Do Women Need Legislative ‘Protection’?

Article here. Excerpt:

'These claims are not backed by evidence. But still the alarms ring, playing into our usual assumptions that the impulse to protect is benevolent and, perhaps, that women are especially deserving of solicitude. The association between ‘‘protection’’ and women is deeply embedded in culture. The image of the domestic-violence victim who receives a protective order is female, though men have the same right to go to court. Shakespeare described God’s protection of the king, but over the centuries, writers from E. M. Forster to Norman Mailer to Jonathan Franzen have rhapsodized about the male impulse to shelter women. Once in a while, a female character voices vexation. ‘‘I won’t be protected,’’ Lucy protests to her irritating suitor in Forster’s ‘‘A Room With a View.’’ ‘‘I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.’’

There’s no phrase for men equivalent to ‘‘damsel in distress’’ and no such thing as ‘‘protective’’ legislation for men. ‘‘No one says anything about sending men to surgical centers for colonoscopies,’’ says Kessler-Harris, who submitted a brief in the Texas case, along with 15 other historians. (Colonoscopies have a mortality rate more than 30 times as high as the rate for abortion.) ‘‘Abortion is one of the safest medical procedures performed in the United States,’’ states another brief by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Medical Association. The major medical groups were exceptionally blunt in disputing the protective rationale for the Texas law, saying there is ‘‘no medical purpose’’ for requiring abortion clinics to meet the standards for a surgical center. The admitting-privileges requirement for doctors ‘‘likewise does nothing to improve the health and safety of women.’’'