Posts Tagged ‘abortion’
Historic Health Care Vote Leaves Women Feeling Shortchanged
Read MoreAfter last night’s historic health care vote in the US House of Representatives, I feel a combination of relief that the (flawed but symbolically important) bill passed and fury that the ban on abortion coverage will not only remain but will remain by virtue of an executive order issued by the hand of a president who during his campaign pledged to repeal the Hyde anti-abortion coverage amendment. In my often expressed opinion, repeal of Hyde and full integration of reproductive health services including abortion is what the president and the pro-choice groups should have demanded in the first place. For if they had, we not would have ended up with this travesty for women’s health. The pro-choice women in the House fought hard, but without the president, Speaker Pelosi, and pro-choice groups standing firm behind them, they were left twisting in the wind.
Linda Lowen, who writes the Women’s Issues column at About.com, suggests that one intangible benefit to women will be a huge increase in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s stature and power. Jen Nedeau, who manages the Not Under the Bus campaign, describes a sense of betrayal shared by many—and how to move forward, in this exclusive written for the Women’s Media Center and reprinted with permission. Kindly scroll down to see one specific action you can take to help right the wrong done–and indeed the only action that can. Let me know your thoughts.
The Right to Choose: Family Lessons
This beautiful piece was written as an exclusive for the Women’s Media Center by Shruti Swamy a writer for India Currents Magazine, currently working toward her MFA in fiction at San Francisco State University. Thanks to the Women’s Media Center for permitting the republishing of this and other articles.Far from a generational divide, the author, as a young feminist, finds sustenance in the ways the women in her family handled their more limited life choices.
It’s hard for me to imagine what my grandmother’s youth was like, spent in rural and then urban India. At 16, she was arrange-married to a man she had met once years before, at 17 pregnant with her first child, by 21 the mother of three young children. There are few pictures of her from that time, so I’ve made them up for myself; Baa on her wedding day in hot, heavy clothes; Baa working in the green fields through her first pregnancy, chewing ginger for strength; Baa with another baby in her arms, cooking dinner for her family.
I had been thinking of her when I first read in the New York Times about a perceived generational divide in feminist responses to the Stupak amendment (“In Support of Abortion, it’s Personal v. Political”). Feminists who remembered a time when abortion was illegal expressed an urgency to take action that they felt was lacking in later generations. Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote that long-time feminists like NARAL Pro-Choice President Nancy Keenan tend to view reproductive choice “in stark political terms—as a right to be defended, like freedom of speech or freedom of religion.” A later blog post for Newsweek quoted University of Maryland assistant professor Kristy Maddux, who specializes in historical feminism, saying younger women “don’t have any reason to believe that it matters if they go out and protest. Instead, they talk about their positions to friends and neighbors.”
Read MoreWhat were your thoughts, feelings, worries when the Senate passed the health reform bill?
What were your thoughts, feelings, worries this morning when the Senate passed the health reform bill?
This is the question I asked on Facebook this morning and there were so many thoughtful and interesting responses
that I just had to share them here. Please add yours too!
Read MoreTime for Women to Drive Our Own Health Care Bus
Check out this new video from new Women’s Media Center website notunderthebus.com. You can also follow @notunderthebus (or check out hashmark #underthebus) on Twitter, and please become a fan on Facebook. It’s going to be a long drive, but together we can turn this bus around starting today. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUtLTB6zKbo&feature=player_embedded[/youtube] The Senate passed its version…
Read MoreTime for Women to Drive Our Own Health Care Bus
Check out this new video from new Women’s Media Center website notunderthebus.com. You can also follow @notunderthebus (or check out hashmark #underthebus) on Twitter, and please become a fan on Facebook. It’s going to be a long drive, but together we can turn this bus around starting today.
Read MoreAs Senate Continues Health Care Reform Debate, Delaying Tactics Reign
Yesterday’s wrap up report of Senate action from NFPRHA-worth a read to see how the meat grinder of legislation works, and how detrimental the 60-vote rule is to getting anything done. And bless Frank Lautenberg! He just never stops.
December 16, 2009, 5:00 p.m. (EST)
Today, the Senate continued debate on its health care reform bill, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (H.R. 3590). Last night an amendment offered by Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) to provide for the importation of prescription drugs did not garner the necessary 60 votes for passage, so while the vote in favor was 56 — 43, the amendment failed. The Lautenberg amendment was intended to improve upon a similar 
amendment offered by Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) which also failed. Like the Lautenberg amendment, the Dorgan amendment did not get the necessary 60 votes, with the vote in favor only being 51 — 48. A motion by Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID) to recommit the bill (effectively killing the bill by sending it back to the Finance Committee) also failed 45 — 54. An alternative to the Crapo motion, offered by Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) which would protect middle class families from tax increases, passed 97 — 1.
Not Under the Bus This Time
December 10 is Human Rights Day. Appropriately today, there’s a new campaign for women’s human rights that I want to share with you.
On the heels of the Senate’s defeat of anti-abortion measures, Bart Stupak published a defense of his amendment in the New York Times (“What My Amendment Won’t Do.” His aggressive protest clearly illustrates the crusade against women’s rights won’t stop any time soon.
The Women’s Media Center is proud to announce the launch of its new media campaign NotUnderTheBus.com, a platform that amplifies the voices of women and organizations devoted to a health care reform that is fair to women.
NotUnderTheBus.com’s first call to action is to stop the Stupak Amendment, the Hatch-Nelson Amendment, and others like them which are the most draconian restrictions on women since the 1977 Hyde Amendment that cut federal funding for abortions by Medicaid.
