“We Need To Support All The Troops”: Military Women In Line To Get Same Rights As Civilian Women
If you’re a member of the U.S. military and you happen to be a woman, you might think you were entitled to the full range of health care allowed your civilian counterparts. But you would be wrong. That’s why Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., crafted an amendment to the National Defense Appropriation Act that would grant, according to the Ms. magazine Web site:
the same rights as civilian women under federal policies that provide affordable abortion care to women who are the victims of rape or incest. Under the current policy, servicewomen are only eligible for abortion care if the woman’s life is at risk.
On Thursday, just in time for the Memorial Day weekend, the Senate Armed Services Committee approved the amendment by a 16-10 vote. The measure must next move to the Senate floor, and faces an uncertain future if, as expected, the appropriations bill goes to a joint conference. (The House bill is not expected to include a similar provision.)
Currently, abortions are forbidden to military personnel unless they are victims of sexual assault or the pregnancy endangers their lives. But if the pregnancy is the result of a rape the soldier, sailor or Marine must pay for her own abortion — a cost that can be prohibitive on a military paycheck. And in a war zone, a woman in uniform will likely find no civilian medical professionals available to her who will perform the procedure.
This is all the more galling when one considers the epidemic of sexual assault against military women that continues to grip the armed forces — assaults perpetrated by men who are supposed to be their comrades.
In 2009, reporting for CBS News, Katie Couric delivered this statistic:
One in three female soldiers will experience sexual assault while serving in the military, compared to one in six women in the civilian world.
And the numbers haven’t changed much. Because of the stigma attached to reporting one’s rape by a fellow soldier, it’s not unheard of for a woman made pregnant through rape to try to self abort. (For one account, see Kathryn Joyce’s outstanding 2009 article, “Military Abortion Ban: Female Soldiers Not Protected by Constitution They Defend,” at Religion Dispatches.)
If Congress really wants to show its appreciation to all of our troops, it will pass the appropriations bill with the Shaheen amendment in tact. But with this Congress, whose freshmen claim to love, love them some Constitution, military women will likely learn the limits of the right-wing version of the U.S. Constitution. (Now, what do you need all those rights, for, little lady?)
By: Adele Stan, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 26, 2012
“A Common Enemy”: Why Is It That Only Women Need Informing On Reproductive Health?
Legislators from Arizona to Virginia want women to undergo often invasive procedures before having a legal abortion, since the lawmakers are convinced that the women don’t really understand what they are doing. And leaders in the Catholic Church, which opposes contraception, are fighting Obama administration rules requiring employers (including those affiliated with the church, although not the church itself) to include birth control in their healthcare plans. The battles—which many of us thought had been fought and resolved decades ago—have caused dissension over religious freedom versus religious dictate, and on the role of government in people’s lives.
Sometimes it takes a common enemy to unite people otherwise diametrically opposed on such an emotional issue. And for that, we have Desmond Hatchett.
Hatchett is the 33-year-old Tennessee man who has fathered 30 children with 11 different women. He has a minimum wage job, and is asking a judge for a break on his child support. Under the law, half of his earnings must go to support the children, and because his earnings are so low, according to local news reports, some of the women receive as little as $1.49 a month in child support. Hatchett told an interviewer who wondered how he managed to help conceive so many children that he had had four kids in one year—”twice,” he added.
Really, legislators and church elders. Do you really think it’s women whose sexuality and sexual behavior needs to be controlled?
There’s surely some sort of medical or psychological term for people who have children for their own sake, with little regard for the health and welfare of the children (not to mention the taxpayers who well might end up supporting them). It’s a special kind of narcissism, the desire for notoriety combined with the self-centered drive to keep replicating your gene pool all over the place. The judgment of the women who got pregnant by this man is also in question (or maybe their healthcare plans don’t cover birth control?), but Hatchett is a special case. At least the women are limited by basic biology to the number of children they can bear in a particular time frame.
So, legislators and radio talk show hosts: The next time you want to wring your hands over the women you consider (or call) misguided, uninformed about their own bodies, or even just plan sluts and prostitutes, have a sit-down with Hatchett. Perhaps he might have benefited from a precarnal video explaining the consequences of his actions.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, May 24, 2012
“Decimation Of Health Care For The Poor And Uninsured”: Mitt Romney Puts Women’s Lives At Risk
If you want to see what women’s health care in America will be like if Mitt Romney becomes president, just look at Texas and Arizona.
