This UN report shows that women’s rights in the US are an international embarrassment

There’s a lot of political debate in the US right now over so-called “women’s issues” like paid family leave, equal pay, and access to health care. Some politicians and stakeholders resist changing the status quo in these areas because they say it might cost too much, be bad for business, or have unintended consequences. Essentially, they view addressing these issues as optional — nice to have, sure, but only if we can figure out a way to implement them without causing any kind of disruption.

But a new United Nations working group report says that improving women’s equality in the United States is not optional. In fact, the status quo in the US falls short of international human rights standards for women.

Three human rights experts from a UN working group on discrimination against women toured the United States for 10 days and visited Alabama, Oregon, and Texas. What they found appalled them, and the resulting report is one of the best brief summaries you could read on all the different ways US policy is harmful to women — particularly women of color and low-income women.

“The United States, which is a leading state in formulating international human rights standards, is allowing its women to lag behind international human rights standards,” the report said. It found that US women have “missing rights” to things like universal paid maternity leave and access to comprehensive reproductive health care.

Some of the US’s deficiencies are merely disappointing and embarrassing, like the fact that our highest-ever level of women’s representation in politics still only puts us in 72nd place in the world. Other issues, like women’s economic inequality, are deeply concerning and should be better in such a wealthy nation, the UN delegates said. Wage inequality for women persists into their vulnerable old age, and poverty literally kills women with higher maternal mortality rates and greater vulnerability to domestic violence.

And still other issues, the report says, fall demonstrably short of international human rights standards. The delegates were “shocked” by the lack of workplace accommodations for pregnant and postnatal women, for instance. The US falls afoul of international human rights law on a broad range of issues, from failing to mandate equal pay for equal work to unjustly criminalizing prostitution. And particularly vulnerable women like domestic workers and undocumented immigrants face inexcusable levels of wage theft, abuse, and lack of access to health care.

The report paid special attention to the often “severe” barriers women face to accessing reproductive health care in some states, from laws that require unnecessary medical procedures to the disturbing level of anti-abortion threats, harassment, and violence.

“The Group would like to recall that, under international human rights law, states must take all appropriate measures to ensure women’s equal right to decide freely and responsibly on the number and spacing of their children,” the report said.

The delegation called out state laws that subject women to unnecessary abortion waiting periods, restrict medication abortion, and use burdensome licensing requirements to close clinics and leave large geographic areas with no nearby abortion services. And national policies like the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal Medicaid funding for most abortions, make it difficult for poor women to afford the procedure. Both state and federal restrictions “have a disproportionate and discriminatory impact on poor women,” the authors note.

The UN delegates also told reporters that they — three women who are visibly past reproductive age — were personally harassed by anti-abortion protesters in Alabama.

“There were two vigilante men waiting to insult us,” said United Kingdom delegate Frances Raday. “It’s a kind of terrorism,” said Poland’s Eleonora Zielinska. “To us, it was shocking.”

The delegates laid some of the blame for women’s status in the US on our political polarization. “We understand the complexity of federalism but this cannot be regarded as a justification for failure to secure these rights,” the report says.

The Obama administration has taken steps to improve things, like expanding health care access and gender equity through the Affordable Care Act, and by inviting the UN delegation to come and issue this report in the first place — but the administration has been stymied by a deadlocked Congress. The US is one of only seven nations that haven’t ratified a major international agreement, the Convention on the Elimination of All of Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

“We acknowledge the United States’ commitment to liberty, so well represented by the Statue of Liberty which symbolizes both womanhood and freedom,” the report said. “Nevertheless, in global context, US women do not take their rightful place as citizens of the world’s leading economy.”