The United States Hates Women: Four Years After Roe

They called us hysterical. Then Roe fell, the SAVE Act came for our votes, and no one apologized. Four years on, the pattern is impossible to unsee.

Jul 01, 2026

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by Dana DuBois

I nearly missed the fourth anniversary of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — the day the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and handed the states permission to do whatever they wanted with our bodies.

It was last week. June 24, 2026. Substack reminded me (thanks, Substack).

And at once I wasn’t sitting at my desk anymore. I’m transported to my mother’s Lexus on McNab Road in Tamarac, Florida, where I’m sweating despite the cranked AC, wiped out and dreading the days ahead, when the radio announcer tells me Roe is gone.

I was exactly as gobsmacked as I should’ve been, and also exactly too overloaded to process any of it.

I’d taken a last-minute red-eye the night before because my stepmother had died unexpectedly and my father — who has dementia, who had COVID — was alone at the house. I can never sleep on planes and had dozed maybe an hour at my mom’s before hopping in her car and racing to my dad’s to sort things out when Roe went down. In South Florida. In a red state. Surrounded, metaphorically, by the people who’d made it happen.

My father is a lifelong Republican, an avid Trump supporter. He doesn’t have a problem with abortion so much as he loves bullies and loathes immigrants. His wife was the same, till her dying day, literally. And I was interrupting my life to manage theirs, seething with a rage I had no outlet for, because their votes, their beliefs, had caused this.

I thought about every conversation I’d had with them since 2016, when I started saying we were going to lose abortion access. The quiet eye rolls. The calm dismissal. Every single time.

You’re catastrophizing, Dana.
Roe is settled law.
I can’t imagine that ever happening.

If the past decade has taught me anything, it’s that Americans have spectacularly shitty imaginations.

Then I drove to pick up my father in the wreckage of the thing he helped build, and I took care of him, and nobody apologized.

That’s the part women never talk about enough — not the being proven right, which is its own complicated thing, but the afterward. The way we absorb the consequences of being dismissed and then have to keep showing up anyway. Keep caregiving. Keep loving. Keep driving through South Florida on an hour of sleep while the country announces it’s decided we matter even less than we thought.

They call us hysterical. They always have.

The word itself tells you everything. Hysterical comes from the Greek hystera — uterus. The ancient diagnosis for women who wouldn’t calm down, who felt too much, who saw things men didn’t want to see. The language they invented to dismiss us was named after the organ they wanted to control.

This isn’t a coincidence. This is a blueprint.

Women said Roe was going to fall. We were called hysterical. It fell. No one apologized. Women said the voting rights protections were fragile. We were called hysterical. The SAVE Act passed in the House and barely died in the Senate — for now. No one apologized. Women said birth control was next. We were called hysterical. The quiet legislative pressure on contraception access has been building for three years. No one’s apologized for that either.

The pattern isn’t incidental. The pattern is the point.

The consistent thread running through it all? The United States hates women.

I know what you’re thinking: there are countries where women are publicly executed for the crime of being assaulted. Where girls are mutilated, and aren’t allowed an education. Where we aren’t even a comparison point. And you’re right. But the United States is supposed to be the proof that it could be different—the country where women were gaining ground, not losing it.

The fact that we’re moving toward those countries instead of away from them isn’t a defense. It’s an indictment.

On the morning of September 16, 2024, Emily Waldorf’s preschooler found her curled on the bathroom floor. She was 17 weeks pregnant and bleeding. She and her husband rushed to Washington Regional Hospital in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where Waldorf worked as a physical therapist.

The pregnancy wasn’t viable. She was miscarrying.

But there was still a fetal heartbeat. And because Arkansas has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, that heartbeat — even attached to a pregnancy that couldn’t be saved — mattered more than the woman carrying it.

Her doctor told her: “Our hands are tied behind our backs. Tell your friends to vote differently.”

She waited. Her cervix was dilated, her uterus exposed to bacteria. The risk of infection rose every hour. The hospital’s risk-management team was consulted twice. Their answer didn’t change: there’s still a heartbeat, we can’t proceed. The standard medical guideline — induce within 12 to 24 hours to prevent infection — didn’t matter. Her life, her humanity, her choice, didn’t matter. The law mattered.

On day four, her water broke, a three-inch blood clot bursting from her body, followed by a steady drip of amniotic fluid, draining out of her.

Still, her doomed baby’s heart beat on.

It was a depraved race: either the heartbeat stopped on its own, or Emily’s condition had to worsen to sepsis before anyone could act. There was no option in which the baby survived. There were plenty when Emily wouldn’t, either. And yet, they waited.

“Are they going to let me die?” Waldorf asked.