Both states are in the news these past few weeks for trying to prevent women from getting health care at Planned Parenthood. It’s wrong, and it will have devastating consequences for women for years to come—and Mitt Romney wants to do it in all 50 states.
Romney said in November that he wants to eliminate the nation’s family-planning program, which was signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1970 and provides essential preventive health services to more than 5 million people a year, the vast majority of whom are poor and uninsured.
Beyond the millions of people who are helped by this health-care program, investing in family planning saves the government money—for every dollar spent on family planning, experts say taxpayers save around $4.
Romney said in March that, if elected president, he would “get rid of” Planned Parenthood. He clarified his remarks to say he would end federal funding for Planned Parenthood. Either way, he would seek to dismantle a nationwide network of community-based health centers that one in five American women rely on for care at some point in their lives.
This isn’t about abortion. These health-care programs provide blood pressure and cholesterol monitoring, flu shots, breast-cancer screenings, Pap tests, and birth control. Planned Parenthood is the only medical care many women receive all year.
Michele Azzaro knows what Mitt Romney’s America would look like—because she’s already experiencing it in Texas.
Azzaro has been a Planned Parenthood patient in Dallas for more than 20 years. Planned Parenthood was there when she had a breast-cancer scare, and her local health center has been there when she needs her yearly cholesterol test.
Last year, Texas drastically cut its family-planning funding, the same way Mitt Romney says he would cut federal funding. Michele lost access to annual breast screenings and the birth-control pills she needs to manage her painful uterine fibroids.
She isn’t alone.
An estimated 160,000 women lost their health care when Texas slashed its family-planning program last year. Now, the state is trying to throw more women off health care by taking Planned Parenthood out of the state’s Women’s Health Program. Planned Parenthood health centers provide care to 52,000 women in the program.
Texas’s program provides low-income working women in Texas with lifesaving cancer screenings, well-woman exams, contraception, screenings for diabetes and high blood pressure, and testing for sexually transmitted infections. The program was sponsored and implemented by Republicans less than a decade ago—an indication of how far to the right some in the party have gone in just a few years.
Planned Parenthood sued the state in federal court in order to continue providing these critical health services to women, and last week a federal appeals court blocked the state’s effort to deny women the health care they rely on at Planned Parenthood while the lawsuit proceeds.
Meanwhile, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer recently signed legislation that cuts state funding for Planned Parenthood’s preventive care. The new law could cut 4,000 women off from the health care they need.
What’s happening in Texas and Arizona isn’t about Planned Parenthood. It’s about Michele Azzaro—and the 3 million people a year who rely on us for cancer screenings, birth control, and well-woman exams.
Our patients aren’t making a political statement when they come to Planned Parenthood. But they’re not afraid to make a political statement to keep the health care they rely on when they vote in November.
“Politics Over Common Sense”: Jan Brewer’s Abortion Grenade, Defunding Planned Parenthood
Arizona’s governor threw yet another political volley at Planned Parenthood Friday night, inking a law aimed at preventing thousands of women on state Medicaid rolls from accessing family-planning services—including breast exams and pap smears—from organizations that also offer abortions.
Jan Brewer signed HB 2800 into law at a gathering of the Susan B. Anthony List, a group that claims on its website that its “grassroots activists” are “on the front lines in the battle to defund America’s abortion giant—Planned Parenthood.”
The bill drew swift reaction from former U.S. surgeon general Richard Carmona, Arizona’s Democratic candidate for senator. At an opening of his campaign office in Phoenix on Saturday, Carmona told The Daily Beast that “anything we do to diminish access of health care to women” is bad policy.
A longtime preventive-health-care advocate, Carmona said in a statement released today: “This is an example of how politics and overheated rhetoric get in the way of common sense. Planned Parenthood provides a vast array of women’s health care services, often reaching under-served communities where health and economic disparities make access to quality care difficult.”
Bryan Howard, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Arizona, struck a similar note, telling The Daily Beast that the intent of the law is to “score political points” and “demonize” Planned Parenthood to “appease certain segments of the voting public.”
The law will reduce Planned Parenthood’s clients by about 10 percent. About 4,000 women on Medicaid, out of a total of 40,000-45,000 patients overall, visit the organization’s 14 Arizona offices, Howard said.
But the law will likely also impact thousands more who may seek family-planning services from Planned Parenthood when the Affordable Health Care for America Act takes full effect in 2014.
As late as last month, Medicaid officials were still trying to figure out the economic ramifications of the bill, according to The Arizona Republic. Officials were not available for comment on Saturday.
