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Tag: war on women
If Abortion Foes Were Really ‘Pro-Life,’ They’d Go After Fertility Clinics Too

If Abortion Foes Were Really ‘Pro-Life,’ They’d Go After Fertility Clinics Too

If life begins at the point of conception, is in vitro fertilization (IVF) morally acceptable?

IVF, the process during which sperm fertilizes an egg in a laboratory, usually produces several embryos to raise the odds for a viable pregnancy. Embryos are then selected and implanted in a woman, who may have had difficulties conceiving, with the hope that at least one produces a healthy pregnancy.

The embryos that are not used are either donated to research (much like the fetal tissue from abortions), kept frozen for another cycle, discarded, or donated to another family.

But hardliners – those devoted to what’s called the Personhood Movement – want legislation that protects embryos as if they were people. (Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee declared that if elected president, he would extend 5th and 14th Amendment protections to zygotes.) This has obvious implications for those in favor of abortion rights, but, if carried to its logical conclusion, it would also affect providers and patients who use IVF.

So where’s the outrage directed at fertility clinics?

That’s the question Margo Kaplan, a professor at Rutgers Law School, asks in an op-ed published in The Washington Post. Kaplan, who conceived her two children through IVF, compares her experience to those of women seeking abortions:

In Pennsylvania (where my fertility clinic is located), a woman seeking an abortion must receive state-directed counseling designed to discourage her from the procedure. She must then wait at least 24 hours until she can continue. In other states, women are forced to undergo unnecessary and invasive ultrasounds, watch or listen to a description of the ultrasound, and hear a lecture on how the embryo or fetus is a human life. Clinics in some states must provide them with medically inaccurate information on the risks of abortion. After all that, women often cannot have an abortion without waiting an additional one to three days, depending on the state.

In contrast, all my husband and I had to do was sign a form. Our competence to choose the outcome of our embryo was never questioned. There were no mandatory lectures on gestation, no requirement that I be explicitly told that personhood begins at conception or that I view a picture of a day-five embryo. There was no compulsory waiting period for me to reconsider my decision. In fact, no state imposes these restrictions — so common for abortion patients — on patients with frozen embryos. With rare exceptions, the government doesn’t interfere with an IVF patient’s choices except to resolve disagreements between couples.

Why do anti-abortion activists and politicians exhaust themselves trying to defund and eliminate Planned Parenthood, while ignoring embryo-destroying fertility clinics?

Kaplan concludes that even though IVF necessitates the destruction of some embryos, the anti-abortion crowd leaves IVF clinics alone because the procedure exists to support women who want to be mothers. Pamela Haag in Big Think calls the discrepancy the “ideological ‘tell’ in abortion politics” — because for some abortion opponents, it’s clearly not just about the preservation of life: “It’s about women’s rights, women’s power, and women’s agency,” she writes.

This argument is one that is advanced by many, many women: Conservative, usually male, lawmakers just want to legislate women’s bodies. Specifically, vulnerable women. As supporters of Planned Parenthood consistently point out, the organization primarily serves poor women and women of color. IVF – due to its hefty price – is available mainly to affluent women.

Viewed in this context, the decision to persecute Planned Parenthood, yet not clinics that specialize in IVF, seems to be informed less by notions of the “sanctity of life” than by the demographics of the women affected. It’s not about saving or killing babies – it’s about making sure the “right” babies are born to the “right” people.

Yet nearly every GOP presidential candidate, many citing the same anti-choice rhetoric, has said that he (or she) supports defunding Planned Parenthood — even if it means shutting down the government — effectively dismantling an organization that helps millions of women get contraception and preventive reproductive health screenings. They maintain their stances despite the facts that the state investigations, which were prompted by videos released by the anti-abortion group Center for Medical Progress, have uncovered nothing, and that the vast majority of Americans support both Planned Parenthood and its receiving federal funding through Medicare. (The organization is fighting back, with an ad blitz in the states where the lawmakers calling for its defunding reside.)

Anti-choice politicians and activists like to point out that if Planned Parenthood had to shutter thanks to a loss of federal funding, community health centers would be there to take its place. But community health centers, which focus on primary care, are often overcrowded and already straining to handle all the new patients enrolled under the Affordable Care Act.

Texas provides a useful case study. As Ali Weinberg of ABC News explains, in 2011, legislators stripped Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers of taxpayer funding, which meant they could no longer be part of the Medicaid Women’s Health Program, providing women with family planning services. To make up for the loss of women’s health care services, clinics that did not have ties to abortion providers were recruited to take their place. A year later, the federal government stopped its Medicaid funding of the Women’s Health Program – meaning that the Lone Star State now needed to fill that funding gap.