And they would have. I don’t blame the hospital workers entirely — they faced potential penalties of up to $100,000 in fines and 10 years in prison. That’s a nearly impossible choice. But I blame the politicians who wrote those laws. And I blame every single person who voted for them, knowing this was the natural outcome. These people are America right now. They’re culpable. They would’ve rather let Emily die, left her toddler motherless, than grant her bodily autonomy and life-saving care.

Finally after five days and many battles, she rode four anxious, bumpy hours in an ambulance to Kansas, where the team promptly induced labor. She delivered her baby. Then post-delivery she hemorrhaged and nearly died. She made it — barely. This almost certainly wouldn’t have happened if she’d been induced five days earlier.

Emily Waldorf couldn’t understand it. Raised Baptist in a Republican family, she kept asking: how could an abortion ban aimed at women who wanted to end their pregnancies keep doctors from helping a woman who desperately didn’t?

I don’t say what I’m about to say without compassion. But I want to name it: how was she surprised by any of this?

Women like me weren’t surprised. We’ve been called hysterical for years for not being surprised.

I don’t know how Emily Waldorf voted. I have my suspicions: Baptist, Republican family, Fayetteville, Arkansas. We know what that combo typically means. She’s now joined a lawsuit challenging the state’s abortion ban, which is good. I’m glad she’s fighting. But I keep turning over the same question: why did it have to happen to her first?

This is the empathy gap. A significant portion of white women voted for the politicians who wrote these laws — not because they hate themselves, but because they couldn’t imagine it landing on them. Abortion bans were for other women. Careless women. Unlucky women. Women who’d made choices they shouldn’t have. Not women like Emily Waldorf, who wanted her baby, who’d named her, who worked at the hospital where she was left to bleed.

But pregnancy is a risky act. It always has been. It can go wrong in ways that have nothing to do with want or choice or virtue or how you voted. Your body doesn’t check your ballot before it hemorrhages. Your placenta doesn’t ask your political affiliation before it fails to detach, as Emily’s did. The fetus you desperately want doesn’t survive just because you believe life begins at conception.

We should be voting as if it could happen to any of us — because it can. Because it does. Because the woman in the next hospital room, told to wait while her infection risk climbs, might have voted exactly the way you did and still ended up exactly where she is.

What do women need to go through before we stop voting against ourselves? What does it cost? How personal does it have to get? Emily Waldorf had to be strapped into an ambulance with a life-threatening condition and shipped four hours across state lines before she understood what the rest of us had been screaming about for years. What’s the price of admission to believing women when we tell you what’s coming?

Because we always tell you. And we’re always right. And somehow it’s never enough — until it’s you.

I have friends — both lawyers, both smart, both people I love — who ended a wanted pregnancy because of a genetic marker that made the fetus nonviable. Quietly, with excellent medical care. Then went right back to telling me I was catastrophizing about Roe. This was in 2016. I told them what I’d been telling everyone: the court seats, the long game, the fifty-year strategy the anti-abortion movement hadn’t bothered to hide. Roe was finished, I said.

You’re being hysterical. That would never happen.

They’ve never apologized. Never said: you were right, we were wrong.

And I think I understand why.

It’s because on some level, they always knew they’d be fine. They’re wealthy, educated, connected. If they needed an abortion tomorrow, they’d have one. The ban was always something that happened to other women. Women without options. Women who couldn’t get a lawyer involved and a transfer arranged and an ambulance dispatched after five days of waiting to nearly die.

Emily Waldorf needed a lawyer to get an ambulance.

My friends would’ve chartered a jet.

The same country built both of those realities and called it pro-life. When in reality, they’re not pro-life. They’re anti-women.

They hate women.

They’re coming for no-fault divorce next.

Don’t argue I’m being hysterical. The evidence is clear I’m not.

The argument in conservative legal circles is that no-fault divorce — the ability to leave a marriage without proving abuse or adultery — destroyed the family. That women were given too easy an exit. So their proposed solution is to make leaving harder. To justify cause, to require proof. They want you to stay until you can demonstrate, to a court’s satisfaction, that you’ve earned the right to go.

Of course this is aimed squarely at women.

Women have every right to leave a marriage and they don’t need to explain why. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and all that. We’re entitled to end a marriage if we’re dissatisfied for any reason. The simple wish to longer to be romantically, legally, or financially linked to a husband should suffice.

Conservatives disagree.

Since women fought and won access to our own credit, mortgagee, and business loans, our dependence on men has evaporated. Now women file for divorce at significantly higher rates than men do. That’s not because women are fickle or destructive. It’s because women are, statistically, more likely to be unhappy in marriages — more likely to be carrying the invisible labor, and more likely to have subordinated their careers, ambitions, and friendships. The no-fault exit was the minimum acknowledgment that a woman’s desire to leave was reason enough.

