“Standard GOP Policy”: Why Is Mitt Romney Outraged At Todd Akin And Not At Paul Ryan?
Mitt Romney is outraged! He’s insulted! He’s offended!
Why? A Republican Senate candidate dared to state a position on choice that is exactly the same as that of Romney’s own running mate.
Missouri Rep. Todd Akin is attracting plenty of attention for his bizarre and idiotic justification for refusing to allow rape victims to have abortions. But the extreme policy position behind those comments – a policy that is the GOP standard — should be getting just as much attention.
Akin explained this weekend how rape victims shouldn’t be allowed reproductive choice because they already have access to some mysterious anti-pregnancy control system: “First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
Romney responded today in an interview with the National Review:
“Congressman’s Akin comments on rape are insulting, inexcusable, and, frankly, wrong,” Romney said. “Like millions of other Americans, we found them to be offensive.”
“I have an entirely different view,” Romney said. “What he said is entirely without merit and he should correct it.”
What is Romney’s “entirely different view”? That Rep. Akin doesn’t have a basic understanding of the female anatomy that he’s so interested in legislating? That Akin feels the need to draw a distinction between “legitimate rape” and “illegitimate rape”? That Akin thinks rape victims shouldn’t be able to choose whether to carry their rapists’ children?
Romney should start by directing his outrage at his own running mate. Rep. Paul Ryan not only opposes abortion rights for rape victims, he was a cosponsor of a so-called “personhood” amendment that would have classified abortion as first degree murder and outlawed common types of birth control. Ryan has also bought into the “legitimate rape” nonsense, cosponsoring legislation with Akin that would have limited federal services to victims of “forcible rape” – a deliberate attempt to write out some victims of date rape and statutory rape.
Romney himself has flirted with the “personhood” idea, telling Mike Huckabee during the primary that he’d “absolutely” support such a measure. When he was later confronted about the comment at a town hall meeting, it became clear that Romney had no idea how the process he wanted to legislate actually worked.
And Romney hasn’t always been keen to stand up for the victims of rape. In a Republican debate in February, he actually got in an argument with Newt Gingrich over who was least in favor of requiring hospitals to provide emergency contraception to rape victims they were treating.
Now the Romney campaign is trying to distance itself from Akin by saying that “a Romney-Ryan administration would not oppose abortion in instances of rape.” But Romney has also vowed to nominate Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, returning to states the power to outlaw or allow abortion as they choose. If Romney and anti-choice activists get their wish from the Supreme Court, a Romney-Ryan administration would have no power to stop states from imposing whichever abortion bans they decide to impose. The promise to carve out an exception for rape victims is not a promise they would be able to keep.
The real scandal of Rep. Akin’s comments isn’t the faulty sex-ed he’s teaching. Instead, his comments expose the anti-choice movement’s skewed and condescending view of women. Akin can’t accept that a woman who fits his definition of virtue – the victim of a “legitimate rape” – would also need to seek an abortion, and he has made up false science to support that assumption. But with or without the weird right-wing science, that same false distinction underlies all anti-choice policies – including those embraced by Romney and Ryan.
Romney can feign all the outrage he wants at Rep. Akin’s misogynistic pseudo-science. But until he can draw a clear distinction between Akin’s policies and his own, his protests will ring hollow.
By: Michael B. Keegan, President, People For the American Way, The Huffington Post, August 20, 2012
“What Women Don’t Want”: Paul Ryan’s Budget Deals A Body Blow To Women’s Bottom Line
You’d have to live under a rock to miss the news on Saturday morning that Mitt Romney has picked Congressman Paul Ryan to be his running mate. The announcement immediately kicked up a flurry of speculation: what does Ryan bring to the ticket that Romney wants? One thing he does not bring: women’s votes. Mitt Romney has been dogged by a problem with female voters, lagging in their support far behind President Obama, particularly among single women. But where Romney has been vague and flip-floppish on many issues, Ryan has long been very clear about his staunch support for policies that will hurt women economically.
Most people know Paul Ryan for his budget plans. There’s plenty of pain to be found in his budget for the lower and middle class, but women in particular make out poorly (literally) if his budget gets a presidential signature. Add in other policies he’s proposed or supported, and the picture becomes even bleaker. Here’s why:
1. Medicaid is crucial to women’s health. It provides coverage to nearly 19 million low-income women, meaning that they make up 70 percent of the program’s beneficiaries. Any slashing of Medicaid’s rolls will therefore fall heavily on their shoulders.
And Paul Ryan’s policies would do just that. Ryan’s budget slashes Medicaid by more than twenty percent over the next ten years and turns it into a block grant to states, letting them spend the money as they wish – as opposed to the current form in which states have to follow certain rules in how the money is spent. The Urban Institute estimated that the block grant plan alone would lead states to drop between 14 and 27 million people from Medicaid by 2021.
