Madeleine Broussard
Edited By Prisca Afantchao (Senior Editor) and Shannon Bazir (Junior Editor)
Abstract: Shock and despair reverberated throughout feminist circles around the country when news of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe broke. Yet, this decision was not only forecast by political trends such as Texas’ legislative patterns for decades, but was part of a broader history of anti-feminist backlash in the United States. This paper charts a recent history of Texas’ anti-abortion legislation to argue that its restrictive laws reflect our history of anti-feminist backlash, with particular emphasis on the Women’s Right to Know Act of 2003 and 2021’s Senate Bill 8 as evidence of policies shaped by women’s growing access to autonomy. Using Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women as a theoretical base, I analyze these policies and their abuse of anti-feminist mythology to justify punitive legislation and deceptive literature related to abortion. My argument illuminates a side of the culture war with particularly dangerous effects for the most marginalized populations—poor, Southern, Black, Indigenous, and disabled women, including those gender non-conforming individuals who seek abortion services—as well as how future anti-feminist legislation may continue to erode civil rights in post-Roe Texas.
Most people believe that women are more empowered now than ever before. Yet, women’s rights are backsliding at an alarming rate. Feminist outcry swarmed public discourse after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision leaked in 2022, with many lamenting what they deemed a sudden, effective end of abortion access in much of the United States. But Texas, whose most harmful laws targeting women who seek abortions and doctors who provide them have all passed in roughly the past two decades, was a longstanding blueprint for federal regulation of abortion. In the 21st century alone, lawmakers subjected Texans to a number of bills that restricted abortion access, including trigger laws, heightened standards for abortion clinics, and regulation of parental bypass, admitting privileges, and so-called “informed consent.” Not only did Texas lawmakers restrict abortion as much as possible after Roe v. Wade, but they have done so more earnestly than ever in the 2010s and early 2020s.
In this paper, I intend to chart a recent history of Texas abortion laws, with a particular emphasis on the most recent legislation as a symptom of backlash against women’s growing demands for bodily autonomy. First, I will provide context, including a brief history of anti-feminist backlash as well as current backlash. Then, I will review Texas’ 21st-century abortion laws, from 2003’s Women’s Right to Know Act, which employed rhetoric that postured women as victims of their right to abortion, to a looming potential policy that will ban Texas women from accessing information about abortion online. I will argue that Texas’ anti-abortion laws are reflective of myths produced by the anti-feminist movement countering women’s growing progress towards liberation.
Before examining anti-feminist backlash as it relates to Texas abortion laws, it is helpful to define anti-feminist backlash and trace its roots. Anti-feminist backlash is a cultural reaction to feminist strides for women’s rights. Backlash manifests in a number of different ways at different times throughout history. For example, following the highly visible sexual revolution in the seventies, an 1985 Stanford University study misrepresented a “devastating plunge” in divorced women’s economic statuses in light of new no-fault divorce laws, and a Bush-era New York Times article exaggerated statistics to suggest college-educated women were “opting out” of careers en masse to dedicate themselves to their families. These stories attempted to construct a post-feminist world in which women were “waking up” and realizing they need not depend on feminism. More recently, the “bimbo,” who cozies up to gender stereotypes in a miniskirt and champions the “sex worker,” was briefly the face of online feminism, and public opinion turned virulently on Amber Heard as a reaction to #MeToo. Reception to women’s empowerment sways at the whim of an interminable pendulum swing.
These cultural reactions to feminism follow a pattern. In Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, author Susan Faludi, from her post-Reagan era perspective, writes, “we find such flare-ups are hardly random; they have always been triggered by the perception—accurate or not—that women are making great strides.” Similarly, Andrea Dworkin references a pervasive “Motherhood First” ideology that permeates patriarchal analysis of abortion in Right-Wing Women, which creates shame for women who seek abortion and frames them as traitors of the nuclear family. Both Faludi and Dworkin were writing during the backlash that ensued largely in response to the sexual revolution. Their writing, based on not only their contexts but also using historical evidence from post-suffrage contexts, proved to be prophetic for the current moment.
