, in fact, about letting the people decide. According to the Pew Research Center, 63% of American adults believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases; 86% of religiously unaffiliated Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, as do 71% of Black Protestants, 64% of white non-evangelical Protestants, and 59% of Catholics. This is where America is. In the red states Kansas, Kentucky, and Ohio, popular initiatives have already overturned the restrictive laws of radical right state legislatures and governors.
Invoking state’s rights has always struck a dark note for many Americans, and generations have worked to limit them. Haven’t we had enough of weaponizing state’s rights to commit crimes against American citizens? For how many decades was the institution of slavery defended by a claim to states’ rights? And later, for how long did we listen to the apartheid system that was Jim Crow and the horrific practice of lynching be justified by the same argument? President Lincoln’s government interceded in 1861 to stop state-government instituted slavery in order to give Black Americans their liberties. How many freedoms will Americans now lose because of the further manipulation of “states’ rights” as an argument? State governments, often entrenched one-party governments, have become dictators of health and presumed, often selectively Christian, morals.
The Dobbs decision has allowed religious intolerance to take sides against the divergent worldviews of American citizens. I use the phrase “worldview” to remind us that what’s at work here is more than legislators and judges driven by religious convictions who weaponize their faith in the name of state’s rights. In a democracy, pluralism goes beyond organized religion to embrace all kinds of spiritual and secular values and views of liberty. At the heart of this matter is religious arrogance and the denial of diversity that goes far beyond religious differences. Christian Evangelicals, literalist Catholics, and others who believe that God governs the laws of nature -- including human sexuality -- are hijacking state governments. In a democracy with its panoply of values and “worldviews,” religious faith that sees the unborn as souls-to-be-saved-persons should have no authority over views that differ from theirs.
Yet religious believers refuse to accept the reality and the value of pluralism. They are convinced that their idea of God should be imposed on everyone. They have turned their self-deluded arrogance into a destructive force against freedom and public health. No one is telling the believers what to do with their bodies. That was the justice of Roe Wade. In their insistence on the separation of Church and State, the Founders understood the limits of religion in a democracy. Women and people across all fifty states must have the right to their own beliefs about nature, identity, and life protected. We do not live in a theocracy.
The irony of Donald Trump being a supporter of evangelicals and religious fundamentalists on this issue is not lost on the majority of Americans. Trump has a history of aggressive, sexist behavior that includes bragging about sexually assaulting women on an Access Hollywood tape; he has been convicted of sexually assaulting a woman in a department store, for which he has been sentenced to pay an eighty-three million dollar judgment; he has been convicted on 34 counts of felony for paying hush money during the 2016 election campaign to an adult film actress he had a relationship with while his wife was pregnant. What could Trump have at stake in appointing three supreme Court judges who would overturn Roe Wade, other than a calculated power gain?
To add to the hypocrisy, vice presidential nominee JD Vance demeans women, even calling those who do not to have children “miserable cat ladies” with no investment in the nation’s future. Currently, the Republican party is a home to blunt misogyny, and is locked into lies and anti-democratic efforts to control women’s bodies and impose invasive restrictions on many people. Women have been subordinated for too long and in too many ways by patriarchal societies and religious systems. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have promised to fight for women’s reproductive rights and private health freedoms. To do so, they need to keep exposing the lie of the so-called “democracy” of states’ rights. Many state governments emphatically do not speak for the people, and those states are ruining the lives of thousands of American women, robbing them of their freedom, and our democracy of pluralism.
Peter Balakian has written widely about American history and culture. He is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the author of New York Times Best Selling The Burning Tigris, he was Colgate's first Director of the Center for Ethics and World Societies, and his op eds have appeared in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Daily Beast, The LA Times, The Guardian, Slate, Salon, and others.