“Markedly Different Circumstances”: The Real War On Moms And Republican Manufactured Outrage
Welcome to the surreal phase of the campaign where Republicans, mindful of facing a gender gap – nay, a chasm – try to nominally out-feminist Democrats, but only insofar as it comes to respecting the right of a spectacularly wealthy woman to raise her children without a job outside the home (or, perhaps, to join an exclusive golf club). But make no mistake: This is not about the so-called Mommy Wars, where mothers with a paycheck sneer at the ones without one – a binary simply not reflected in women’s lived experience. It’s about class and about how government policy compounds its impact on households with kids.
The Romney campaign may not know what it’s getting into here, since this is where plenty of progressives live, which is how they had a bunch of substantive questions at the ready. “I will tell you that Mitt said to me more times than I can imagine, Ann, your job is more important than mine,” Ann Romney said on Fox News today. But is this about nominal celebration or actually helping parents? If the Romneys “value women’s domestic work so much,” tweeted feminist author Jessica Valenti, “when will they discuss their plan for national paid parental leave?” And Slate’s Matt Yglesias wondered, “Do Mitt & Ann Romney think unemployed single moms have a full-time job? Do such moms deserve a living wage?” Or healthcare? You could almost fantasize for a minute that this campaign season jockeying of faux outrage is going to somehow lead to a substantive conversation about those oft-neglected policy issues, which force women and men into unhappy choices about how they’re both going to provide for and care for their families.
“Choice” was the word on Ann Romney’s lips in her Fox News appearance this morning. “We need to respect the choices that women make,” she said several times, adding, “Mitt respects women that make different choices.” “Choice,” of course, is a word that represents in other contexts, like abortion rights, a negotiated truce on rights and liberties of women to live within and without their traditional roles. But Ann Romney’s use of it shows how limited it is as a trope: Is it a relevant “choice” for the vast majority of American women to decide whether to use their degree in French in the workforce or rationally rest on their husband’s millions to focus on five children – six, according to Ann, if you count mischievous Mitt?
The more pertinent “choice” involves a series of unappealing options when it comes to affordable childcare or workforce opportunities. According to the census, the proportion of mothers with a recent birth in the labor force increased during the recession, from 56 percent in 2006 to 61 percent in 2008. And another Census Bureau report suggests that the 5.6 million stay-at-home mothers, a minority among mothers, have little in common with Ann Romney. They tend to be younger, Latina and foreign-born – and they are less likely to have graduated from high school or attained a bachelor’s degree. These women face markedly different circumstances from the more publicly visible stakeholders in alleged Mommy Wars, the ones who opted out of the workforce and who have the ear of people making movies and writing novels, but the women with the luxury to live on a single income at their expected standard of living are a statistical and demographic blip. The bulk of stay-at-home moms have characteristics that correlate to lower earnings in the workforce, and for them, with the high cost and inaccessibility of childcare, the “free” childcare offered by staying at home is also a rational economic choice.
Did these women feel acknowledged when ultra-wealthy Ann Romney said on Fox News, “I know what it’s like to struggle,” if they heard her say it at all? The Romney campaign is counting on the fact that such women, and maybe other women who have felt the tug between home and the workplace, will be more moved by the unfortunate phrase “never worked a day in her life” than by the fact that the Republican Party’s policies disproportionately impact these lower-income mothers, from their access to reproductive healthcare to cutting the public-sector jobs that tend to be held by women. They hope that Obama will effectively be blamed for structural job losses to women, without being able to point to a single Democratic policy that drove it, even as women are supposed to be mad that an alleged Obama surrogate only values employment outside the home.
All of this started because Mitt Romney said that he knew what women care about because his wife had told him: “She reports to me regularly that the issue women care about most is the economy, and getting good jobs for their kids and for themselves,” he said last week. Apparently, he is unable to speak to these alien creatures himself, or to understand that women’s interest in the economy includes how to balance their economic responsibilities with their family ones – since the latter still disproportionately falls on women – or how controlling their fertility is an economic issue. But maybe there’s a policy prescription that’s to augment the elaborate umbrage at the alleged disrespect to Ann Romney and women everywhere. Let’s hear it.
