It will be devastating’: Women’s rights at risk under Trump presidency

by Erin Anderssen,

“… just as attitudes shifted about cancer or sexual orientation, some day soon, terminating a pregnancy would not be something women kept shamefully to themselves.“

At 3:40 p.m., on the day of her country’s most divisive election, Carol Sanger, a professor at Columbia Law School, pressed “send” to e-mail her publisher the final version of her book about abortion.

She had been working on it for more than six years. It explores the emotional cost and social consequences of abortion in the United States, and the last chapter, called Normalizing Abortion, ends on an upbeat note – that just as attitudes shifted about cancer or sexual orientation, some day soon, terminating a pregnancy would not be something women kept shamefully to themselves.

“Two good things will happen today,” she thought as she went off to vote. Her book was finally finished, and she was energized by the prospect of the first female president. At home, she held back on the celebratory champagne because it felt “premature.” Then Donald Trump won – his boasts about groping women apparently excused, his bullying tolerated, and with the vehemently anti-abortion Mike Pence standing at his shoulder as his running mate. Her research suddenly seems more timely than ever.

“It feels likes a death,” Prof. Sanger says of the election result. She quotes the observation of one of her students: “‘We think we are just walking down the street, and everything is the way it was, but it’s not.’”

For women, the results of the U.S. election are not only about what will happen next, but what will not happen now. Had Hillary Clinton won on Tuesday night, it would have been historic. But sitting in the Oval Office would also have been a highly skilled politician who was unequivocal about protecting women’s right to choose and ensuring access to birth control. She had vowed to fight legislation that prevents federal funds from being used for abortion services. She would have safeguarded President Barack Obama’s work to combat domestic violence, defend transgender rights, and make universities take sexual assault cases more seriously. She would have nominated a pro-choice Supreme Court justice, and stacked the White House and her cabinet with women. As one U.S. legal scholar put it to me this week, “We are so focused on what we are facing now, we can’t even bear to think about what we have lost.”

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