Kara Dansky

Kara Dansky, attorney, author of The Abolition of Sex, and president of the US chapter of Women’s Declaration International, examines the legal and political history of abortion rights in the United States through the figure of Sarah Weddington and the strategy behind Roe v. Wade. She explains why the case was argued under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment rather than equal protection, tracing the influence of Griswold v. Connecticut and the practical constraints facing a young female lawyer in Texas. Dansky argues that fitting women’s reproductive liberty into a privacy framework from the outset limited its scope and left it vulnerable, contending that an equal-protection analysis recognising women as a sex class would have provided a sturdier foundation. She links the current vulnerability of abortion access to the broader erosion of sex-based rights, noting how gender-identity policies have already compromised women’s sports, prisons and shelters. Emphasising the disproportionate harm that abortion restrictions inflict on poor women and women of colour, she calls for renewed class consciousness among women across the political spectrum and practical measures of mutual aid while advocating future litigation grounded in the equal protection of the laws.