“A Major Step Backwards”: How Mitt Romney Would Treat Women
In this year’s campaign furor over a supposed “war on women,” involving birth control and abortion, the assumption is that the audience worrying about these issues is just women.
Give us a little credit. We men aren’t mercenaries caring only for Y chromosomes. We have wives and daughters, mothers and sisters, and we have a pretty intimate stake in contraception as well.
This isn’t like a tampon commercial on television, leaving men awkwardly examining their fingernails. When it comes to women’s health, men as well as women need to pay attention. Just as civil rights wasn’t just a “black issue,” women’s rights and reproductive health shouldn’t be reduced to a “women’s issue.”
To me, actually, talk about a “war on women” in the United States seems a bit hyperbolic: in Congo or Darfur or Afghanistan, I’ve seen brutal wars on women, involving policies of rape or denial of girls’ education. But whatever we call it, something real is going on here at home that would mark a major setback for American women — and the men who love them.
On these issues, Mitt Romney is no moderate. On the contrary, he is considerably more extreme than President George W. Bush was. He insists, for example, on cutting off money for cancer screenings conducted by Planned Parenthood.
The most toxic issue is abortion, and what matters most for that is Supreme Court appointments. The oldest justice is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a 79-year-old liberal, and if she were replaced by a younger Antonin Scalia, the balance might shift on many issues, including abortion.
One result might be the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which for nearly four decades has guaranteed abortion rights. If it is overturned, abortion will be left to the states — and in Mississippi or Kansas, women might end up being arrested for obtaining abortions.
Frankly, I respect politicians like Paul Ryan who are consistently anti-abortion, even in cases of rape or incest. I disagree with them, but their position is unpopular and will cost them votes, so it’s probably heartfelt as well as courageous. I have less respect for Romney, whose positions seem based only on political calculations.
Romney’s campaign Web site takes a hard line. It says that life begins at conception, and it gives no hint of exceptions in which he would permit abortion. The Republican Party platform likewise offers no exceptions. Romney says now that his policy is to oppose abortion with three exceptions: rape, incest and when the life of the mother is at stake.
If you can figure out Romney’s position on abortion with confidence, tell him: at times it seems he can’t remember it. In August, he abruptly added an exception for the health of the mother as well as her life, and then he backed away again.
Romney has also endorsed a “personhood” initiative treating a fertilized egg as a legal person. That could lead to murder charges for an abortion, even to save the life of a mother.
In effect, Romney seems to have jumped on board a Republican bandwagon to tighten access to abortion across the board. States passed a record number of restrictions on abortion in the last two years. In four states, even a woman who is seeking an abortion after a rape may be legally required to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound.
If politicians want to reduce the number of abortions, they should promote family planning and comprehensive sex education. After all, about half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which conducts research on reproductive health.
Yet Romney seems determined to curb access to contraceptives. His campaign Web site says he would “eliminate Title X family planning funding,” a program created in large part by two Republicans, George H. W. Bush and Richard Nixon.
Romney has boasted that he would cut off all money for Planned Parenthood — even though federal assistance for the organization has nothing to do with abortions. It pays for such things as screenings to reduce breast cancer and cervical cancer.
Romney’s suspicion of contraception goes way back. As governor of Massachusetts, he vetoed a bill that would have given women who were raped access to emergency contraception.
Romney also wants to reinstate the “global gag rule,” which barred family planning money from going to aid organizations that even provided information about abortion. He would cut off money for the United Nations Population Fund, whose work I’ve seen in many countries — supporting contraception, repairing obstetric fistulas, and fighting to save the lives of women dying in childbirth.
So when you hear people scoff that there’s no real difference between Obama and Romney, don’t believe them.
And it’s not just women who should be offended at the prospect of a major step backward. It’s all of us.
By: Nicholas D. Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, November 3, 2012
“His Position Is Our Position”: 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, The Huffington Post Blog, October 20, 2012
“Extreme Positions On Everything”: Republicans Scaring The Voters In The Middle
The claims of Representative Todd Akin that women don’t get pregnant from “legitimate rape” now live in infamy. But a few things you may not know:
If an American woman in uniform is raped and becomes pregnant, Congress bars Tricare military insurance from paying for an abortion.