So while other providers were scrambling to train medical professionals and integrate family planning services into primary care, some patients found that they had a hard time finding a provider. As Amanda Stevenson, a researcher at the University of Austin’s Texas Policy Evaluation Project, told ABC News, many women prefer going to a specialist – like a gynecologist – rather than a primary care doctor, because they feel it’s a more respectful and confidential environment.

There was an average 25 percent drop in women served by clinics with the Texas Women’s Health Program, with two districts reporting greater than 50 percent. The state’s Health and Human Services Commission showed that within two years, there were 63,581 fewer claims filed for birth control and almost 30,000 fewer women got any sort of service from the state-run health program.

This is partially why many say that abortion opponents fail to adhere to their stated “pro-life” ideology, since their policies actually end up harming the people already alive. And their ideology rings particularly hollow when they take a hard line on one procedure but aren’t so quick to apply the same standards to another.

Image: Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) (via Flickr)

Jeb Walks Back Mega-Gaffe: ‘I’m Not Sure We Need Half A Billion Dollars For Women’s Health Issues’

Jeb Walks Back Mega-Gaffe: ‘I’m Not Sure We Need Half A Billion Dollars For Women’s Health Issues’

Jeb Bush just handed Democrats a gift-wrapped present in the political fight over funding Planned Parenthood — and on President Obama’s birthday, no less!

Speaking to the Southern Baptist Convention Tuesday, Bush chimed in on the conservative movement to defund Planned Parenthood — boasting that he had had success on this very front when he was governor of Florida. But in a side comment, Sabrina Siddiqui of The Guardian reports, he appeared to question the whole idea of spending money on women’s health at all.

“The argument against this is, well, women’s health issues are gonna be — you’re attacking, it’s a war on women and you’re attacking women’s health issues,” Bush said. “You could take dollar for dollar — although I’m not sure we need a half a billion dollars for women’s health issues.”

“But if you took dollar for dollar,” he continued, “there are many extraordinarily fine organizations, community health organizations that exist, federally sponsored community health organizations, to provide quality care for women on a wide variety of health issues. But abortion should not be funded by the government — any government, in my mind.”

Shortly thereafter, Bush quickly released a statement via his campaign:

With regards to women’s health funding broadly, I misspoke, as there are countless community health centers, rural clinics, and other women’s health organizations that need to be fully funded. They provide critical services to all, but particularly low-income women who don’t have the access they need.

I was referring to the hard-to-fathom $500 million in federal funding that goes to Planned Parenthood – an organization that was callously participating in the unthinkable practice of selling fetal organs. Democrats and Republicans agree we absolutely must defund them and redirect those funds to other women’s health organizations.

Men Rule Republican-Led House As Lone Woman Gets Committee Gavel

Men Rule Republican-Led House As Lone Woman Gets Committee Gavel

By Kathleen Miller, Bloomberg News (TNS)

WASHINGTON — Candice Miller has a special status in the new Republican-run U.S. House: She’s the only female lawmaker in the party to head a congressional committee.

Her domain? House Administration, a panel known more for tending to granular details — overseeing federal elections, parking lots and cafeterias — than grabbing headlines.

“I don’t want to diminish her position but it’s not Ways and Means, it’s not the Budget Committee,” said Debbie Walsh, head of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “It’s much more administrative.”

Even as Republicans seek to attract more female voters and fend off attacks from Democrats on women’s issues, the lack of women heading the House’s 22 committees shows the party has a long way to go to catch up to the minority party, Walsh said.

“It is shocking to think there is only one woman in the entire House that holds a committee chair,” Walsh said. “Republicans had an opportunity to put women in leadership positions on committees and have made a conscious choice not to do so.”

Indeed, it’s less common for a female Republican to get a committee gavel than it is for a woman to run a major U.S. corporation. Miller’s lone chairmanship means that 4.5 percent of the 22 Republican women serving in the House will head panels during the congressional session that began last week.

That compares with 25, or 5 percent, of Fortune 500 company chief executive officers who are women.

Republicans have made strides in responding to criticism that the House party leadership included few women. In 2012, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington was elected head of the Republican Conference, in charge of messaging and communications. Lynn Jenkins of Kansas was chosen as conference vice chairwoman, and Virginia Foxx of North Carolina as secretary.

Miller, 60, first became head of the House Administration panel in 2013 — the only woman to head a committee in that Congress, too — after losing a bid to run the Committee on Homeland Security. She was defeated by Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, although Miller, a Michigan lawmaker now starting her seventh term in the House, had been in Congress two years longer than he had.