Conservatives want to take that back.

And they’re not stopping there.

Birth control — actual contraception, the pill, the IUD — is under legislative pressure in ways that weren’t imaginable a decade ago. Don’t be hysterical, no one’s coming for birth cont — SHUT UP. Seriously, just stop.

THEY ARE COMING FOR BIRTH CONTROL TOO.

The playbook doesn’t change. Only the target does.

The logic isn’t about families or faith or any of the things they say it’s about. It’s about access. It’s about control. If they can’t control the body through abortion law, they’ll control the life through marriage law. If they can’t control that, they’ll control the contraception. Keep her contained. Keep her pregnant. Keep her from having the clean break that lets her rebuild. Keep her from having the agency that lets her leave in the first place.

They want to control us, because they hate us.

They just dress it up in the language of stability and tradition and family values, and they wait for us to stop paying attention.

We’re not going to stop paying attention.

Trump tried to sneak through The SAVE Act, a legislative bill sold as a measure to keep non-citizens from voting. On paper, the SAVE Act aimed to require the name on your voter registration card to match the name on your birth certificate.

That doesn’t sound so bad, right?

Oh, but it is.

The SAVE Act would have disqualified up to 69 million registered voters — disproportionately women, of course, because ~80% of us who marry change our names (myself included). Life, divorce, and the administrative reality of being a woman in a country that doesn’t make any of this easy. The SAVE Act tried to limit our voting access through expensive, time-consuming administrative barriers to voter registration.

Women vote Democratic in higher numbers than men. That’s not a secret. The people writing these laws know it. The goal isn’t election integrity. The goal is a more manageable electorate — one with fewer of us in it.

The SAVE Act failed in the Senate on June 4, which also happened to be the 107th anniversary of the passing of the 19th Amendment. I noted the occasion on Substack, including a warning that consistent vigilance is required to protect our rights, including to vote.

Within minutes, a man appeared in my comments. He wanted me to know he had five sisters and three daughters. Then he asked: “Is any sane person thinking we’re gonna take away the vote from women in the United States?”

There it was.

Not disagreement. Dismissal. The assumption that because he couldn’t imagine something happening, the concern itself must be irrational. That because he loved women, because women populated his life, he understood what it meant to move through the world as one. I don’t doubt that man loves his daughters. But I doubt he’s been paying the same kind of attention we have.

Because here’s what I’m paying attention to: it’s not just the men who want to take away a woman’s right to vote.

At a recent Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Summit organized by Erika Kirk, many women got on camera and proclaimed they’d willingly give up their right to vote. “My husband and I are one flesh, so I’d be okay with that… because I know he would represent me well.” They’re socializing this — putting it in mouths, normalizing it, widening the Overton window the way the anti-abortion movement widened it for fifty years before Roe fell.

We weren’t supposed to have this right in the first place. They told us that a hundred years ago. They’re telling us again.

Don’t be hysterical, they’ll say. No one’s actually going to repeal the 19th. And I’ll say: Not. This. Dismissive. Shit. Again.

I cannot with it any longer.

I said Roe was going to fall, and I was right. I said abortion access would be used to let women bleed out while lawyers debated heartbeats, and I was right. I said the people calling me hysterical would never apologize, and I’ve been right about that longer than anything.

The word for deciding that women’s political participation is a problem to be corrected isn’t traditional. It’s not conservative. It’s not a values difference I’m supposed to respectfully consider.

It’s hate.

“Yeah, but he’s your husband…”

Amanda Stanhope woke up in her own bed disoriented — bruised, wearing unfamiliar clothes, with no memory of falling asleep. Again. This went on for years. When she confronted her partner, he told her she was unstable. Taking too many medications. Crazy.

She wasn’t crazy.

Unbeknownst to her, he was crushing pills into her drinks, waiting for her to go under, and filming as he raped her while she was unconscious. Then he uploaded it to a website called Motherless, where a community of men with the same sick hobby watched each other’s footage and called it entertainment.

The tag was #eyecheck.

It described a specific act: lifting a woman’s eyelid to confirm she can’t see, filmed as proof she’s gone. It wasn’t just a horror. It was a content category. Organized. Searchable. Discoverable. Motherless hosted more than 20,000 videos tagged as sleep content as of CNN’s investigation in March 2026.

Zoe Watts’ husband was another member of the community. While their four children slept, he ground up their son’s sleeping pills and slipped them into her bedtime tea. He did this for years. One morning, outside church, he confessed. He’s now serving eleven years for rape, sexual assault by penetration, and drugging.

