The squalid ethics and crackpot policies of Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt make regular headlines these days. But in addition to carrying out the desires of his fossil fuel patrons and spending wheelbarrows full of taxpayers’ money for personal benefit, Pruitt has a record of public misogyny.
Nearly 20 years ago, before Pruitt became attorney general of Oklahoma (a perch from which he would repeatedly sue the EPA), he was a state senator who introduced legislation to accord “property rights” over unborn fetuses and mandate that a pregnant woman get the father’s permission before obtaining an abortion. An amendment defined “fetus” as “any individual human organism from fertilization until birth.” Twice, in 1999 and in 2005, Pruitt’s bills failed.
Alexander C. Kaufman at Huffpost writes:
As HuffPost previously reported, Pruitt’s support from right-wing evangelical Christians, a group that largely opposes abortion, has helped him keep his job amid calls from droves of Democrats and a handful of Republicans to fire the administrator.
And while his current role atop the EPA does not give him any official control over abortion policy, he has appeared alongside President Donald Trump in meetings with evangelical leaders, and his draconian history on the issue is of a piece with the administration. [...]
“It’s not surprising that another member of Trump’s inner circle is hostile to women,” said Dawn Huckelbridge, a senior director at the progressive super PAC American Bridge, which opposes Pruitt and supports abortion rights. “But framing a fetus as a man’s property is a new low.
If either Oklahoma bill had become law, any doctor who performed an abortion without the written consent of the father would have been subject to civil liability, a punitive fine of $5,000, and loss of his or her medical license. But the law would also have run afoul of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1992 ruling in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey. That decision barred as unconstitutional any requirement for a woman to get her husband’s permission for an abortion.
It’s disturbing but no longer surprising to see right-wingers work to blend the secular with the religious when it suits their purposes. While Pruitt was trying to have “fetuses” governed by property rights, he was also a trustee of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, which holds that “a wife is to submit herself graciously” to her husband. For Pruitt and his ilk, The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t dystopian fiction—it’s a manual.