Miller said in an interview that she’s “delighted” to run the Administration committee and that the panel’s duties, which include oversight of security on the House side of the U.S. Capitol complex and the Federal Election Commission, weren’t belittled until she took over the job. The comments come mainly from people who want to attack Republicans in general, she said.

“This was always considered a pretty powerful committee,” she said. “A lot of people don’t consider federal elections a token issue.”

In Miller’s failed bid to run the Homeland Security panel, she may have been hurt more by geography than gender, said Michele Swers, an associate professor of government at Georgetown University in Washington.

When she competed for the Homeland Security gavel, two other Michigan Republicans were leading desirable House panels: Fred Upton at Energy and Commerce and Dave Camp at Ways and Means, which is now run by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.

“The center of the Republican Party’s power is not Michigan, it’s more somewhere like Texas,” Swers said. “There are regional balances, ideological balances and other factors to consider as well like how much money you raise, how close you are to leadership. So it’s really quite difficult to say this is necessarily gender discrimination.”

Some Republican women say the reason for the shortage of female House committee chiefs is simple: Not enough want the jobs.

Not a single woman competed for a committee leadership chair this past year, said Jenkins, the number two woman in the party leadership.

“It’s kind of hard to win a race for a gavel if you don’t run,” she said.

Democrats have elevated more women because there are more of them in the party caucus and they’ve been there longer, Foxx said.

Seniority, a major factor in determining committee chairmanships, is an obstacle in both parties.

“It’s not that there is overt discrimination or attempts to keep them from achieving leadership status, but there are a lot of men in line ahead of them,” said Jennifer Lawless, a government professor at American University in Washington.

Just two House Republican women — Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida and Kay Granger of Texas — were elected before 2000. Granger, who took office in 1997, leads an Appropriations subcommittee; the panel itself is run by Hal Rogers of Kentucky, one of the chamber’s most senior members.

Ros-Lehtinen, who has been in Congress since 1989, ran the House Foreign Affairs committee from 2011 to 2013.

In contrast, 20 female Democrats in the House were elected prior to 2000. Yet seniority is an issue for the minority party, too.

Rep. Anna Eshoo of California, elected in 1992, lost a bid this session to be the leading Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee. Frank Pallone, of New Jersey, who defeated her, has four more years of experience.

Eshoo was backed by Nancy Pelosi, the chamber’s top Democrat. Pelosi became the first woman House speaker in 2007, which gives the party something to boast about, said American University’s Lawless. She held the job until 2011, when Democrats lost the majority.

“They have had women in the highest echelons of the party,” Lawless said. “Having achieved those milestones does give them some degree of credibility.”

Even so, when it comes to female committee chiefs, Democrats aren’t that far ahead. When they controlled the House between 2009 and 2011, three women ran committees. That’s about 5.4 percent of the Democrats’ 56 female members at the time.

Women do better in the Senate. Democrats, who held the chamber’s majority from 2007 until ceding control to Republicans last week, had seven of 16 female senators from their party running committees.

Republicans have two of six women in the Senate with gavels this session: Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who heads the chamber’s Energy and Natural Resources panel, and Maine’s Susan Collins, who runs the Special Aging panel.

Still, if money equals power, few female senators will have seats on two of the most influential panels.

Just two of the 20 women senators — Democrats Debbie Stabenow of Michigan and Maria Cantwell of Washington — are on the 26-member Finance Committee, which is responsible for taxes, trade and health care. And two of the 22 members on the Banking Committee are women, both also Democrats: North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp and Massachusetts’s Elizabeth Warren.

Cynthia Terrell, a founder of FairVote, a group whose goals include electing more women to public office, said the U.S. is still a long way from having women constitute 50 percent of Congress.

At the current growth rate, she said, “We’re still about 300 years from parity.”
___
(With assistance from Richard Rubin, Roxana Tiron and Derek Wallbank in Washington.)

Photo: Diliff via Wikimedia Commons

War For Women Intensifies In Campaign’s Final Days

War For Women Intensifies In Campaign’s Final Days

By David Lightman, McClatchy Washington Bureau (MCT)

BOULDER, Colo. — The war for women is raging in campaigns across the country in these last days before Tuesday’s midterm elections, and though Democrats have comfortable leads in most key races, the margins aren’t as comfortable as they’d like or need.

Hurting the party is a renewed concern about security, particularly among mothers who tend to see the Obama administration as fumbling recent crises — from the battle against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria to the fears of Ebola spreading in the U.S. — as well as some backlash from Republicans and independents who complain that Democrats seem obsessed with reproductive rights issues.