On top of that, Ryan’s budget repeals the Affordable Care Act, and with it the Medicaid expansion that some states are already threatening to refuse. Without that expansion, 17 million people will be left without Medicaid coverage. Women will again be hurt by this outcome: 13.5 million were expected to get health insurance coverage under the expansion by 2016. A Ryan budget would ensure they stay unprotected.
2. Social Security is another crucial safety net program that women disproportionately rely on. It is virtually the only source of income for about a third of female beneficiaries over 65. (Compare that to less than a quarter of men.) Without it, half of those women would live in poverty.
Ryan’s budgets haven’t called for specific cuts to the program, although his first version favorably cited the cuts proposed by the Simpson-Bowles report. But before he was known for chart-filled budgets, he put his name to a plan to partially privatize Social Security by having workers divert about half of their Social Security payroll-tax contribution to a private retirement account. Remember how well 401(k)s fared during the recent financial crisis when stocks took a nosedive? That could happen again – and the women who rely on Social Security benefits could be left without anything to fall back on.
3. One more big social safety net program that women rely on: Medicare. The majority of Medicare beneficiaries are women, and twice as many women over age 65 live in poverty as compared to men.
Ryan’s budget plan would raise the eligibility age for Medicare to sixty-seven while repealing the ACA, leaving those between ages sixty-five and sixty-seven with neither Medicare nor access to health insurance exchanges or subsidies to help them buy coverage. That will leave low-income people with nowhere to turn except the pricey private insurance market at an age when health care is crucially important. Come 2023 his plan would also replace Medicare’s guarantee of health coverage with payments to the elderly to buy coverage from private companies or traditional Medicare. The problem is that the payments would increase so slowly that spending on the average sixty-seven-year-old by 2050 could be reduced by as much as forty percent as compared to now. That’s not going to go very far toward getting the elderly health coverage.
4. There are other huge pieces of the social safety net that women rely on that Ryan would unravel if given the chance. Beyond all the above cuts, his budget plan would spend about sixteen percent less than President Obama’s budget on programs for the poor. This includes slashing SNAP, or food stamps, by $133.5 billion, more than seventeen percent all told, over the next decade.
According to the National Women’s Law Center, women were over sixty percent of adult SNAP recipients and over sixty-five percent of elderly recipients in 2010. Plus over half of all households that rely on SNAP benefits were headed by a single adult – and over ninety percent of them were women.
5. His budget would also cut TANF, the program that replaced welfare, and Supplemental Security Income by $463 billion. Nearly nine in ten adult beneficiaries of TANF were women in 2009 – over eighty-five percent.
6. Given that his budget plan gets over 60 percent of the $5.3 trillion in nondefense budget cuts from support for low-income Americans, there are a host of other programs women rely on that would see huge cuts. Child care assistance, Head Start, job training and housing and energy assistance would likely see a $291 billion cut. Cuts to childcare and Head Start will disproportionately impact working mothers. But other programs also greatly benefit women. Take housing support. The Housing Choice Voucher program provides families with rental assistance, and over 80 percent of households receiving that support are headed by women.
7. There are plenty of other ways that Ryan’s ultra conservative views could impact women financially beyond his severe budget and policy proposals. His views on contraception are from another century. He’s against the ACA’s mandate that religious employers provide insurance coverage for birth control. He’s also opposed to federally funded family planning services. He voted to deny birth control coverage to federal employees in 1999 and has voted at least four times to defund Planned Parenthood, a key provider of contraceptives, particularly for low-income women. He also supports the “personhood” movement, which writes bills defining conception as the beginning of life that would likely outlaw some forms of birth control.
This is not just a social issue. This is an economic issue for millions of women. Research has shown a clear link between women’s ability to control their fertility thanks to contraception and increased female employment. In 1950, 18 million women were in the workforce. Since then, the pill has become widely available and widely used, and that number has tripled to 66 million. Ryan threatens to set us back by at least half a century and make it that much harder for women to get into the workforce.
8. On top of this, he’s no supporter of equal pay for equal work, voting against the Lilly Ledbetter Act, which gives women more time to file lawsuits when they believe they’ve been discriminated against by an employer. The gender wage gap means that the typical woman loses $431,000 over a forty-year career as compared to her male peers.
On Feministing, Vanessa Valenti points out that there are plenty of other ways that Paul Ryan’s policies are a nightmare for the country’s women – from opposing Roe v. Wade to voting against marriage equality to being terrible on immigration issues. One thing is for sure: if Romney’s new running mate is voted in as second in command and his ideas guide the next administration, women can expect a lot of economic pain.
