Vital Interests: Can you comment on what you think the circumstances of women and girls are in the world today?

Michele Goodwin: It's an excellent question -  attention should be given to the fact that, in many ways, the status of women and girls is better than it has been in the last century and yet, on the other hand, given the advancements that have taken place, in terms of transformative leadership, jurisprudence, legislative enactments, and other kinds of policy directions, a retrenchment is taking place. 

The manifestation of certain types of norms and ideologies about women that had been put forth centuries ago, which today should be seen as barbaric and arcane, are gaining traction. To give a good example of that in the United States where Title X legislation

was promulgated in the late 1960s, early 1970s to address reproductive health care for the poorest of Americans.

I start with this because it was actually George H.W. Bush who shepherded Title X legislation  through Congress, and it was Richard Nixon who signed it into law. Both Republicans, who said, "Well, this is basic common sense, that poor women, poor American women, should have access to reproductive health care, including contraception and other matters that relate to reproductive health." Fast forward to 2019, and it is the Trump administration that has sought to gut it, to wipe it out, to create challenging requirements for clinics that provide needed reproductive health services for women that had been previously funded under Title X. 

A gag order is now in place, like ones that we've seen previously affecting clinics abroad, but now bringing that back home with a suggestion from the Trump administration that if an organization or a clinic performs abortions and receive Title X funding, they can no longer mention the word abortion to the individuals who are coming to receive medical care. This is significant. When you think about it, George H.W. Bush's father, Prescott Bush, was the treasurer for Planned Parenthood. It's really a rollback, a very significant rollback.

One of the things that concerns me most about this rollback is the fact that it's completely disconnected from the realities of health, science, and law. That's really dangerous for democracy, where there is the lawmaking or jurisprudence that would emanate not out of empirical evidence, not out of scientific studies, not out of qualitative or quantitative reviews, but out of ideology. That is one of the disconcerting aspects of what is happening today, in relation to women and girls.

VI: Is this mentality, this ideology, also being exported to the rest of the world? Internationally, where the United States had previously supported groups that helped, assisted, and promoted the well being of women and girls, is that  also being rolled back?

Michele Goodwin: What the U.S. signals, basically, is like fireworks to others. When the United States sends out a flare, it ends up being like the Fourth of July to the rest of the world. Sometimes that's conditioned on aid, where countries are coercively influenced by U.S. policy. Of course, one can be coerced to do good, but also, coerced to do the kinds of things that really do undermine civil liberties and civil rights. That would be the concern about what's happening today.

The United States can be a beacon for good, and when it's doing good, and it is maximizing, let's say, in championing the right to vote, maximizing equality, shoring up substantive, equal opportunity, due process, et cetera. Those can be beacons and signs for other democracies or other countries that want to shape more democratic ideals and norms. Equally, when the United States is involved with the rolling back, the undermining of rights, then that can be a signal that is sent to the rest of the world. It's worth noting what's happening in Brazil, what's happening in India, what's happening in Italy, what's happening in the UK, and other parts of the world. That's deeply disturbing.

VI: Has global progress that had been made in the health and safety of women and girls been truly compromised? Is it the case that when the term “family planning” appears within any UN resolution or document intended to address women’s health and safety, the United States holds things up until that language is taken out?

Michele Goodwin: The United States can use its power in international organization for influence in ways that could be very meaningful and helpful to others, but also in ways that can be coercive, duplicitous, and harmful. To drill this home, it is important to understand health and science, the empirical facts, not these things that are made up because of what someone fantasizes about.

Termination of pregnancy is an important example. You would think, given the language that is being expressed by some members of Congress, and by some state lawmakers,   that terminating a pregnancy would be the least healthy thing that a woman can do. That it would be incredibly dangerous to her, that it would undermine her health and safety. That's actually not true. A woman is 14 times more likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term, than she is by terminating it.

Now, once we begin with these realities, then we can think about, "Well, what makes sense for policy?" In no other space, would we say that we want to push you as a citizen, towards a condition or a health option, where you are 14 times more likely to die. We don't do that If you've had a heart attack, you don't say, "Choose the option where you're 14 times more likely to die." If your liver is giving out, we don't say, "Well, choose the medical option where you're 10 times more likely to die." We wouldn't choose it if we said, "You're three times more likely to die. Choose that option." We never would. If you follow that reasoning, that the health and safety of women should be of paramount concern, then that should be the underlying purpose of all government policy.

