TY RBG
This Bustle piece has a great breakdown of all progress towards women’s freedom to choose to have the families we want. Included in women’s freedom TO choose to have children is the choice of WHEN to have them and, then, when you do make that choice, to not be PENALIZED at every turn for having them.
Justice Ginsberg co-founded the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project following the 1961 Supreme Court decision that
Her initial work on reproductive rights was actually fighting against an Air Force “policy” of forced abortion. In 1970 when Air Force nurse Susan Struck became pregnant, she was told to either have an abortion or lose her job - she was not allowed to continue in the Air Force as a mother. The discrimination case brought by RBG was simple: for the whole history of the US Military when male members became fathers or impregnated women, they didn’t lose their jobs, so why was a woman in the service treated differently?
She was part of the majority and wrote scathing dissents in the minority of multiple pieces of abortion-related cases over 20 years. In Stenberg v. Carhart (2000) and Gonzales v. Carhart (2007), Ginsberg was at first successful in Nebraska in 2000 but then, in 2007, dissented when a federal law was upheld to make later abortions (fallaciously called ‘partial-birth’ by the right) illegal. In the 2017 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case, the court dangerously allowed a business’s “religious beliefs” to withhold legal healthcare options (in the form of contraceptives) from female employees, Justice RBG wrote a 35-page dissent. In 2016 Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the majority with RBG voted down a Texas law that forced abortion providers to maintain admitting privileges at local hospitals (adding a burden intended to reduce available providers.)
Even in the months before she left us, in 2020, she helped to uphold a rule adding restrictions to abortion clinics (this time trying to force providers in Louisiana to maintain hospital privileges) in June Medical Services v. Russo. Her final salvo for the right of a woman to maintain control of her body, regardless of where she works, was in Trump v. Pennsylvania where she again dissented against the ruling that companies can use their religious or moral “freedom” exemption to refuse contraception coverage.
Helping women control when they have babies and ensuring that when they do CHOOSE to have them, they are not penalized professionally was the hallmark of Justice Ginsberg’s time at the bench. Hopefully, with her work as a cornerstone, we can build the new movement toward #profamily #feminist policies that will allow women to truly blast through glass ceilings and give children a sturdy base to thrive on.