By: Irin Carmon, Salon, April 12, 2012
“An Unethical Salesman”: The Anatomy Of A Mitt Romney Lie
Mitt Romney’s meaningless 92.3 percent statistic about women and job losses has been thoroughly debunked pretty much everywhere, but let’s take one last look at his original statement:
There’s been some talk about a war on women. The real war on women has been waged by the Obama administration’s failure on the economy. Do you know what percentage of job losses during the Obama years of have been casualties of women losing jobs as opposed to men? Do you know how many women, what percent of the job losses were women? 92.3 percent of the job losses during the Obama years have been women who’ve lost those jobs.
In large part because of its absurdity, Romney’s misleading92.3 percent claim became the focus of attention after he delivered his remarks. When you reread his original statement, however, it’s clear that the bogus statistic wasn’t really the main thing he hoped to communicate. Rather, he offered it as evidence to support his core accusation: that “the real war on women has been waged by” President Obama.
As it turns out, the 92.3 percent stat failed to provide any support whatsoever for that claim—even though it was technically accurate. That’s important: Romney’s 92.3 percent claim wasn’t itself a lie, rather it was a meaningless factoid offered in an attempt to mislead his audience about something else. That’s a time-honored tactic of unethical salesmen, and the fact that Mitt Romney decided to take such a sleazy approach to the issue is a pretty big clue that he was in the middle of telling a pants-on-fire lie.
Sure enough, that’s exactly what it was. Mitt Romney and his Republican Party are waging an all-out assault on Planned Parenthood, birth control coverage, reproductive rights, and even Obamacare’s guarantee that women won’t be charged more for insurance than men just because they can get pregnant. That’s what you call a real war on women. It’s being led by Romney and the Republicans. And when they blame it on President Obama, that’s a lie.
By: Jed Lewison, Daily Kos, April 12, 2012
“You Can’t Fix Stupid”: Birth Control Is Different Than Starbucks
The controversy over contraception has faded a bit. Congressional Republicans are rethinking efforts to overturn a requirement that would make birth control coverage a mandatory part of health insurance. Rush Limbaugh has stopped talking about the issue, at least for the moment.
But the issue hasn’t gone away entirely. The administration is still working on ways to accommodate the wishes of some large religious institutions opposed, for reasons of faith, to sponsoring employee benefits that cover contraception. (On Friday, it unveiled a few options and announced it was seeking public comment on them.) Conservatives, meanwhile, continue to press their case.
With that in mind, let’s talk about a conservative argument that isn’t simply about religion or the morality of birth control. It’s the suggestion that birth control coverage simply doesn’t belong in health insurance, because it’s not an expense that all of us should be subsidizing.
Among those making that argument recently was syndicated columnist Mona Charen. After arguing that contraception costs “less than the cost of a weekly trip to Starbucks” and that a variety of programs, public and private, make free contraception available to the poor, Charen draws a distinction between birth control and other types of drugs:
Contraceptives are not a matter of life and death. But even if they were, such as cancer drugs are, is that an argument for forcing insurance companies to provide them free? Why not force free distribution of all medicines? The mandate makes no economic, social or moral sense.
Actually, it makes economic, social and moral sense.
Let’s put aside the question of whether contraception coverage should be “free,” because that’s not really the issue anymore. Republican Senators Roy Blunt and Marco Rubio, along with the Conference of Catholic Bishops, have said they oppose any requirement that forces employers to cover contraception, regardless of whether such coverage requires out-of-pocket expenses.
And, one more time, let’s dispense with this notion that every woman can get birth control for less than the weekly cost of Starbucks. As noted here previously, the cheap drugs at Target, Walmart, and the other big chains are great if you take the standard combination hormonal pills, which combine estrogen and progestin. But some people cannot or should not take those pills. They’re not good for postpartum women who are breast-feeding, for example, and they cause side effects for many others. They may not be as effective, for some women, as methods like intrauterine devices, depo-provera, or surgical sterilization.
How many women fall into those categories? It’s a minority of the population, to be sure. But that’s always the story with health care and health insurance. At any one time, most people don’t require expensive medical care. Only a small number of people do. It’s precisely for the sake of that group – the ones who face high expenses, and could face financial or medical turmoil without assistance – that insurance exists.