Even economically, it makes absolutely no sense, because for a woman who does not wish to become a mother, for a person who does not want to carry a pregnancy to term, it actually costs far more to push her towards that condition than allowing her to terminate the pregnancy. Not only have we said, "We want you to risk your life by significant degree," but we've also said, "Now, we also want insurance companies to pay so much more for this decision that the state is imposing upon you, woman." That makes no sense.  Terminating a pregnancy costs several hundred dollars. An unwanted pregnancy and birth begins at tens of thousands of dollars and multiplies beyond that.

There was a time, prior to this administration, where we didn't push women towards that. In the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, by a 7 to 2 majority, an all-male Supreme Court said that it makes no sense for women to be shackled to lives that they don't want. The Supreme Court explained that an unwanted pregnancy and forced motherhood impeded women’s opportunities to pursue their education or gainful employment.  The Court recognized the injustice in saddling women and potential future offspring with lives that would not be healthy for them. To further underscore this, and this is something that many people don't know, not only did we have in 1973 a Supreme Court that was of that thinking, but also legislators were of that thinking, and religious leaders as well. I remind audiences about what Dr. King had to say about these issues.

Again, if you only take flash points from today, you would think that there's no science to support keeping women healthy and safe, you'd think that there was never any jurisprudence, such as Supreme Court decisions to do this, but you'd also not recognize that there were religious leaders that were supportive of family planning. In 1966, Dr. King received Planned Parenthood's inaugural Margaret Sanger Award. His speech in receiving the award, is stunning. In his speech he says that one of the cruelest things that you could ever do is to force a child to come into a world where it's not wanted, into a family where it's not wanted. This was basic, this was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a Nobel laureate, religious leader, respected worldwide, who in 1966, had this to say.

In 2019, if you were to look at what's happening, in terms of how legislators are speaking about the rights of girls and women, it’s so far removed from where we were in the 1960s and '70s with regard to the health, safety, civil rights and civil liberties of women and girls.

VI: This brings us to the question of gender and gender equality. Considerable  progress has been made around the world to equate gender equality with a human right, that women have the right to be equal.  Isn’t the concept of women’s rights and human rights also being severely undermined?

Michele Goodwin: When you think about the pathways towards equality, one of those pathways has been to use the foundations of a human rights framework to help uplift the status of women and girls. We've also seen that be used with regard to people of color, in various contexts. Yes, that too. Using human rights principles to further shore up the recognition of women and girls as deserving basic human dignity and treatment. That had previously been quite successful.

Let's face it, centuries ago in the United States, there were people who convinced themselves that black girls and black women were not even human. That they were no different than cows, sheep, and goats. People grabbed hold of that ideology. That then justified for them the degrading, despicable, and shameful treatment of black women and girls. To just cast the visual, which we don't often do in the United States. We run from the visual, and so I think it's important to actually cast the visual of naked little girls and women on auction blocks with people all around holding up pieces of paper so that they could bid on them. They could justify such inhumane treatment by suggesting that these are not even people but just chattel. The status of the cows in the field and the horses with saddles on.  That held in society and law for centuries.

When we think about a human rights framework, it's important to take that quite seriously because we're not too far off from the point where there were individuals who justified their horrific treatment of individuals based on the fact that they consider them to be non-human. A human rights framework has actually been quite essential in advancing the status of women and girls and reminding the world, and reminding men that, yes, girls and women are human beings and as such deserve certain basic civil liberties and civil rights.

VI: Absent American advocacy for global programs that helped women and girls around the world - in circumstances where girls are married at age 11, are victims of sex trafficking, and suffering from other exploitations- how are these programs faring, given funding cuts and government resistance?

Michele Goodwin: When these rollbacks occur, and even without some rollbacks, you see where in fact there's so much additional work to be done. If we were to think about sex trafficking for example in places where I've done field research - I have interviewed girls who are being married off at 10, 11. I’ve interviewed a 15-year-old who was being married to her second husband because the first one had died. These are the kinds of conditions that continue to exist within our world, but it's important to flag that these are the challenges that we find right here at home, in the United States.

There are organizations, and I've partnered with a couple of them, that are focused on these issues. There have been attempts to change state laws such that it would be impermissible for a girl under 17 or 18 to be married. Let's face it, there are states where it's still legal, so long as a parent agrees for the 13 or 14 or 11-year-old to be married in the United States. There are documented cases of this where it happens all the time. There are people who think, "Well, no—this is not a serious issue. These girls are typically 16 pregnant." I want to correct that misconception.  In reality, we're talking about cases that involve 11 and 12-year-olds that continue to persist even in the United States, and the sexual exploitation that continues to criminalize the victims of sex trafficking.

Here, in these instances, I'm talking about arresting the girls and arresting the women, while the Johns now have access to “John school.” There are states now where those accused of soliciting a sex worker have to attend the equivalent of a driving court.

