Wolf Whistle Politics by Dr. Naomi Wolf

Author:Dr. Naomi Wolf
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620973530
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2017-05-06T04:00:00+00:00

Part III

Women and Governance

What Wendy Davis Stood For

Amy Davidson

Amy Davidson is a staff writer at the New Yorker. “What Wendy Davis Stood For” appeared in the New Yorker on June 26, 2013.

“Something special is happening in Austin tonight,” Barack Obama tweeted late Tuesday, with the hashtag #StandWithWendy. That is Wendy Davis, a Texas state senator who, at that point, had been standing on the floor of the legislature for more than nine hours—talking about women’s bodies, their health, their lives—and would stand for about four more before Republicans, amid shouting and with brazenly dubious parliamentary tactics, forced an end to her filibuster. By then, though, she had won both a temporary and a long-term victory: a bill that would have left only five abortion clinics in the 260,000 square miles of Texas failed, even though Republicans first tried to pretend that it hadn’t. They’ll get another chance. But Davis reminded everyone that despite the steady dismantling of abortion rights in state legislatures, it’s possible to fight back. People might yell at you on the floor and for you from the rafters, and you might, if only for the moment, win.

Davis had started her filibuster at about eleven a.m. The antiabortion-rights bill would have banned the procedure after twenty weeks and placed conditions on clinics—for equipment, for admitting privileges for doctors at hospitals within thirty miles—that would have made it impossible for them to stay open. The best guess, looking at a map, was that some women in Texas would end up driving over the Mexican border, and others might end up in some back room. But the bill had to pass by midnight, when the session ended. And so Davis set out to talk until the next day.

What did she talk about? What the bill really meant. What towns and the women who lived in them would lose; how a pregnancy unfolded—all points on which, she noted, her male colleagues seemed vague. “Lawmakers, either get out of the vagina business or go to medical school,” Davis said. Davis is fifty. She had a child when she was nineteen. She went to law school at Harvard. She wore a pale skirt and jacket. And in the hours she spoke she read the stories of people who had testified about the bill. According to the Texas Tribune’s live blog, at one point she cried, reading the testimony of one of the bill’s opponents, a woman who had needed to seek an abortion after twenty weeks because of unexpected medical complications.

Davis almost made it past midnight. She couldn’t sit down or take a break for the bathroom, and if she got help or went off-topic more than three times the filibuster would be over too. That last was tricky, not because her plan had been to read the Federalist Papers or every volume of Harry Potter out loud but because at about ten p.m. the Republicans controlling the state senate tried to claim that her mentions of the Planned Parenthood budget and an

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