When Zoe told friends and family what had happened, she heard: “Yeah, but he’s your husband.” And: “You weren’t awake, so… it’s not the same as being taken down an alleyway, is it?”

When Amanda brought video evidence of her own rape to police, they told her it wasn’t conclusive — because she might have been pretending to be asleep. The tag that documented her unconsciousness became a defense against accountability for it. Her partner was eventually charged with multiple counts of rape and sexual assault. He took his own life before the case reached court. No conviction. No sentence. Nothing.

CNN broke this story. Dutch authorities took the servers offline. Motherless claimed on its homepage that it had voluntarily shut down, while Dutch prosecutors told CNN that was false.

Either way: it came back online after a week.

In its return statement, Motherless claimed it had strengthened its moderation systems. The site’s long-standing operating rule, established in federal court, remains unchanged: anything legal stays. The site would be self-policed — by users. By the community of men who’d uploaded the videos in the first place. When CNN checked after the relaunch, several search terms had been banned in English. But in other languages, they still worked fine.

The site didn’t suffer for any of it. Traffic went from 62 million views in February to 81.7 million in March — up 30% after CNN’s exposé.

As of this writing, Motherless.com is down again. A serverHold has been placed on its domain. No one is saying why. NFOrce says it doesn’t control that. The journalists are still asking questions.

The women in those videos? They’re still waiting.

Amanda and Zoe didn’t disappear into that waiting. They took the name of the hashtag — the name of the wound — and built something out of it: EndEyeCheck.org. They’re demanding the laws change. They’re demanding platforms be held responsible for the infrastructure they built to organize and monetize this content, not just the videos they claim not to have posted.

They’re doing the work the United States government has failed to do.

But it’s not just the men at home. When men in this country claw their way to the very top — to the Epstein class, the men whose names are on those flight logs — the pattern holds. A significant number of them use that power to assault girls and young women. We know this because independent journalists have spent years documenting it. Women, mostly: Ellie Leonard. Kait Justice. Anne P. Mitchell, Esq. Carly P Reilly. They’ve been diving into the unsealed Epstein documents and upleveling all the horrors they find, ensuring we can’t look away. As the brilliant Rachel @ This Woman Votes writes: “Epstein was a glorified drug dealer and his drugs of choice were the vulnerable bodies of women and children, offered up to his friends and allies as the forbidden currency he traded in.”

These friends and allies in the Epstein files weren’t outliers. They were connected to each other, shielded by each other, normalized by each other. And none of them have faced any meaningful consequence. We elected one of them to the presidency. Twice. Not despite the credible accusations, the legal findings, the tape where he bragged about it. Knowing all of that. Choosing him anyway.

That’s not a mistake. That’s a statement. These men were — are — protected.

The United States looked at all of this — the online rape academies, the Epstein flight logs, the women bleeding out in hospitals, the women in those files waiting for justice that will never come — and did nothing. The billionaire class was protected. And so were the common men at home drugging their wives. Because systemically, the United States simply does not care.

No federal investigation into Motherless. No charges or prison sentences for any of the powerful men in the Epstein files. Nothing that communicated to the men uploading those videos, or the men watching them, or the platforms hosting and organizing them, or the men who raped all those girls on Epstein Island: we see what happened to these women and we’ve decided it matters.

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

And that’s how you know.

Not just the legislation — though the legislation is damning enough. Not just the billionaires, not just the flight logs, not just Emily Waldorf strapped into an ambulance and shipped four hours across state lines with the threat of sepsis and hemorrhage on every bump in the road because a law decided a fading heartbeat mattered more than her life.

It’s the nothing. The collective, institutional, bipartisan nothing that follows every single one of these stories. The way the outrage peaks and then recedes. The way the accountability never arrives. The way women absorb it and keep going because what else do you do, and the way that keeping-going gets mistaken for everything being fine.

They called us hysterical for seeing all of this coming. We saw it anyway.

Four years ago, on the day Roe fell, I drove through South Florida on an hour of sleep to take care of a man who helped make it happen. I didn’t confront him. I made sure he was okay. I kept going.

Women have always kept going.

Amanda and Zoe are fighting back. Emily Waldorf is fighting back. The journalists building the Epstein record are fighting back. And I am done waiting for the country to do something, anything, for women.

Because here’s what I know after four years of watching this: they are not going to stop. The legislation will keep coming. The flight logs will keep not mattering. The women in those videos will keep waiting. The Overton window will keep moving. They will not stop until we make them stop.

The United States hates women.

It always has.

We know it now.

Act like it.

About The Author

I’m Dana DuBois, an essayist and GenX word nerd living in the Pacific Northwest—and founder of I Write Out Loud and co-host of The Daily Whatever Show.