H.R. 3755 (Women’s Health Protection Act)

Congress Giving Women Abortion Rights While Erasing Women

The first federal legislation in U.S. history granting women a right to abortion is pending before the U.S. Congress. It passed in the House of Representatives in September 2021 and is now before the Senate. On February 28, 2022, Senate Democrats failed to advance the bill but the bill is still alive and can be amended.

If it passes and the President signs it, every U.S. woman will be able to take a breath of relief that no state law can force her to bear a child against her will. Having a woman’s right to abortion codified in federal legislation, enforceable in every state, is a crucial milestone for women’s rights.

Article 3 of the Declaration reaffirms women’s rights to physical and reproductive integrity. It is the position of WDI USA that a woman’s bodily integrity includes the right to abortion on demand, for any reason or no reason, up to time of birth, because all her body parts and their contents are subject exclusively to her control.

The Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA) is inadequate for two reasons:

1. Following existing case law (Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey), the WHPA protects a woman’s right to abortion only until the fetus is “viable”, i.e., deemed reasonably able to survive outside the woman’s body without artificial support. The point of fetal viability can be expected to diminish the window during which abortion is legally available as medical techniques advance; and
2. The WHPA enshrines so-called “gender identity” into the WHPA by defining “woman” to include “gender identity.”

Pregnancy, like motherhood, is an exclusively female status (see Article 2 of the Declaration). Everybody knows that only women and girls can become pregnant and need an abortion.

Such phrases in the WHPA as “all people with the capacity for pregnancy” are used as substitutes for “women”, which has become branded by gender identity ideologists as exclusionary hate speech. In a pathetic attempt to clarify what is meant by the mysterious “all people with the capacity for pregnancy”, the law goes further into the land of unintelligibility by explaining that the category includes “cisgender women, transgender men, non-binary individuals, those who identify with a different gender, and others.”

The language in this legislation that results from the ridiculous and harmful fiction that anyone but women or girls might need abortion services is not only incoherent, but also results in the erasure of the sex known as women. Erasure of the category of sex in law means that it cannot be protected in law.

The meaning of the word woman is used in this legislation “to reflect the identity of the majority of people targeted and affected by restrictions on abortion services . . . which are rooted in misogyny.” This statement illustrates a shocking lack of insight by the legislators into their own misogyny.

To the President and members of Congress: The erasure of women (the sex) through the linguistic trick of “gender identity” is as firmly rooted in misogyny as restrictions on abortion.

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