Pre-clearance for women's reproductive health

Women are facing an unprecedented assault on their rights and improvements in quality of life over past decades. The supreme court overturning Roe v Wade was just another step in years of eroding the right to an abortion. States have invented random regulations on room sizes or contracts with hospitals to further try to eliminate all options. If they do ban abortion overall, they still need to keep pushing just to establish their conservative credentials. So they come after birth control, in-vitro fertilization, and they even write bills to ban ectopic pregnancy abortions that have a 100% fatality rate: a law that just condemns unlucky women to death.

Any democrat in congress needs to resist these restrictions and codify access to abortions into the law, not just rely on the courts to do it for them. However, we actually learned a way to prevent this kind of erosion through regulation with the civil rights act. Local authorities were required to seek preclearance for changes to their election system and if it seemed like they were just trying to find a way around the civil rights act, it wouldn't be approved. We should implement a similar preclearance regime for abortion regulations, where they must get approval from the department of health and human services. This should apply to any reproductive care, including birth control and IVF.

Rights in the workplace

Conservatives have reacted to the crisis for young men by trying to roll back the gains of feminism. Women's liberation really came through the ability to work and earn a living independent from men, and the ability to control when to have children was a major barrier to overcome to make equality possible. That's a big piece of the motivation for these attacks, which spills over into other Republican policy entrepreneurship. Trump repealed Biden's executive order against employment discrimination by gender and sexual orientation. Project 2025 calls for eliminating the disparate impact test that protects women from workplace policies that pretend to be neutral but actually cause significant disadvantages to women. They gutted the federal agencies responsible for protecting women from workplace discrimination like the EEOC and the OFCCP. They have disqualified several women-majority fields like nursing from counting as professional degrees, which reduces the availability of federal money and scholarships for those career paths.

These changes need to be reversed and the disparate impact test can also be codified into law. Democrats need to start acting like the supreme court is a hostile entity, because it is. Too often the party has left it to the court to safeguard the rights of Americans instead of implementing legislation to protect those rights. There were several versions of this legislation introduced in recent sessions of congress like the Pay Equity for All Act or the Paycheck Fairness Act. Democrats should put together a large number of pro-women policies as well as reversing the Republican policy attacks into a single omnibus bill and pass it like was done with housing. Republicans whittled away these rights bit by bit over years, and Trump's own moves are split into several small actions; too small to draw media attention individually. A massive bill pulling all these issues together is much harder for Republicans to resist because they'd have a high profile vote against a lot of women's rights all at once.

The crisis for men in America is not a reason to reverse feminism

Feminism's big gains came in the 2nd half of the 1900's, with women gradually closing the wage gap and having additional laws and rights protected by our institutions. After 2000, there are very few increases in women's rights to speak of; progress on issues like the wage gap just continued through momentum and cultural change while institutional protections remained in place. By contrast, the crisis among young men only really started after the great recession in 2008. Feminism is not the cause of men's struggles, and it makes no sense to reverse women's equality as a way to try to help men. However, this economic pain for men does cause a surge of anti-feminist political action. We've seen this happen in other places like South Korea and the European Union. Democrats need to argue forcefully and loudly that economic pain is the cause of men's struggles to present an alternative to the far right antifeminist narrative.