Ex-prosecutor warns women's right to vote may be next on chopping block: 'Handmaid's Tale'

Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance is sounding the alarm that the right of women to vote, long treated as untouchable, could erode along the country's current political path, after watching conservative women publicly declare they would happily surrender it.

In her Civil Discourse newsletter, Vance pointed to a recent Turning Point USA Women's Leadership Summit, the event now run by Charlie Kirk's widow following his death. There, right-wing influencer Samantha Stone said, "I would gladly give up my right to vote to have a more conservative country," according to Vance.

Stone was not alone. Vance pointed to a clip compiled by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in which other attendees voiced similar views. One young woman explained that as a Christian, she and her husband "are one flesh" and vote the same way, so she would be fine giving up her vote because "he would represent me well." Another said her daughter wouldn't need the vote because she would marry "a godly man."

The remarks can sound "shocking and even laughable" on first exposure, Vance acknowledged, carrying "a Handmaid's Tale quality" in which women are "willing to bargain away their own personhood" for the perceived security of marriage and motherhood. For now, she noted, it remains "a fringe view, even at Turning Point."

But Vance's central warning was that fringe is not the same as harmless. Ideas once dismissed as unthinkable, she argued, have a habit of becoming mainstream, citing the unitary executive theory and the overturning of Roe v. Wade. And she pointed to a sobering reminder of how exposed women's equality already is: the United States tried, and failed, to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have enshrined in the Constitution that rights cannot be denied "on account of sex."

In other words, the legal floor under women's equal status is thinner than many assume, and a notion as extreme as women relinquishing the franchise could drift from the margins toward the mainstream if it goes unchallenged.

Rather than mock the women, Vance said, the moment calls for recommitting to the principle that everyone, women included, holds equal rights. "If MAGA women don't want to vote, that's their prerogative," she wrote. "As for me, I intend to exercise my rights fully."

She closed by warning that the sentiment did not arise on its own. These women "seem to have absorbed the idea that political power is dangerous in their own hands," Vance wrote, urging readers to consider "how ideas like this get planted and who seeks to benefit from them."