By: Bryce Covert, The Nation, August 13, 2012
“The Tent Has Collapsed”: Former Republican Congresswoman Blasts Modern GOP Approach To Women’s Issues
Over her eight terms as a Congresswoman from Maryland’s Eight District, Connie Morella earned a reputation one of the strongest voices for women’s rights and reproductive choice in the Republican Party. A bipartisan-minded moderate, she worked with members of both parties to shepherd the 2000 re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act through the House with a 415 to 3 majority. Like former Sen. John Danforth(R-MO), she hardly recognizes her party today.
In an interview with ThinkProgress, Morella expressed disappointment with the anti-women voting record of the 24-member Republican Women’s Policy Committee and the lack of bipartisan House support for the Senate version of the Violence Against Women Act.
Among her observations:
On the GOP’s move to the right:
I think the [Republican] Party has moved more towards the right and it has become more solidified in terms of not offering opportunities for other voices to be heard. Look at [Indiana Republican Senate Nominee Richard] Mourdock’s statement when he proclaimed victory: I’m not going to give into them, they’re going to come over to me. The word compromise is not even in the lexicon, let alone an understanding of what it means.On moderates in Congress:
I went to Harvard in 2008. My program’s theme was “An Endangered Species: A Moderate in the House of Representatives.” If I were to go back now, I think I’d have to say “An Extinct Species,” not endangered, extinct.On the GOP-only Women’s Policy Committee:
I’ve always said that when you look at Congress, you had more bipartisanship with Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues. The number of issues has gotten smaller… I was the prime sponsor in 2000 of the Violence Against Women Act, when it was reauthorized… On the floor, there was hardly a vote against it. And now, I don’t know why these women have been cornered, so to speak. Maybe they are motivated by the fact that this is an election year — and in a presidential election particularly, they want to act to counter the concept of the War on Women. That’s why they’re coming up with their own caucus, I suppose. I’ve always felt [the women’s caucus] needed to be bipartisan… I think it’s a defensive attempt on the part of this caucus, because they’re concerned.On a backlash for the GOP’s votes on women’s issues:
Women are a majority of the voting bloc. If they sense that some of the equities they worked so hard for are being taken away, you’ll see a backlash.
While she thinks the economy will be the biggest issue in the 2012 elections, she warns that if House Republicans insist on a Violence Against Women Act that says “except certain women,” it could hurt the party in November.
Morella says she’s disappointed with where the Republican Party has gone. “If I were there, I’d be one of the minorities voting against the party. There’s no big tent, not even a small tent. It collapsed.”
By: Josh Israel, Think Progress, May 25, 2012
“Pro-Corporate, Anti-Mammary Agenda”: Why MItt Romney Is No Fan Of Breastfeeding
When it comes to moms and their babies, Romney has been hungry to suckle at the corporate teat.
Breastfeeding is having another moment. Thanks to Time magazine’s creepy cover pic of young mom Jamie Lynne Grumet nursing her three-year-old son, the nation has once again gone tits-up over how mothers opt to feed their young. The choice is not an easy one: As previous Mother Jones parents will attest, there’s an enormous emotional and physical cost to breastfeeding. On the other hand, mother’s milk doesn’t contain secret toxic chemicals, put babies at increased risk for diabetes and asthma, or enrich already-bloated pharmaceutical companies to the tune of $8 billion a year.
One person doesn’t seem very conflicted about favoring formula, though: Mitt Romney. As Massachusetts governor, he took steps friendly to Big Pharma that helped push pre-fab formulas on new moms. Romney’s pro-corporate, anti-mammary agenda could now have implications as he struggles to convince a key constituency of female voters that he’s got their interests at heart.
Romney’s role goes back to early 2006, when Massachusetts’ Public Health Council tried to ban so-called baby swag bags, totes full of free supplies that were given to new mothers as they left their delivery hospitals. Formula manufacturers had stuffed the bags with samples and coupons; the panel worried that the moms would see that as a hospital endorsement of less-healthy formulas and would influence the moms to miss out on the medical and financial benefits of breastfeeding.
“The marketing of infant formula undermines the initiative to nurse,” Phyllis Cudmore, a council member, told the Boston Globe. “I don’t think there’s any place in a hospital for corporate America trying to influence a vulnerable population.” A pediatric expert at Boston University’s medical school added: ”The commercial stuff like gift bags—it’s like Pepsi-Cola in the schools.” (Statistics show three-fourths of moms start out nursing their kids, but fewer than half are still breastfeeding after six months.)
Romney was having none of it, decrying the swag ban as “the heavy arm of government” squeezing dear ol’ ma. “I think that the mother should have the right to decide whether she is going to use infant formula or breast-feed,” he said in a press conference. “And allowing her to make that decision is best [done] by letting her have the formula, and if she wants to use it, fine.”