In a statement released in the wake of the ceremonial bill signing, Brewer said: “This is a common-sense law that tightens existing state regulations and closes loopholes in order to ensure that taxpayer dollars are not used to fund abortions, whether directly or indirectly.”
Asked about the political strategy behind signing the bill alongside the Susan B. Anthony List, the governor’s spokesman, Matthew Benson, wrote in an email: “Susan B. Anthony List is one of the nation’s most prominent supporters of pro-life elected officials, and HB 2800 was a high priority of the group. It only made sense to sign the measure into law in front of this group and its members.”
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the Susan B. Anthony List donates mostly to Republicans. It contributed $511,416 to Rick Santorum’s presidential campaign in 2012, and in 2010 donated about $23,000 to attempt to defeat congressional Democratic pro-choice candidates Gabrielle Giffords, Raul Grijalva, and Ann Kirkpatrick. (Kirkpatrick lost; the other two won their bids.)
Brewer held off signing the HB 2800 until Tea Party legislators passed one of her top priorities: a bill that would make it easier for her to fire and discipline state employees.
Planned Parenthood is considering a legal challenge as its next step. It’s not “acceptable,” Howard said, to have the state prohibit women from choosing where they want to get birth control.
By: Terry Greene Sterling, The Daily Beast, May 5, 2012
“Perfectly Equal Already”: GOP Tries To Protect The “Sanctity Of Traditional Domestic Violence”
Republicans still can’t decide whether there is a War on Caterpillars Women, or whether President Obama started it, or whether it’s a fictional invention of the media or the Democrats, or whether it’s a Democratic War on Women Ann Romney.
This week, Michele Bachmann said, “There is no war on women. There’s never been a war on women.” Which is either on or off message, depending on the day. For example, Sen. John McCain on Meet the Press, March 20, 2012:
GREGORY: Do you think that there is something of a war on women among Republicans?McCAIN: I think we have to fix that. I think that there is a perception out there because of how this whole contraception issue played out — ah, we need to get off of that issue, in my view.
But this week, during a Senate debate on reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, McCain flip-flopped on the problem he’d previously acknowledged. He took to the floor to make his case while his party launched an unprecedented opposition because they don’t like the part where it includes protection for immigrants, lesbians and Native American women. Or, as Melissa McEwan (aka Shakespeare’s Sister) brilliantly described it, “Protect the sanctity of traditional domestic violence!”
While McCain ultimately voted to reauthorize the act, he first had to spend more than 10 minutes explaining why women are perfectly equal already and, just as his fellow Republican Bachmann claimed, the War on Women is mere fiction:
My friends, this supposed “War on Women” or the use of similarly outlandish rhetoric by partisan operatives has two purposes, and both are political in their purpose and effect. The first, purely political; the first is to distract citizens from real issues that really matter, and the second is to give talking heads something to sputter about when they appear on cable television. Neither purpose does anything to advance the well being of any American. […]To suggest that one group of us or one party speaks for all women or that one group has an agenda to harm women and another to help them is ridiculous if for no other reason than it assumes a unity of interests, beliefs, concerns, experiences and ambition among all women that doesn’t exist among men or among any race or class. […]
Thankfully, I believe men and women of our country are smart enough to recognize that when a politician or political party resorts to dividing us in the name of bringing us together, it usually means that they’re either out of ideas or short on resolve to address the challenges of our time. At this time in our nation’s history, we face an abundance of hard choices. The vicious slogans and the declaring of phony wars are intended to avoid those hard choices and to escape paying a political price for doing so. […]
Leaving these problems unaddressed indefinitely and resorting to provoking greater divisions among us at a time when we most need unity might not be a war against this or that group of Americans, but it is surely a surrender: a surrender of our responsibilities to the country and a surrender of decency.
Apparently, Mitt Romney’s flip-flopping is contagious, and John McCain has a bad case of it.
As I previously wrote, and as readers of this series well know, Republicans can deny it all they want, but there is a War on Women. It’s real, and it’s dangerous, and it’s not about zingers and slogans:
It’s about a constant legislative assault by the Republican Party, at the state and federal level, on women’s equality and basic rights, from health care to equal pay to funding programs to combat violence against women. Women aren’t stupid, even if Republicans, like Herman Cain, insist that “men are much more familiar with the failed policies than a lot of other people.”
Despite the best efforts of the 31 Republicans (yes, all men) who voted against it, the Senate passed the not-watered-down Violence Against Women Act. Next stop is the House, so tell your representatives to pass the Violence Against Women Act.
By: Kaili Joy Gray, Daily Kos, April 28, 2012
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