Myths, such as Motherhood First, shape much of anti-abortion backlash today. As a result, at times when women begin to demand the right to control their own bodies—including the early 2010’s awareness of sexual violence in the workplace and the current fight for access to gender-affirming care—the main project of backlash is to attack bodily autonomy as it relates to gender. Notes of anti-abortion backlash fueled by patriarchal mythology in an attempt to substantiate male domination can be observed in Texas’ abortion policies.
In Texas, the 21st-century flavor of backlash began legislatively with the so-called “Women’s Right to Know Act” (WRTK). One major clause of the act mandated that doctors give misleading information to people seeking abortion twenty-four hours before the procedure could take place, including an informational booklet produced by Texas Health and Human Services entitled “A Woman’s Right to Know.” The first paragraph of the first page of the 2016 version of the booklet ends with, “You need good information in order to make important decisions…You have the right to make these decisions… No one else should make them for you. No one can force you to have an abortion…” It ritualistically repeats this ethos with recurring phrases like “Only you have the right to decide what to do” throughout. The booklet also lists “risks associated with an abortion,” the first of which is death.
These deceptive tactics not only attempt to debase feminist strides for abortion, but set the reactionary tone for the two decades of backlash ahead. Faludi identifies such rhetoric as a myth used consistently in anti-abortion backlash: that feminists have mischaracterized the liberty of bodily autonomy as a source of women’s joy, when it is, in fact, a source of women’s pain. By assuming that pregnant women deeply want to keep their pregnancies, and that there is overwhelming social and cultural pressure to have an abortion, the booklet postures women as victims of their own right to an abortion. WRTK presented a substantial rhetorical obstacle to abortion, in addition to its multiple structural and logistical restrictions.
For example, the Act’s other major clause required doctors to provide abortions at 16 weeks of gestation or later in ambulatory surgical centers, or ASCs. The logic of the ASC requirement originated in the same fear-mongering message that motivated the booklet distributed to women seeking an abortion: the belief that abortion is a dangerous medical procedure that interferes with a natural, healthy process and requires immediate emergency care. As a result of this clause, abortion clinics, which previously provided 95 percent of late-term abortions, were no longer options for Texas residents seeking an abortion. Between dwindling options for treatment and the rising costs associated with late-term abortions and limited supply, most abortion seekers’ only option was traveling out of state to get healthcare, which is financially strenuous. Unsurprisingly, the rate at which Texas residents got abortions decreased dramatically in 2004, the year WRTK went into effect. The creativity of WRTK’s example of backlash is evident: though Texas lawmakers could not place an absolute ban on abortion, they could place restrictions on abortion per Casey precedent, which weakened the standard for judicial review of laws that regulate abortion.
Texas lawmakers could accomplish the goal of eliminating abortion by passing laws that motivated providers to close up shop. While a steady increase in abortion facility closings were recorded from the beginning of the century, it was between 2012 and 2014 in particular that Texas saw a steep dropoff in the number of hospitals providing abortions due to new legislation. Incidentally, in 2013, Texas passed House Bill 2 (HB2), an omnibus bill that banned abortion after 20 weeks post-fertilization. Though parts of HB2 were struck down before they could take effect, including an unconstitutional admitting privileges requirement and heightened standards for ASCs, HB2’s damage—specifically, its warning of legislation to come, as well as its status as a sign of the times—was done. Abortion rates were declining.