Democrats have spent much of the election year insisting Republicans would jeopardize abortion rights and access to contraception and make it harder to gain equal pay. While those messages have won Democrats healthy margins among women, it’s not the overwhelming edge the party sought.

“Many women say, ‘You’re trivializing us,’ ” said Wayne Lesperance, director of the Center for Civil Engagement at New England College in New Hampshire. “Women say, ‘We’re going to war again and we’re worried about this disease.’ ”

That view echoes all over states with tight races. Cydney Tanner, a University of Colorado student, is voting Republican because she appreciates how President George W. Bush dealt with terrorists.

She was in the first grade on Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists attacked American targets. “President Bush was very comforting. I really felt assured I was safe,” she said.

Women could be critical constituencies in virtually all of the too-close-to-call contests next week where Democrats need double-digit leads among women to offset strong Republican advantages among men, said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion.

Marist’s latest polls for NBC show Democrats flirting with political danger.

In Iowa, Rep. Bruce Braley, the Democratic candidate for Senate, is up by only 5 percentage points among women. In Colorado, Sen. Mark Udall has an 11-point advantage, the same margin as Sen. Mark Pryor in Arkansas. In North Carolina, Sen. Kay Hagan leads by 10 points. Only Pryor’s numbers are up from previous polls this fall.

In New Hampshire, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, has a 5 percentage-point lead over Republican Scott Brown, down from 12 in September, according to the latest New England College Poll. Helping drive that trend: Two-thirds of women polled earlier this month in New Hampshire said they were very or somewhat concerned the Ebola virus would affect the state.

Wooing women, particularly those who are unmarried, has been a crucial part of Democrats’ strategy this year, and loyalists maintain they’re going to do well with those constituencies next week.

“Unmarried women, who tend to pay attention later, are listening to the economic narrative,” said Page Gardner, president of the Voter Participation Center, devoted to getting unmarried women to vote.

There’s also contraception. After the Supreme Court’s June ruling exempting certain companies from providing government-mandated birth control services if they violate the owners’ religious beliefs, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the decision “jeopardizes the health of women who are employed by these companies.”

In the Democratic-controlled Senate, leaders have made equal pay, reproductive rights and reauthorizing domestic violence laws top priorities. On the campaign trail, candidates have been relentless painting Republicans as heartless anti-abortion zealots — in Colorado, Udall has been dubbed “Mark Uterus” for his persistent focus on such issues. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, trying to build her own momentum among women for a possible 2016 presidential run, campaigned for Udall last week and warned, “Women’s rights here at home and around the world are clearly at risk.”

All this has triggered sharp criticism. “If Colorado’s U.S. Senate race were a movie, the set would be a gynecologist’s office, complete with an exam table and a set of stirrups,” wrote Lynn Bartels of the Denver Post last month.

Getting Democratic women to the polls, though, faces several challenges. Unmarried women are more prone to stay home on Election Day. They tend to be younger voters who often are not engaged in politics.

“A lot are heads of households and not affluent at all,” said Susan Carroll, a senior scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics in New Jersey. “They don’t focus on politics. They’re more worried about meals on the table.”

The battle for women has intensified in these final pre-election days.

In Iowa, Ernst’s background as a lieutenant colonel in the Iowa Army National Guard helps her with women concerned about security. “The biography is attractive,” said Christopher Budzisz, director of the Loras College Poll in Dubuque, Iowa.

In Arkansas, the Democratic senatorial committee launched an ad this week where a woman maintains, “A vote for Tom Cotton is a vote against Arkansas women.” Cotton fights back, as “Women for Cotton” tell voters on a website, “Women in Arkansas know that the Obama-Pryor economic agenda isn’t working.”

Cotton also stressed his military credentials. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Colorado’s the stage for some of the most intense battles, thanks to Udall’s all-out effort to woo women. This week, he launched an ad blasting Republican opponent Rep. Cory Gardner for co-sponsoring a measure to provide equal protection under the Constitution “for the right to life of each born and preborn human person.” Backers call this personhood. Gardner earlier this year said he does not back personhood anymore.

Democratic women are wary and insisted they’ll flood the polls Tuesday. “Democrats show us respect. Republicans act like women are a minor class,” said Molly Nunes, an Aurora nurse.

Electing a new senator is not necessarily going to make things safer, say these women — after all, it’s the executive branch that’s in charge of disease control and national security policy.

Republicans disagreed. “Democrats pegged us as single-issue voters,” said Ellyn Hilliard, a Lyons insurance saleswoman. “That’s insulting.”

Photo: uacescomm via Flickr