Keep in mind that, at some point or another, pretty much everybody falls into that category. Maybe you’re not a woman who needs expensive birth control. You might still be a woman, or a man, who ends up with heart disease. Or allergies. Or a chronic gastro-intestinal problem. Or cancer. Insurance is there to take care of you, so why shouldn’t insurance be there to take care of a woman who needs more expensive forms of contraception?
No, birth control isn’t treatment for an acute condition. It’s routine, preventative care. But that hardly undermines the case for coverage. Think about eye exams for a moment. Or blood pressure checks. Both of these are widely available, for very low cost. In fact, if you do the math, over the course of a year either one would cost less than a year’s supply of even generic hormonal contraception. But insurance typically covers those costs and, under the Affordable Care Act, insurance must cover those costs – because this sort of care keeps people from getting serious medical conditions and, quite possibly, saves money in the long run.
The very same things are true of birth control. Pregnancy is a wonderful thing, but it’s also a serious medical condition that requires serious medical attention. (Those of you unfamiliar with what pregnancy entails might want to consult this page from the American Academy of Family Physicians – or ask a woman who has been pregnant.) Don’t forget, too, that some women take contraception to control their menstrual cycles or for reasons that aren’t really related to avoiding pregnancy.
Some critics insist there’s a difference between screening for hypertension or vision problems, on the one hand, and controlling the timing of pregnancy, on the other. Non-procreative sex, they say, is a purely voluntary act, for which others should not have to pay. “No one is touching your birth control, ladies,” conservative writer Amanda Carpenter tweeted on Friday. “We just don’t want to be forced to pay for it.” But, according to statistics from the Guttmacher Institute, 99 percent of women use birth control at times during their reproductive years. Based on that, I think it’s safe to assume that non-procreative sex is an activity in which virtually everybody engages, at some point or another, and for which a large majority will need birth control.
And so we’re back to the question that’s always been at the very heart of our health insurance debate: Do we think responsibility for medical expenses should lie primarily with individuals, even if that means some won’t be able to afford it? Or is it a burden we wish to spread more broadly, across society, so that everybody can get the care they need, at a price they can afford?
You know where I stand on that question.
P.S. When the administration announced its options for accommodating religious institutions on Friday, it also released a rule about health plans for college students – and, in so doing, revealed that, for legal reasons, it does not have the authority to regulate all the plans. Sarah Kliff has the story. It doesn’t sound like a huge deal, but, as she notes, it’s yet another reminder of how complex insurance regulation is in the U.S.
By: Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic, March 16, 2012
“Unlicensed Doctors”: Politicians Swinging Stethoscopes
Let’s take a look at sex and state legislatures.
Never a good combo. Lawmakers venture into murky waters when they attempt to deal with the mysteries of human reproduction. The results are generally short of scientific. Once, when I was covering the Connecticut House of Representatives, a bill introduced at the behest of professional musicians, “An Act Concerning Rhythm Machines,” was referred to the Public Health Committee under the assumption that it was about birth control.
That was a long time ago, but a definite high note. Normally when these matters come up in a state capitol, the result is not chuckles.
New Hampshire, for instance, seems to have developed a thing for linking sex and malignant disease. This week, the State House passed a bill that required that women who want to terminate a pregnancy be informed that abortions were linked to “an increased risk of breast cancer.”
As Terie Norelli, the minority leader, put it, the Legislature is attempting to make it a felony for a doctor “to not give a patient inaccurate information.”
And there’s more. One of the sponsors, Representative Jeanine Notter, recently asked a colleague whether he would be interested, “as a man,” to know that there was a study “that links the pill to prostate cancer.”
This was at a hearing on a bill to give employers a religious exemption from covering contraception in health care plans. The article Notter appeared to be referring to simply found that nations with high use of birth control pills among women also tended to have high rates of prostate cancer among men. Nobody claimed that this meant there was scientific evidence of a connection. You could also possibly discover that nations with the lowest per capita number of ferrets have a higher rate of prostate cancer.