Surveillance was the next step in Texas’ plan to enact its growing backlash. After several more restrictions on abortion passed over the next few years, including an attempt at banning dilation and evacuation procedures, the Texas state legislature passed Senate Bill 8, or SB8, in 2021. Known as the Texas Heartbeat Act, SB8 banned abortion on detection of embryonic cardiac activity, which can occur as early as six weeks past the patient’s last menstrual cycle. Additionally, SB8 authorizes private citizens to file civil lawsuits against abortion providers in order to enforce the ban, offering a $10,000 bounty to those who “catch” healthcare providers and anyone who “aids and abets” an abortion—a carceral response that harnesses the United States justice system for support in enforcing the law, which will disproportionately affect Black women. Horrifyingly, this also means that abusive partners and ex-partners can sue providers. SB8 is an intimidating reminder of the cultural shame of choosing an abortion, as Faludi references, and what Andrea Dworkin terms a betrayal of Motherhood First ideology.
These restrictions on online access to abortion are among the most recent developments in Texas’ anti-abortion policy. In November 2024, House Representative Steve Toth filed a bill to be deliberated in Texas’ 89th legislative session called the “Women and Child Safety Act.” Notably, if passed, the Act would not allow anyone to “create, edit, upload, publish, maintain, or register a domain name for an Internet website, platform, or other interactive computer service that assists or facilitates a person’s effort in obtaining an abortion-inducing drug”—an explicit violation of the First Amendment. The policy would also prevent people from sharing any website that assists patients in accessing medication abortions and allows private citizens to bring civil lawsuits against internet service providers who do not comply.
Included in the text are various definitions, one of which is “abortion.” Toth refers to abortion as a “murderous act of violence that purposefully and knowingly terminates human life in the womb.” Not only is Toth’s definition unscientific and ahistorical, but it is charged with emotion; it lacks sympathy for those who seek abortion and instead angrily assumes women who get them are ruthless murderers. This is no mistake. In Right-Wing Women, Dworkin diagnoses the psychological underpinnings of such a strong belief that women who get abortions are murderers: “She has learned…that every life is more valuable than her own; her life gets value through motherhood…Abortion turns a woman into a murderer…This is a crime. She is guilty: of not wanting a baby.” Right-wing opposition to abortion is not about human life. Toth’s anger is reserved for the potential mother who decisively takes action to end a pregnancy she doesn’t desire, compounded by the autonomous action of facilitating her own abortion via medication in her own home—a blatant display of anti-feminist backlash.
Toth’s bill also includes a swipe at one of the right’s current preoccupations with feminism: transgender “ideology.” Among his definitions, he includes, “‘Woman’ means an individual whose biological sex is female…regardless of any gender identity that the individual attempts to assert or claim.” Inclusion of a definition of “woman” that attacks a person’s self-determination as it relates to gender identity is a symptom of anti-feminist backlash’s evolving project: one that constructs a “boogeyman” out of transgender individuals. Through restrictive anti-abortion laws, Texas lawmakers apparently seek to police gender according to a traditional standard in addition to regulating abortion.
A backlash framework not only helps us understand the reasons why democratic politics of equality backslide, but also why, at a time when abortion and other rights appear to be hanging in the balance, feminist intellectual studies are under attack, transgender individuals are feared, and the media seems to favor blonde bombshells again. Anti-feminist backlash is a cultural phenomenon that, at its core, is about upholding gender mythology. Understanding the relationship between anti-feminist backlash and abortion policy in particular is essential to understanding how to remedy familiar past situations as they compare to the present for a better future. It also gives us a glimpse of hope. While privacy, the internet, and mass culture changes, the same abortion debate has occurred for decades. Despite violent backlash, women have always continued to march closer to liberation beyond legal equality.
The Texas case is poignant for both its relevance and its impact. Texas is a large state with hundreds of thousands of births each year. It has a diverse population, with some of the strictest laws in the country, with some of the most visible cases of death due to abortion laws. The Texas case reminds us that, while restrictions on abortion are an affront to all women, Southern women, who are more likely to be poor, of color, and disabled, are the most marginalized by anti-abortion laws. Activists, advocates, and voters should reserve hope for a post-Dobbs future that includes enfranchisement for all. To achieve this end, we must let ourselves lash back. Many lives have already been worsened and lost to anti-abortion backlash. Should Texas lawmakers have their way, we stand to lose more.
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