If an American woman in the Peace Corps becomes pregnant, Congress bars coverage of an abortion — and there is no explicit exception even if she is raped or her life is in danger.
When teenagers in places like Darfur, Congo or Somalia survive gang rapes, aid organizations cannot use American funds to provide an abortion.
A record number of states have curbed abortions in the last two years. According to the Guttmacher Institute, which follows reproductive health, 55 percent of American women of reproductive age now live in one of the 26 states deemed “hostile to abortion rights.”
The Republican campaign platform denounces contraceptive education in schools. Instead, it advises kids to abstain from sex until marriage.
All this boggles the mind. Republican leaders in 2012 have a natural winning issue — the limping economy — but they seem determined to scare away centrist voters with extremist positions on everything from abortion to sex education.
Most Americans do not fit perfectly into “pro-choice” or “pro-life” camps. Polls show that about one-fifth want abortion to be legal in all situations, and another one-fifth want abortion to be illegal always. The majority fall somewhere between, and these voters are the ones who decide elections.
Bill Clinton won their support with his pragmatic formula that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.” Then social conservatives won ground with a shrewd strategic decision to focus the abortion debate where they had the edge.
They fought battles over extremely rare procedures they called “partial-birth abortion.” They called for parental consent when a girl seeks an abortion, and for 24-hour waiting periods before an abortion. In polls, around two out of three Americans favor those kinds of restrictions.
But change the situation, and people are more in favor of abortion rights. Four out of five Americans believe that a woman should be able to get an abortion if her health is endangered, or if the pregnancy is the result of rape.
So it’s astonishing that Republicans would adopt an absolutist platform condemning abortion without offering an exception even for rape.
Mitt Romney insists that his position on abortion is crystal clear. In fact, his policy is so muddled that he doesn’t seem to know it himself. So, Mr. Romney, let me help you out.
On your campaign Web site, you say that life begins at conception and that you favor overturning Roe v. Wade. As with the Republican Party platform, you give no indication there that you favor an exception for rape or to save a woman’s life.
Likewise, you seemed to endorse a “personhood” initiative like the one in Mississippi last year that would have treated a fertilized egg as a legal person. It failed because of concerns that an abortion, even to save a woman’s life, could be legally considered murder. It might also have banned in vitro fertilization and some forms of birth control.
These days, Mr. Romney, as you seek general-election voters, you insist that you do, in fact, accept abortion in cases of rape, incest or a pregnancy that endangers a woman’s life. In an interview with CBS the other day, you added another exception, for the health of the mother.
Mr. Romney, if you don’t know your own position on abortion, how are we supposed to understand it?
More broadly, you’ve allied yourself with social conservatives who are on a crusade that scares centrists and mystifies even many devout evangelicals.
“Representative Akin’s views don’t represent me,” Richard Cizik of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good told me. “They also don’t reflect the theological and ethical, not to mention scientific, view of evangelical leaders, who understand the rationale for exceptions: God’s grace and mercy. Akin and company are the political and theological minority, but they have captured the G.O.P.’s platform process.”
Americans are deeply conflicted on abortion, but I think most are repulsed by the Republican drive to impose ultrasounds — in some cases invasive ones — on women before an abortion. Five states now require a woman, before an abortion, to endure an ultrasound that may use a probe inserted into her vagina. Four of those states make no exception for a rape.
And if the Republican Party succeeds in defunding Planned Parenthood, the result will be more women dying of cervical cancer and fewer women getting contraception. The consequence will probably be more unintended pregnancies — and more abortions.
Or there’s sex education. Today in America, more than one-third of teens say that when they began having sex, they had not had any formal instruction about contraception. Is this really the time for a Republican Party platform denouncing comprehensive sex education?
Some Americans don’t even seem to have had any sex education by the time they’re elected to Congress. Like Todd Akin.
By: Nicholas D. Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, September 1, 2012
“Fantasy Women of the GOP”: To Republicans, Women Have Been Reduced To Scare Quotes And Head Pats
As the “war on women” continues, my sole comfort has been watching dumbfounded Republicans try to explain away the misogyny that’s so foundational to their agenda.