In such instances, if you are a man caught with a 16-year-old, 17-year-old girl, now, going to the equivalent of traffic court and being told to take some classes on a Saturday will wipe your record clean if you stay clean—in some jurisdictions. Meanwhile these girls are in juvenile detention. It's worth noting that the overwhelming majority of women who are in our jails and in our prisons in the United States were individuals who experienced sexual violence as they were growing up.

VI:  And in addiction programs as well?

Michele Goodwin: That’s exactly right. It's important to recognize that the United States is not an exception to the norms that we see elsewhere, but it is also worth noting that there have been years of progress and activism that have taken place within various movements in the United States, pushing the envelope so that women would be able to be recognized as full citizens.

This was not easy. Let's be clear, within the United States when it was founded, its judiciary, as well as its legislatures, could very well have adopted norms that were distinct from those that had been developed in Europe. I say this just to frame for members of your audience who know that much of U.S. law has actually emerged from laws in France and England. We basically adopted British law in many ways.

In this example, I want to think about coverture laws, laws that emanated in France and then morphed into the UK and then came aboard in the United States. It's interesting to know that in a country that was forging ideals about equality, values, about opportunity, about liberty, about freedom, about happiness, about rights.

So in this new America, it is worth thinking critically about legislators and judges choosing equality, freedom, and liberty—only for men and not setting a new day for women. That it would choose these new principles for men, and purposefully exclude women is a point worth emphasizing. In the founding principles of America, it could have said, "Well, we don't like this notion that men can rape their wives. We will not adopt that in the law here. We will not uphold that if those kinds of cases come before our courts."   But, no, we chose to go right along with these misogynist norms.

Or these principles around domestic violence, could have very well said, "We do not uphold principles about men being able to beat their wives, so long as the instrument used is no wider than their thumb." Legislature and courts could have said no to that. They didn’t, and on and on from there.

VI: We have discussed the dark side of what the contemporary world looks like for women. What about the points of light around the world where women are actually being empowered, where they are making progress in having access to the political structure and a responsive judicial system, and have economic and social rights? Do you see, maybe not governments, but organizations leading the battle for women and girls?

Michele Goodwin: It's so important to continue recognizing organizations that are in the trenches, because the work can seem daunting in political times such as this. Typically, because we don't do a good job of recognizing our past, then we don't pay as much attention to the organizations that have helped us beyond those darker times. You're right, there are organizations that have been in the trenches and that have helped to further democracy for all. I like to think that when we forge democracy for the least amongst us all boats and ships rise. We have a better, crystallized sense of what equality and democracy actually mean.

What's interesting is that there are countries around the world that have had some pretty dark times that are now shaking things up a bit. Look at Rwanda, where there are still some challenges, in a country that came from a very dark period with genocide, but now has one of the most representative governments in terms of women who are serving in the government. 

The opportunities for shifting, and shifting upward, are many and great. Even in countries like Saudi Arabia, where women weren't even able to drive, you now see some movement. We still have to see what will be taking place. Women can now drive and women are going to be able to get passports on their own, without having their uncles and brothers and fathers signing up. Progress is taking place. Even in the spaces where we might say, "Well, we’ve got to see what's going to happen," it's important to note that in those countries, there have been women for a very long time fighting for these rights. Women whose names we may never know. Women who've probably paid a significant price in various ways just for the movement of the needle a little bit. The same is true in the United States.

Around the world, hats off to the many organizations and many of the people who have been sacrificing. One thing that I'd like to add is that I think we often take for granted those who are doing this work on the grassroots level. They're sacrificing everything that they have economically and the people who are underwriting it are often very poor people. Certainly, that was the case in the United States during the Civil Rights Movement and with the Brown v. Board of Education decision.  I remind people that it wasn't like there was a Bill Gates urging, “here take this extra 5 or 10 million so that you can get kids integrated in schools.” No. These were black farmers, nurses, teachers, people in church congregations who were selling cakes and pies on weekends, sharing what meager wages they had earned from sharecropping and whatnot, who were threatened with violence, and also economic violence, if they were caught writing checks to the NAACP but they did so. That's really important for us to remember and recognize.

VI: To get back to the 2020 campaign and the candidates, what would you have the candidates think about and try to build into their potential administration that would improve the standard for women's rights, health and safety?

Michele Goodwin: As we look forward to the election taking place in 2020 and what can be useful, the first is recognizing the basic human dignity of girls and women. In recognizing that basic human dignity, that would mean not enacting and engaging in the types of policymaking that would undermine their civil liberties, their civil rights, their health. An aspect that we don't often think about, but I find equally important, is not causing micro-aggressions. I know that that sounds very sociology-driven.  However, when you think about what happens with the undermining of civil liberties and civil rights, it can cause enormous psychological stress.  

