Schumer Links Equal Rights Amendment to Abortion

The mask finally comes off: 

The Senate’s ERA vote on Thursday — which failed to overcome a filibuster, 51–47 — was mostly a messaging bill designed to cast Republicans as aggressors in a “war on women.” But one interesting development in the run-up to the Senate vote is that Democrats have finally been willing to admit that conservatives were right about the Equal Rights Amendment after all.

As recently as 2020, then-speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi claimed the ERA “has nothing to do with the abortion issue.” But when Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer announced the ERA vote earlier this week, he explicitly cited the ERA as “necessary” to protect abortion. “Anyone who thinks the ERA isn’t necessary at a time like this is not paying attention to the terrible things happening in this country,” Schumer said on Tuesday. “In the past year alone, the U.S. Supreme Court has eliminated the protections of Roe v. Wade, our courts have targeted drugs like mifepristone, and we’ve seen over a dozen hard-right states enact near-total bans on abortions. We need the ERA more than ever, ever before.” Pro-life advocates have argued that the ERA would be interpreted to grant a sweeping right to elective abortion throughout pregnancy and allow for unlimited taxpayer funding of abortion. In 1998, the New Mexico supreme court found a right to taxpayer-funded abortion in the state constitution’s version of the ERA.

When Phyllis Schlafly rallied Americans against the ERA in the 1970s, she warned that, among other things, it would mean the end of bathrooms exclusively for women. Advocates of the ERA insisted for decades that the charge was absurd, but as the Senate prepared to vote this week, Hawaii Democratic senator Mazie Hirono was tweeting that the ERA would provide equal rights to “trans women & non-binary people.”

Democrats have dropped the mask about what the ERA would really mean for abortion and women-only spaces and associations because Democrats in the House and Senate have almost unanimously and explicitly embraced progressivism on these issues.