Women Working for Reproductive Justice in the Virginia General Assembly

• In Event: Women, Politics, and Policy: A View from the States

Abstract

This paper examines how the Virginia General Assembly evolved from privileging pro-life policies to protecting reproductive rights and expanding women’s reproductive health care during the Democratic trifecta of 2020 and 2021. Democratic women lawmakers worked to pass legislation to comprehensively protect reproductive health and normalize birth control and abortion as a part of essential health care. These efforts were largely successful. By the end of the 2020 and 2021 legislative sessions, the General Assembly had passed legislation to define birth control consistent with the FDA’s definition and in doing so separate birth control from abortion, include birth control as an essential health benefit, remove restrictions on abortion including TRAP laws, mandatory ultrasounds, and a waiting period, and allow abortion to be covered in health insurance plans offered to Virginians.

To place this policy evolution in context, I show how the sharp increase in the number of predominantly Democratic women lawmakers elected to the General Assembly that began in 2017 changed the culture of the “privileged patriarchy” that had long been associated with the state legislature (Schockley 2018). I process-trace the passage of several key women’s reproductive health care bills during the 2020 and 2021 sessions and draw on elite interviews I conducted with women members of the Virginia General Assembly who served during those Democratic trifecta sessions. Interestingly, I find a division of labor between Black and white women Democratic lawmakers and the bills they championed; white women focused on legislation pertaining to birth control whereas Black women focused on legislation pertaining to abortion. In the latter case I demonstrate how Black women legislators served as “heavy lifters” (Wrighten 2023) to carry pro-choice bills and wield their power as committee chairs and party leaders to protect these bills throughout the legislative process that culminated with their passage into law. Moreover, I find that women lawmakers from both parties play the roles ascribed to them by extant research on women legislators and their representational and policymaking activities (Swers 2002; Osborn 2012; Brown 2014; Brown & Banks 2014; Volden, et al, 2016; Dittmar, et al, 2018; Reingold, et al, 2020). Democratic women lawmakers sponsored reproductive rights legislation while Republican women lawmakers were deployed defensively to speak for their party in opposition to these bills. By analyzing members’ testimony in committee and floor speeches I show how these legislators drew on language from the reproductive justice movement to emphasize contraception and abortion as essential to health and central to bodily agency and autonomy. Taken together, efforts by Democratic women state lawmakers normalized birth control and abortion as health care in the Commonwealth.

Author

• Rosalyn Cooperman, University of Mary Washington