Help Us Fight Back Against Efforts to Roll Back Gender Justice
Extremist judges will not stop endangering the lives of pregnant people or people who may become pregnant—overturning Roe v. Wade, attacking medication abortion, threatening the future of IVF, and this week at SCOTUS, emergency abortion care.
Our lawyers are waging strategic fights that make clear what is at stake for people who can become pregnant and seek to bolster our fundamental rights to control our lives, futures, and destinies.
Make a donation to the National Women’s Law Center to power the fight for accessible health care and a better future for all. Every donation is 100% tax-deductible.
Senator Jeff Sessions’ Problematic Record on Women’s Rights
On November 18, President-Elect Donald Trump announced that he would nominate Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, Alabama’s junior Senator, as his Attorney General. The Attorney General is the nation’s highest law enforcement officer and leads the Department of Justice. As such, the Attorney General is charged with enforcing a number of laws particularly important to women, such as the Violence Against Women Act, the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, and several critically important antidiscrimination statutes that protect women at school, at work, when exercising the right to vote, and in housing, as well as against discrimination on the basis of disability. The Department of Justice also enforces federal hate crime laws, which create enhanced criminal penalties for crimes that target victims based on gender, race, sexual orientation and disability, among other categories.
Unfortunately, Sen. Sessions’ record on legal rights and protections important to women, including those that he would be responsible for enforcing in the position to which he has been nominated, demonstrates that he should not be confirmed to this crucial position.
Sessions has taken positions hostile to the rights of survivors of sexual assault.
Sessions has repeatedly voted to limit women’s access to reproductive health care, including abortion care.
Sessions has a 0% lifetime rating from Planned Parenthood, meaning that in twenty years in the Senate, he has consistently voted to restrict access to safe and legal abortion care and other reproductive health services. He has sponsored a bill that would defund Planned Parenthood. He has supported a 20-week ban on abortions, parental notification and consent laws, and expanding religious refusals to provide abortion, contraception, or other health care. He has opposed funding to combat clinic violence, which is on the rise. He also opposed allocating any funding to fight the Zika virus to family planning providers, including Planned Parenthood, despite the fact that Zika has been shown to cause microcephaly. Sessions has also opposed the Affordable Care Act, which provides for mandatory coverage of essential health benefits, including maternity benefits and all forms of contraception without co-pays.
Sessions has voted against employment discrimination protections, as well as other economic policies that benefit women.
Sessions has a long record of hostility towards civil rights.
Before becoming a Senator, Sen. Sessions was rejected by the Judiciary Committee for a federal judgeship in large part because of evidence of hostility to civil rights. In 1986, President Reagan nominated Sessions, who was a U.S. attorney in Alabama at the time, to the Federal District Court for the Southern District of Alabama. During Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, former employees testified that he had called black prosecutors “boy” and had said that he didn’t think the KKK was bad until he found out they smoked marijuana. There was testimony that he had called the NAACP and the ACLU “un-American” and “Communist-inspired” and that he agreed that a white civil rights lawyer was a “traitor to his race.” Sessions himself stated that the Voting Rights Act was a “piece of intrusive legislation” in his testimony before the Committee. Since becoming a Senator, Sessions has continued opposition to civil rights protections: he has criticized judicial nominees merely for their affiliation with civil rights organizations, including District Judge Edward Chen, who had worked for the ACLU prior to his nomination. He also accused Paula Xinis, a Maryland district court judge, of having an “agenda” and bias against police officers, based on her firm’s representation of Freddie Gray.
Sessions has consistently opposed anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ individuals.
Sessions has been a leading opponent of immigration rights.
Sessions has been a leading voice in Congress arguing against immigration reform that include a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and is in favor of drastically reducing legal immigration. In his two decades in the Senate, Sessions has opposed every single immigration bill that included a path to citizenship. He has argued for limiting the number of refugees that America accepts and turning away Central American children at the border.
Sen. Sessions’ record on legal rights and protections on which women and their families rely undermines public confidence that he could fairly and vigorously enforce those laws as Attorney General. Over the course of his career, he has consistently demonstrated animosity to the very laws that the Department of Justice is responsible for enforcing. Accordingly, the Senate should reject Sen. Jeff Sessions’ nomination.