Joseph Sabino Mistick: Women's rights may decide this election

Since the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Dobbs case — reversing Roe v. Wade and throwing the issue of abortion back to the individual states — women voters have shown their political strength in every state where the issue has been on the ballot. With that collective clout, women voters just might pick the next president of the United States.

For many women — and the men who respect them — the decision in Dobbs is about more than abortion. It is a denial of their right to make their own medical decisions and their right to consult with their own doctors. It is about control of their own bodies — just as men control their own bodies. It’s about not being a second-class citizen.

There is no mistaking who is to blame for the chaos surrounding women’s rights, because Donald Trump proudly takes full credit for nominating the justices who decided the case.

“After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v. Wade, much to the ‘shock’ of everyone,” Trump boasted on social media and elsewhere after the decision.

But for many Republicans, Dobbs is clearly a political case of “be careful what you wish for because it might come true.” Since then, voters in seven states — California, Michigan, Vermont, Kansas, Kentucky, Montana and Ohio — have sided with abortion-­rights supporters when the issue has appeared on the ballot.

In Ohio, voters overwhelmingly supported an amendment to protect women’s rights that was opposed by Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance. Vance argued against exceptions for rape and incest when he was running for senator in Ohio, calling those situations “inconvenient.”

In November, referendums on abortion and women’s health care rights will be on the ballot in Arizona, Nevada and Florida. At the same time, voters will be choosing between Trump, who brags that he took away the rights that women had for 50 years, and Kamala Harris, who supports their rights and would support a national law to guarantee them.

With polls indicating broad public support for the restoration of these rights, Democrats are hoping it is an issue with long coattails. Not just at the top of the ticket, but all the way down to state and local races.

Leaving the protection of fundamental rights up to the individual states never works. Civil rights still would not exist in many parts of the country if it were up to each state to act individually. We fought a Civil War with 750,000 casualties and then enacted constitutional amendments and federal laws to guarantee those rights.

A woman’s right to vote required federal action for it to be available universally and applied fairly. President Woodrow Wilson believed that it was a right that should be left to the states to decide. Through the early years of the 20th century, women could vote in some states and not others.

But that all changed with World War I. Then, Wilson could not deny the strength of the argument that American women — who endured the high cost of the war at home — had an equal right to vote.

Wilson relented and supported “the constitutional amendment proposing the extension of the suffrage to women as vitally essential to the successful prosecution of the great war of humanity in which we are engaged.” It passed in 1920.

And this November, women will have the opportunity to use their right to vote to protect their long-standing right to control their own bodies.