By May 2006, Romney had removed three anti-swag council members, including Cudmore, and added new ones who permanently reversed the ban. Shortly thereafter, in early June, Romney’s administration proudly announced that Massachusetts had beaten out three other states to get a $660 million facility for pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers Squibb—parent company to the manufacturer of Enfamil, one of the country’s biggest-selling infant formulas.
Peeved breastfeeding proponents started a website, banthebags.org, to press for Massachusetts to restore the Public Health Council’s ban. That in turn prompted the formula industry to start its own astroturf sites: momsfeedingfreedom.com and babyfeedingchoice.org. “The decision to breastfeed or bottle feed is personal, practical, and private,” momsfeedingfreedom.com states on a page decrying the bag-ban. “These ‘3 P’s’ are the reason that Moms Feeding Freedom was created!”
But the site doesn’t add who created it: It was registered in 2007 by a web marketer, ENilsson LLC, with “a grant from the International Formula Council.” That same year, ENilsson worked on Mitt Romney’s nascent presidential campaign. The firm’s founder, Erik Nillson, is now a major developer of GOP fundraising technology. And he’s continuing to support Romney’s election efforts.
Romney’s connections to the breastfeeding issue would seem to suggest that he is less about giving moms choices than about giving corporations greater revenue streams. “Distributing free formula in the hospital is not about empowering women, helping them make informed choices or providing them with needed resources in tough economic times—all arguments made by supporters of the free samples,” Elizabeth Mitchell Armstrong, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University, recently wrote in the New York Times. “Companies provide them for the same reason they distribute swag to celebrities: it drives sales.”
Indeed, between Romney’s recent missteps on women’s issues and his past maneuvering on breastfeeding, voting moms may decide that the GOP presidential hopeful has suckled at the corporate teat a little too long.
By: Adam Weinstein, Mother Jones, May 17, 2012
“Spewing Horsepucky”: Dear Republicans, Contraception Is An Economic Issue
Republicans on the Sunday talk show circuit spent a lot of time insisting that contraception isn’t a real issue for women voters, that it’s unimportant and will take a back seat to the economy. Colorado Republican Chair Ryan Call said much the same thing on a local Colorado political show Friday night when he insisted access to contraception was a “small issue.”
Horsepucky. There is no more fundamental economic issue for women than determining if and when they will have children. Fertility is destiny. The Pill was the catalyst for the sexual revolution and the full entry of women into the American workforce because, for the first time in history, women could themselves control their own reproduction. Approximately 99 percent of reproductive age American women have used birth control—and something used by almost every woman in America isn’t a small issue, it’s huge.
A March 6, 2012 blog post in the New York Times, “The Economic Impact of the Pill”, summed it up:
Those changes have had enormous impacts on the economy, studies show: increasing the number of women in the labor force, raising the number of hours that women work and giving women access to traditionally male and highly lucrative professions in fields like law and medicine.
A study by Martha J. Bailey, Brad Hershbein and Amalia R. Miller helps assign a dollar value to those tectonic shifts. For instance, they show that young women who won access to the pill in the 1960s ended up earning an 8 percent premium on their hourly wages by age 50.
Such trends have helped narrow the earnings gap between men and women. Indeed, the paper suggests that the pill accounted for 30 percent—30 percent!—of the convergence of men’s and women’s earnings from 1990 to 2000.
Republicans have also argued that when it comes to reproductive healthcare, affordability and access are two separate issues. Right, and I suppose Dick Cheney paid for his six-figure heart transplant by washing dishes in the hospital commissary. Furthermore, pregnancy prevention programs, including subsidized contraception, save taxpayers money—anywhere from $2 to $6 for every $1 spent, according to a study by a Brookings Institution scholar.
Republican strategist Alex Castellanos, a repeat winner for the Mad Men Chauvinist of the Week Award, undermined his own spin on Meet the Press when he falsely stated that women don’t earn less than men do. Some single women without children are able to close the income gap in some metropolitan areas for precisely that reason—they don’t have kids, and can replicate men’s hours at the office. Women with children often fall behind economically because they’re working a double-shift, at home and at work, and our child care system in this country is wildly inadequate.
Contraception isn’t just a big issue to women voters, it’s obviously a big issue to Republicans, despite their protest to the contrary now that it’s costing them with women voters. It’s big enough that they threatened to shut down the entire U.S. government over it last spring. It’s big enough that Republican governors like Mitch Daniels have made defunding Planned Parenthood a top priority, as has their presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Romney even wants to eliminate federal funding for Title X, which provides family planning funding for five million low-income Americans.
Which begs the question: If contraception is key to women’s economics, why are Republicans trying to keep women from getting it?
By: Laura Chapin, U. S. News and World Report, April 30, 2012
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