by Jennifer Berry Hawes

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London Lamar rose from her chair in the Tennessee Senate last spring, stomach churning with anxiety as she prepared to address the sea of men sitting at creaky wooden desks around her. She wore a hot pink dress as a nod to the health needs of women, including the very few of them elected to this chamber, none of whom were, like her, obviously pregnant. She set her hands onto her growing belly.

The Senate clerk, a man, called out an amendment Lamar had filed. The Senate speaker, also a man, opened the floor for her to speak. The bill’s sponsor, another man, stood near her as she grasped a microphone to discuss the matter at hand: a tweak to the state’s near-total ban on abortion access for women.

Lamar glanced around at her fellow senators, three quarters of them men. The imbalance was even more stark in the state’s House of Representatives, where almost 9 in 10 members were men. And Tennessee is no anomaly. Across much of the Southeast, state legislatures are more than 80% male.

On this day, the Tennessee Senate was poised to take a final vote on a bill that would allow abortions to prevent a woman’s death or “serious risk of the substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.” Lamar stood to pitch a broader health exception.

A Democrat in the substantial minority, she could have appealed to her female Republican colleagues. Although they oppose abortion, they bring to the debate their personal knowledge of women’s bodies and experiences. But there were only three of them in the 33-member Senate. Instead, Lamar turned to the two dozen Republican men.

She reminded them that four years earlier, she was 32 weeks pregnant and serving in the House when her blood pressure suddenly spiked. Her placenta ruptured. Her son died in utero, and she faced a terrifying risk of a stroke. “It’s personally one of my biggest fears that this thing would happen again to me,” she told them. If it did, she feared the proposed law would prevent her doctor from protecting her health.

She implored the men to see her as a family member: “I’m telling you as your own colleague, as your niece, baby girl. I love you all. It is real, not only for me but for women all across the state.”

Scenes like this play out across the Southeast, even as the U.S. as a whole saw a record number of women elected to statehouses last year. Nationally, one-third of legislators are women, the most in history. In recent years, three states — Nevada, Arizona and Colorado — achieved parity.

But much of the Southeast lags far behind.

Women made up less than half of the state legislatures in nearly every state.

More than a century after the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote, women constitute fewer than 1 in 5 state legislators across much of the region: in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, which studies women’s political participation. West Virginia has the lowest percentage of any state; less than 13% of its state lawmakers are women.

As Lamar spoke, 14% of Tennessee’s legislators were women. The Republicans, including two of the three GOP women in the Senate, swiftly rejected her amendment. She sank into her chair and pressed one palm over her heart, the other onto her belly, and practiced deep breathing exercises to help keep her blood pressure from soaring again.

Soon after, another Black woman in the chamber stood to speak. Holding the microphone, Sen. Charlane Oliver read prepared remarks calling for an exception in cases of rape. Then, she paused. She glanced to her right and bit her cheek. She cleared her throat.

Fighting tears, she began again: “I rise before this body as a sexual assault survivor.”

Sitting nearby, Lamar listened intently. She hadn’t known this about her fellow senator, yet Oliver felt compelled to share her trauma so publicly to try and sway the men around them. Tears welled in Lamar’s eyes as well. She passed her colleague a tissue.

Three decades have passed since a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee composed entirely of men grilled Anita Hill on live TV. Some of the men were dismissive, others downright hostile toward her testimony that Clarence Thomas, her former boss, had sexually harassed her. Millions watched it on live TV, and the Senate later confirmed Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The following year, voters elected a record number of women to Congress in what became known as the “The Year of the Woman.” Yet while Congress and many states have seen steady growth in numbers of female lawmakers over the years since then, much of the Southeast has stagnated or barely inched forward.

Tennessee has fewer female legislators than it had 20 years ago. Mississippi improved less than 3 percentage points since then; South Carolina fared only slightly better. Louisiana gained 6 percentage points, and Alabama gained 7.

This leaves large majorities of men controlling policy — including laws that most impact women — at a time when the U.S. Supreme Court is sending more power to statehouse doorsteps. Abortion, a key issue of the day, provides one window: A ProPublica analysis of comprehensive legislative data kept by the Reflective Democracy Campaign found that with few exceptions, the states with legislatures most dominated by men as of July have some of the nation’s strictest abortion bans.

Of the 10 states where men made up the biggest share of the legislatures, eight have strict abortion bans, and one outlaws it at around six weeks, before many women know they are pregnant. Five don’t allow exceptions for women who are raped.

Seven of the 10 states have trigger laws........

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