The Republican party of the United States remains the party of denying women fundamental human rights. The US press as a whole remains the instrument of softening up or ignoring this reality.

“Trump has long been criticized for his public treatment of women,” ran a CNN headline. “The ones in his life argue he’s different in private.” What follows is a puff piece in which prominent Republican women say nice things about him, and his history of alleged sexual assault is mentioned several paragraphs down.

The first Mrs Trump is no longer in his life, though she’s buried on his New Jersey golf course, but she charged him with raping her – at home, in private – in her 1990 sworn divorce testimony. E Jean Carroll is only casually in his life, but she won a civil lawsuit against him for sexual assault in the privacy of a department store dressing room and a second one for public defamation, and he owes her tens of millions of dollars for these cases. CNN does get around to mentioning Carroll in passing, but praise from Trump’s protege Sarah Huckabee Sanders and his lawyer and daughter-in-law get the lionesses’ share of attention, and headlines are often all viewers read.

Rape is an assault on the victim’s body but also on her (or his or their) agency and right to bodily autonomy, though the assault on agency and autonomy can and does take many forms – and the Republican party and its candidates for president and vice-president support many of them. The Republican party has uncomplainingly offered up an adjudicated rapist as their presidential candidate and rallied behind a vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, who has shown great enthusiasm for denying women basic rights and safety and sometimes survival.

One of the crucial ways Vance has sought to deny women basic rights is by what has been dubbed menstrual surveillance. In 2023, the federal Department of Health and Human Services proposed a revision to medical privacy regulations “to shield the protected health information of patients seeking lawful reproductive health care from disclosure for the purpose of criminal, civil, and administrative investigations”. Vance was one of the eight Republican senators who filed a letter of protest declaring: “Under the Proposed Rule, however, States would be forced to cede their powers to investigate criminal abortion-related activity.”

In other words, the revision would protect women’s right to privacy around........

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