In the midst of the fallout over Todd Akin’s comments claiming “legitimate” rape victims are unlikely to get pregnant, the science-whiz whined to Mike Huckabee in a radio interview that he “made a single error in one sentence.” He was frustrated that people “are upset over one word spoke in one day in one sentence.”
Bryan Fischer, a spokesperson from the American Family Association, complained about the Akin backlash, saying, “You talk about somebody being a victim of forcible assault, that would be Todd Akin.” Mitt Romney denounced Akin’s remarks as “insulting” and “inexcusable,” but accused the Obama campaign of trying to link Akin to the GOP as a whole, calling it “sad” and that the move stooped “to a low level.”
But what Romney, Akin, and their ilk don’t understand is that women’s anger isn’t about “one word” or one politician—it’s about an ethos, a Republican ideology steeped in misogyny and willful ignorance.
Akin’s remarks—a combination of cluelessness and sexism—were a reminder that it isn’t just disdain for women that directs the GOP agenda on all things female. Misogyny is part of it, but what’s more insidious than the clear-cut contempt embedded in qualifiers like “legitimate” or “forcible,” is the sly sexism of disinterest.
To Republicans, women exist parenthetically—pesky asides that occasionally require some lip service. It’s why Paul Ryan can describe rape as a “method of conception” without batting an eye, dismiss criticisms about the term “forcible rape” by saying it was “stock language,” or call a health exception to abortion legislation a “loophole.” It’s why Republican Senate candidate Tom Smith of Pennsylvania can say rape is “similar” to having a baby “out of wedlock.” It’s the thinking that led John McCain to put air quotes around “health of the mother” in a 2008 presidential debate with Obama, and why during a Republican primary debate earlier this year the candidates had a whole conversation about limiting birth control without even uttering the word “woman.”
Women simply don’t rate in the Republican imagination—our lives have been reduced to scare quotes and head pats.
It may sound hyperbolic to argue that Republicans deny women’s humanity, but there’s no exaggerating how their policies bear this out. Personhood initiatives, for example, legally give fertilized eggs more constitutional rights than women. As Lynn Paltrow of National Advocates for Pregnant Women has pointed out, “There’s no way to give embryos constitutional personhood without subtracting women from the community of constitutional persons.” Abortion legislation like the Republican sponsored HR 3 would have made it legal for hospitals to let women die rather than give them life-saving abortions. And how else do you justify demanding women get a paternal permission slip before obtaining an abortion if not to say that you don’t think her a full person capable of controlling her own life?
Republicans only bother to acknowledge women when they’re reasserting our status as second-class citizens. Sure, they occasionally feign outrage over supposed attacks on stay-at-home moms (while nary a word of paid parental leave is spoken) and they trot out their wives to assure us how much their hubby respects women. But we know the truth—that this “respect” is conditional. It’s not based on a belief that women are deserving of human rights, but on a very specific set of rules and roles we are expected to adhere by.
Republicans can spin all they like, but what they don’t understand is that women can recognize dehumanization from a mile away. We live it every day. We know what it is to talk to a person and suddenly realize they believe us stupid because of our gender. We listen while people mansplain topics we’re experts in. We watch media that presents us as little more than masturbation fodder and walk down the street feeling lecherous stares on our back. We know what you mean when you say “legitimate” rape. We know exactly what you’re thinking when you pretend to give a shit.
This weekend I went to a wedding where I sat next to a woman who was pregnant with her second child. Like me, her health and life were put at risk when she developed pre-eclampsia during her first pregnancy. She was livid. She could hardly contain her rage as she spoke about GOP policies on women’s health. She was fortunate—as I was—to have her wanted pregnancy go to term. But when Republicans mock the health exception, she told me, “they’re talking about me.”
“They’re saying it’s fine if I die.”
Women know exactly how little Republicans think of them. So please, guys, do us the favor of not acting so shocked when we call you on it.
By: Jessica Valenti, The Nation, August 28, 2012
“The Temporary Glitter Of Expediency”: A “Party Of Principle” Will Not Occur On A Mitt Romney Watch
This will not be Mitt Romney’s first Republican National Convention. Forty-eight years ago this summer, 17-year-old Mitt went with his father, Michigan Governor George Romney, to the party’s 1964 convention in San Francisco. As the party prepared to nominate Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater for the presidency, and to embrace a platform that was even more extreme in its positions than those taken by its standard-bearer, Mitt watched as his father fought a valiant battle to prevent the party’s lurch to the right.
