Trump’s war on women enters sinister new phase

1 week ago 2

Opinion

December 2, 2025 — 11.45am

“Why does it feel like it’s somehow all slipping away? And how do we get it back?”

That’s one of the opening lines in Liberation, a play now showing on Broadway, in which the lead character looks back at her mother’s efforts to fight for equality in the 1970s.

Demonstrators dressed as characters from The Handmaid’s Tale march to the US Supreme Court during a Trump Must Go Now rally.

Offstage, it’s a question many American women are asking.

“It feels like we’ve gone back in time,” Maria Gwinn, a 25-year-old from Ohio, told me outside the theatre.

The road towards gender equality has been paved with potholes and obstacles. But here in the US, it seems we haven’t just arrived at a stop sign – we’re doing a U-turn.

After decades of progress, the gender pay gap is widening; and women, particularly Black women, have borne the brunt of the Trump administration’s cuts to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

Leading female members of the military have been fired by War Secretary Pete Hegseth, the man who has said women should not serve in combat roles and has ties to a Christian nationalist pastor who believes women should not be allowed to vote.

But the most egregious example of how the US has entered a time machine would have to be the ongoing efforts to strip women of their rights to control their own bodies.

Millions of American women live in the 19 states where abortion has been banned or severely restricted after the US Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to the procedure in 2022.

Since then, there’s been a steady drip feed of headlines about how these bans are hurting women.

As ProPublica has reported, at least five women have died after being denied emergency abortion care, and there’s been a rise in sepsis cases. Thousands of women have endured the stress and cost of travelling vast distances to access abortion in states where it remains legal.

A young woman from Georgia, where abortion is banned after six weeks, told me earlier this year that she’d been too afraid to tell anyone she was travelling to New York for the procedure.

The latest target for anti-abortion politicians and activists is abortion medication, now the most common form of abortion in the US.

Women in states with near-total bans, such as Texas, have still been able to order abortion pills online or have the medication mailed to them after a telehealth appointment with a doctor in a state where it remains legal.

But in an attempt to close that loophole, Texas will introduce a “bounty hunter” law on December 4 that will allow members of the public to sue anyone who sends abortion pills to women in the state for up to $US100,000 ($153,000).

The American Civil Liberties Union has said the law will “fuel fear among manufacturers and providers nationwide, while encouraging neighbours to police one another’s reproductive lives, further isolating pregnant Texans”.

But doctors such as Angel Foster, who runs a telehealth practice from Boston, have vowed to continue sending abortion medication to women in Texas.

She is optimistic that a Massachusetts state “shield” law meant to protect medical providers will help prevent her from prosecution under the new Texas law.

A similar law in New York has so far proven effective. Texas fined a New York doctor $US100,000 earlier this year for prescribing abortion medication to a woman in that state, but New York has refused to enforce the fine.

On a national level, the US Food and Drug Administration is examining regulations covering the abortion pill mifepristone after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr asked for a review based on the findings of a study that has been widely discredited.

Meanwhile, The New York Times has reported that the Environmental Protection Agency asked scientists to investigate whether the government could develop methods for detecting traces of abortion pills in wastewater.

This news takes on a chilling quality when you consider that lawmakers in at least nine states have proposed legislation this year seeking to classify abortion as homicide, according to The British Medical Journal.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen today’s America compared to Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, in which women are forced to bear children.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that people keep making that comparison when there’s yet another story from Texas about a woman dying after doctors refused to perform a termination.

Or from Louisiana, where even child rape victims are not allowed to get an abortion after politicians voted – for the third time in as many years – against granting them an exemption.

In the US, more women die in pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum than any other wealthy nation. Instead of trying to improve this shocking statistic, politicians continue to police women’s personal lives with laws that only cause greater harm.

No wonder Liberation, on Broadway, is resonating so powerfully with theatregoers.

By the time the lead character delivered her final call to arms, “Go ahead, you can take it from here,” many in the mostly female audience had tears in their eyes.

But the woman sitting next to me was defiant.

“There’s no way in hell we’re going to let them bring us all the way back,” she said.

Liz Gooch is an Australian journalist living and working in the US.

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