NotUnderTheBus.com will serve as an aggregator and media resource center in the fight to safeguard women’s reproductive rights in the national health care reform debate.
Read MoreReclaiming the Means of Reproduction
Lilith Magazine asked me to review Michelle Goldberg’s The Means of Reproduction. The book waspublished earlier this year and at first I thought this review would be a bit dated. As it turns out, given the health reform debate in which women’s reproductive health is once again the battering ram for Republicans who want to kill reform and controversial fodder for the pundits, the subject matter couldn’t be more timely. In particular, Goldberg’s discussion of the damage done globally to women’s health by the Helms amendment shouts the warning about what might well happen in the U.S. if the Stupak-Pitts amendment prevails.
Michelle Goldberg’s captivating book, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (Penguin Press, 2009) is perfectly timed to remind those who came of age post-Roe v Wade and might think they can relax under an Obama administration, just how much work is left to do. An investigative journalist and author previously of Kingdom Coming: the Rise of Christian Nationalism, Goldberg has imbued this long-running story with fresh power by telling it in her young feminist voice.
The Means of Reproduction is a sweeping history of U.S. foreign policy on international family planning that spans four continents and the covers issues such as birth control, abortion, HIV/AIDS, their intersections with environmental concerns and economic development, and the gender politics of all, while staying in intimate touch with how America’s policies affect real women globally.
The story begins during the 1960’s cold war when Republicans like John D. Rockefeller and, yes, George H.W. “Rubbers” Bush led the charge to secure U.S. funding for international family planning, convinced that population pressures threatened national security. Then as now, family planning proponents met predictable adversaries. Goldberg writes, “There is one thing that unites cultural conservatives throughout the world, a critique that joins Protestant fundamentalism, Islamists, Hindu Nationalists, ultra-Orthodox Jews, and ultramontane Catholics. All view women’s equality and self-possession as unnatural, a violation of the established order. Yet in one society after another, we can see the absence of women’s rights creating existential dangers.”
Read MoreThe Democrats’ Dilemma: Their Own Trojan Horse Kicks Free
Democratic leaders have said that the Stupak amendment’s draconian new restrictions on abortion contained in the House health-reform bill will not appear in the final version. Here why voters who value women’s health cannot sit back and accept such assurances. Re-posted here courtesy of the Women’s Media Center which originally posted it as an exclusive and is rolling out a public and media education campaign to help Stop Stupak. But I think stopping the bad is only the first part of what we need to do…
House Democrats broke into a paroxysm of self-congratulation for passing a health reform bill. By embracing the Stupak-Pitts amendment, however, they entered the women’s hall of shame. They had promised no more limitations based on preexisting conditions. But House leadership allowed a codicil: Except if you are a woman.
The Stupak-Pitts amendment to the health bill is a sweeping ban on insurance coverage of abortion. It expands the 1976 Hyde amendment, which outlaws abortion coverage by existing Federally funded programs, to middle class women participating in the public option, even if they pay from their own pocketbooks. Hyde began a juggernaut of restrictions on abortion and birth control that I’d hoped the current health care debate would rectify.
Headlines blaring, “Abortion an Obstacle to Health-Care Bill,” got it backward. And the biggest obstacle was President Obama’s approach, which meshed all too well with Speaker Pelosi’s: they are both so averse to feather-ruffling that one wonders why they entered the rough and tumble of politics in the first place. No amount of Rahm Emmanuel’s mean-guy interference could have kept this chicken’s eggs from breaking, let alone its feathers in place.
Smart as he is, why didn’t Obama know that when you start from a position of compromise, you’ll end up with a fragment of what you wanted, if that? The public option is too weak to exercise serious cost-cutting control. And now women have been sacrificed, like so much detritus, even though we are 51 percent of the population and (in case they haven’t noticed) 60 percent of Democratic voters.
Read MoreUncover (the Truth About) Abortion Coverage to End the Deceptive Health Reform Dance
I wrote this commentary for The Daily Beast–please go there to comment and share too!
I felt that it was way past time for someone to call out the cynical politicians who won’t vote for health reform under any circumstances but are using women’s bodies as a rallying cry to whip up the anti-choice right. Shamefully, President Obama and most of the Democrats are dancing to their tune, and will continue to unless we voters speak out and insist that abortion and other reproductive health care is covered fairly along with other basic medical care.
They named it “The Abortion-Controversy Hoax.” Probably a better, shorter title than mine.
It’s September. Congress will soon return to tackle health care reform, and I can’t help but notice a familiar political two-step. If you want to see whether a politician–Democrat or Republican–can cut a rug, just ask him or her about abortion. They’ll swing around faster than Tom DeLay on Dancing With the Stars.
Partisans on the right mobbed town halls during the August recess to exploit abortion and women’s health, whipping up controversy around President Obama’s health reform plan. Twisted logic and deliberate misinformation abound in a YouTube ad campaign by the Family Research Council, which, along with other anti-choice groups, also launched a paid media blitz claiming Obama’s health reform plan would pull Granny’s plug while covering abortion—ignoring that most of us grannies want to make advance directives and would be quite grateful if our health plans covered the service.
Meanwhile, Democrats were doing a dance of their own and, without Senator Ted Kennedy to lead them toward their higher principles, tried unsuccessfully to waltz away from the hot-button issue with the Blue Dogs to whom they owe their souls and their majority. No wonder voters are increasingly questioning Obama’s plan.
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