It was a battle of ideology, idealism and honor. George Romney, a committed supporter of the struggle for racial justice that he traced to Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, believed that Goldwater’s opposition to federal civil rights legislation meant that the presumptive nominee’s “views deviate as indicated from the heritage of our party.” He argued that the party needed to fully embrace the civil rights struggle and to explicitly reject the extremism of far-right groups such as the John Birch Society.
“There is no place in either of our parties for the purveyors of hate,” George Romney argued to no avail. The Republican Party rejected platform planks proposed by the elder Romney and the moderate wing of the Republican Party and went all-in for extremism. With that, he walked out of the convention, displaying the resolve that would lead the future president of the United States, Gerald Ford, to say “(George Romney) has never let the temporary glitter of expediency obscure the path which his integrity dictated he must follow.”
Even allowing for the overheated rhetoric of nominating speakers, there will be no such pronouncements this year regarding Mitt Romney. Nor will there be any meaningful efforts to dial back the extremism of a platform that one of its drafters, Oregon delegate and Tea Party activist Russ Walker, says “appears to be the most conservative platform in modern history.” The Washington Times echoed that assessment, as Republican U.S. Senate candidates such Scott Brown of Massachusetts and Laura Lingle of Hawaii scrambled to distance themselves from a platform defined by its:
* no-exceptions approach to abortion and a “personhood” section that seeks “legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children”
* militant opposition to marriage equality and a refusal even to acknowledge civil unions
* call for limiting the role of women in the military
* celebrations of election suppression schemes such as Voter ID laws and proof-of-citizenship requirements
* endorsement of Arizona-style anti-immigration laws
* support for overriding popular democracy and local lawmaking in the District of Columbia
* proposal to constitutionally restrict the ability of Congress to write budgets, with “exceptions for only war and national emergencies”
* pining for a return to the Gold Standard
* full embrace of soon-to-be vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan’s proposals to begin the process of undermining Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — along lines advocated in 1964 by Goldwater but opposed by George Romney.
Unlike his father, Mitt Romney will make no effort to guide his party back toward the mainstream. The man who just a decade ago was identified as the brave new champion of the centrism, even liberalism, that his father once espoused will make no demand for moderation. There will be no stance on principle. No show of integrity.
Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus admits that the platform is frequently at odds with Mitt Romney’s stated positions — if not with those of Paul Ryan. “This is the platform of the Republican Party; it’s not the platform of Mitt Romney,” says Priebus.
But isn’t Mitt Romney effectively the leader of the Republican Party at this point, in the same sense that Barack Obama is (as Republicans so frequently suggest) the leader of the Democratic Party? Why isn’t Romney exercising leadership? Why isn’t he saying that he will not run on a platform that is at odds with his stated positions on critical social policy, economic policy and international policy issues? Why isn’t he objecting to stances that “deviate… from the heritage of our party”?
The answer is not that Romney, who once declared “I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush. I’m not trying to return to Reagan-Bush,” who began his own political career as an enthusiastic supporter of abortion rights and gay rights, whose Massachusetts health-care reforms laid the groundwork for “Obamacare,” is some kind of right-wing purist.
Romeny’s lack of a coherent conservatism going into the 2012 race is what scared conservatives so much that they supported, literally, Anyone-But-Romney — from Michele Bachmann to Herman Cain to Newt Gingrich to Rick Santorum. Ultimately, Romney bent enough to the demands of the right to secure the nomination. And he threw conservatives a bigger bone with the selection of House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan, who is a true believer, as the party’s vice presidential nominee.
It is that determination to make himself acceptable to the right that distinguishes Mitt Romney from his father. And it is what would distinguish a Romney-Ryan presidency, were the ticket to prevail in November.
Mitt Romney defers to the extremism that George Romney battled as a matter of principle. Where George Romney defended the heritage of a great American political party, Mitt Romney will this week “let the temporary glitter of expediency obscure the path which his integrity dictated he must follow.”
By: John Nichols, The Nation, August 27, 2012
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