We never pay any attention to the tolls that are placed on girls and women when their rights are undermined. We think about technical legal questions, but not about the burden that one has to take home or that one enters a school with. Entering a school where you know that you might not be provided opportunities that boys are accorded because of presumptions and stereotypes related to girls and math.  Or stereotypes that as a girl, you can't understand science and you're not provided the opportunities that boys would be. The same is true for what that means for women when they receive unfair wages.

We need pay equality. Women need to be able to determine their own reproductive health and future. Women deserve the opportunities that have been provided for men across myriad spectrums. I could go on quite a while thinking about the various categories in which women do not get the same opportunities that men do or where women suffer added burdens. When you think about matters of who cares for elderly members of families, those burdens fall on women. When you think about who cares for people in a family, often those burdens fall on women.

Another important category that we haven't talked about is mass incarceration. That's something that's reserved for our thinking about men. In fact, the U.S. incarcerates more women per capita than any other country in the world by volume and percentage. The majority of women who happen to be incarcerated are mothers. Two-thirds of them happen to be non-violent offenders. What this has led to is a host of conditions that women experience behind bars - rape, pregnancy, et cetera. It's horrific and we don't pay attention to that or even breast cancer behind bars, ovarian cancer behind bars. A system that thinks about incarceration and its drug war, only in relation to men, ignores exactly what the experiences are that women endure.

VI: Do you think that the women candidates should speak out more about patriarchy and the problems that it causes in a democracy - racism, sexism, bullying, homophobia, and misogyny? Should that be more articulated, more pointed out, talked about? 

Michelle Goodwin: I think, writ large through our society, that is exactly what is needed. That's such a great question, because it's not just within the context of those who are running for office and it shouldn't be just the women. It should also be the men. 

These are the double standards that we see, and so yes, that should be called out. Even more, I believe that these issues need to be called out in all of the space which we occupy and this is a very unique time in which it can be done because a couple of things have taken place. One is the #MeToo Movement, it's become the first space where people can actually begin to talk about sexual harassment, sexual assault and other kinds of sexualized burdens that have resulted in the harming and shaming of women. 

The second category in which we see it is white supremacy. Had we actually talked about white supremacy 5 or 10 years ago, people would say, "Now, what are you talking about? That's an exaggeration. White supremacy doesn't exist. You’re race-baiting or playing the race card." All those ways in which it had been described before to suggest that it just doesn't exist. Today, we see it. We see it with people showing up at white supremacy rallies. We see white supremacists killing people in the United States with so-called manifestos and an homage to Hitler and true fascist rhetoric.  We can't deny today in the wake of Heather Heyer's death and the marches in Charlottesville and elsewhere, that white supremacy is alive and robust in the United States.

This then also provides an opportunity for us to talk about the ways in which racial discrimination and animus takes place, not only in overt ways but in covert ways, ways that have harmed institutions, from education to the military, and continues to be a malignant cancer afflicting our society. 

Michele Bratcher Goodwin is a Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Irvine and founding director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy. She is also faculty in the Stem Cell Research Center; Gender and Sexuality Studies Department; Program in Public Health; and the Department of Criminology, Law, & Society. Her forthcoming book, Policing The Womb, is due in January 2020 in Europe and March 2020 in the United States.

She is an elected member of the American Law Institute as well as an elected Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and the Hastings Center. She is an American Law Institute Adviser for the Restatement Third of Torts: Remedies. Professor Goodwin has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago and University of Virginia law schools. Professor Goodwin’s scholarship is hailed as “exceptional” in the New England Journal of Medicine. She has been featured in Politico, Salon.com, Forbes, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, NPR, and HBO’s Vice News, among others. A prolific author, her scholarship is published or forthcoming in The Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, Cornell Law Review, NYU Law Review, California Law Review, and Northwestern Law Review, among others. Goodwin’s publications include five books and over 80 articles, essays and book chapters as well as numerous commentaries. Trained in sociology and anthropology, she has conducted field research in Asia, Africa, Europe and the United States, focusing on trafficking in the human body for marriage, sex, organs, and other biologics. In addition to her work on reproductive health, rights, and justice, Professor Goodwin is credited with forging new ways of thinking in organ transplant policy and assisted reproductive technologies, resulting in works such as Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Body Parts (2006) and Baby Markets: Money and the Politics of Creating Families (2010). Professor Goodwin is at the forefront of national and international health policy discourse.”