After her filibuster against Texas Republicans' anti-abortion bill, American women need her to stand again for their rights
Wendy Davis: it's a function of the world we live in that nearly everyone with internet access now knows the name of an otherwise obscure state senator from Fort Worth, Texas – the woman who stood for nearly 12 hours in a pair of pink Mizuno sneakers to filibuster an anti-abortion bill earlier this summer. While a presidential tweet may certainly have helped catapult her on to the national stage, the viral videos of her filibuster and the onslaught of #StandWithWendy posts aren't the only reason this remarkable politician has become such an instant celebrity.
Rather, Wendy Davis's popularity is a function of what she has come to represent, something that, until she stood up in the Texas state capitol in late June, didn't yet have a voice.
Granted, the controversy over abortion rights has been a perpetual feature in the American culture wars before, during, and especially after the US supreme court's 1973 Roe v Wade decision. But after the court affirmed that access to abortion is a woman's constitutionally protected right, lawmakers in a host of states began to launch a different and, arguably, far more dangerous campaign. Centered on passing provisions that essentially make it impossible for many abortion providers to operate, what has resulted is an unprecedented assault on women's health organizations in general, with the principal effect of denying countless women access to health services that, for the most part, have nothing to do with abortion whatsoever. Those efforts have come to terrible fruition this summer in particular, when states such as Ohio, North Carolina, and, of course, Davis's and my native Texas have all approved a slew of anti-abortion restrictions whose sole purpose is to close as many clinics as possible.
It's impossible to underscore just how dramatically all these laws can and will affect the lives of the millions of American women who depend on these health centers. As the Toledo Blade reports, it looks like these laws are about to cause the only clinic in Ohio's largest city to close. North Carolina, which only closed two clinics in the past 14 years, has shut down three in the last three months, and that's a trend that's only likely to continue in the months ahead. Perhaps most poignantly, many women in Texas are now beginning to look for alternate sources of care in Mexico, as many of their state's 42 abortion clinics will probably close in the near future.
For the longest time, it seemed as though there was nothing to be done about this quiet, backroom attack on women's health, that "Trap" laws like these – targeted regulation of abortion providers – were an unavoidable and unfortunate reality of the current political climate. Given the 11th-hour nature of these restrictions, it's particularly revealing that in none of these proceedings in any of these states were women's voices ever significantly heard or even included; half of the population in each jurisdiction was merely meant to sit back and accept these encroachments on their bodies as if nothing was wrong about that.
Wendy Davis was the one who refused. When she took the floor in her moment of heroic defiance, she gave voice to the millions of women various state legislatures have deliberately left out in the cold and who otherwise would have little effective means of objecting out loud and in public. Her words were her own, but her voice, to borrow from Walt Whitman, contained multitudes. This is why the state senator from Fort Worth has become an avatar for the crusade against (at least some of) the most flagrant gender inequalities that still manage to define contemporary American life.
Conceded, Davis's efforts in the filibuster were not ultimately successful: Texas Republicans finally got their way, and Governor Rick Perry has signed into law the bill she attempted to filibuster in early July. But what Davis achieved was larger even than the change in the law she sought to enact. What she accomplished during those 12 hours in Austin was a crucial shift in public discourse. As the hundreds of thousands of supporters she gathered in person – and the millions more she gathered online – can attest, it will now be impossible to resume any discussion of women's health without women themselves at the center of the conversation.
That, quite simply, is why Davis must run for governor of Texas in next year's election. Although she's equivocated on the question of her political ambitions, her candidacy, successful or not, would be the much-needed reminder that enough is enough.
Of course, as my colleague Sean Sullivan points out in the Washington Post, the odds are decidedly against a Davis victory: Bill White, the previous Democratic contender, failed spectacularly in the 2010 election; the presumptive Republican nominee, Attorney General Greg Abbott, has already amassed enormous amounts of cash. And even in Davis' own party, Julián Castro, the mayor of San Antonio, who delivered the keynote address at last year's Democratic national convention, may very well be the heir apparent to win a primary.
But just as her technically unsuccessful filibuster effectively sparked a revolution in Texas and across the United States, a Davis campaign wouldn't necessarily have to be about winning the governor's mansion per se (even if that would be an ideal scenario). Far more importantly, a Davis campaign would be about winning back for women the political position they have long been denied in Texas and many other similar states.
At the moment, Wendy Davis has the public profile and cultural capital to make that statement. Win or lose, it would be a shame to see that go to waste.