Bringing the prostate into the fight was definitely a new wrinkle. But it’s getting very popular to try to legislate an abortion-breast cancer link. I suspect this is at least in part because politicians in some states are being forced to stretch to find new ways to torture women who want to end an unwanted pregnancy. It’s sort of like gun control — once your state already has guaranteed the right to wear concealed weapons into bars and churches, you’re going to have to start getting really creative to reaffirm a commitment to the Second Amendment.
Last year, South Dakota — which has a grand total of one abortion provider — instituted a 72-hour waiting period, plus a requirement that the woman undergo a lecture at one of the state’s anti-abortion pregnancy counseling centers.
This law is tied up by litigation. While they’re waiting, the legislators have improved upon their work, requiring the doctor to ask his patient — who may have already traveled for hours, waited for three days and gone through the counseling center harangue — questions including what her religious background is and how she thinks her family might react to the decision to end the pregnancy.
“South Dakota has taken the I.R.S. audit model and applied it to women’s reproduction,” said Ted Miller of Naral Pro-Choice America.
But about this cancer business.
“Now we’re seeing why legislatures getting into the practice of medicine is dangerous,” said Barbara Bollier, a Republican state representative in Kansas, where a bill requiring doctors to warn abortion patients about the breast cancer connection is pending.
Bollier is a retired anesthesiologist, who also formerly taught bioethics. If you wanted to have a résumé guaranteed to drive you crazy in the Kansas State Legislature, she’s got it.
We had a very interesting discussion over the phone about good science — what makes a reliable study, and how an early suggestion of a possible connection between abortions and breast cancer was overtaken by larger, better studies that showed no evidence of a link whatsoever. All of this has been shared with the Kansas Legislature, to no effect whatsoever.
Bollier has her finger on the moral to all this. When faced with a choice between scientific evidence and their personal and political preferences, legislators are not going to go with the statistics. I have warm memories of the committee of the Texas House of Representatives that last year rejected a bill to require that public school sex education classes be “medically accurate.”
Let’s refrain from discussing how the people who are preparing to legislate medical science are often the very same ones who scream about government overreach when health experts propose taxing sugary beverages.
Just try to envision yourself in a doctor’s office for a consult. Then imagine you’re joined by a state legislator. How many of you think the situation has been improved? Can I see a show of hands?
Thought so.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 16, 2012
Today’s Republican Party: “Grand, Old And Anti-Woman”
Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska got it half right on Tuesday when she told her Republican colleagues that their party was at risk of being painted as anti-woman. It would be more accurate to remove the hedges and say flat out that the G.O.P. is anti-woman.
There’s really no other conclusion to reach from the positions Republican lawmakers, and the contenders for the party’s presidential nomination, have taken on contraception, abortion and reproductive health services, including their obsession with putting Planned Parenthood out of business.
Republican opposition to reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act certainly won’t help the party’s reputation. That law, which provides federal money to investigate and prosecute domestic violence, has had broad bipartisan support since it was enacted in 1994. Congress renewed it in 2000 and 2005 without struggle.
Senate Democrats have revised the law to include LGBT victims of domestic violence, dating violence and sexual assault. New provisions would also allow more immigrant victims to claim temporary visas. The latest version has five Republican co-sponsors, but it failed to garner a single Republican vote in the Judiciary Committee last month.
Despite what Republicans might say to the press, the Democrats did not dream up these changes to infuriate their opponents—they were responding to calls from groups that help victims of domestic violence. A 2010 report from the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs detailed a woeful shortage of services for LGBT violence victims – including scarce access to shelters. An expanded Violence Against Women Act would reflect the reality of American life in the 21st century – when gay men and lesbians actually get married and illegal immigrants cannot merely be deported or wished away.
Naturally, certain out-of-control right-wingers are eager to fight over this bill. Phyllis Schlafly said last month that it promoted “divorce, breakup of marriage and hatred of men.” Because, I guess, women whose husbands are beating them should stay in those relationships and just try to work it out. Or maybe because if we provide assistance to lesbian women whose girlfriends beat them up, straight women will hate their boyfriends. (Honestly, what is the logic here?)
But Congressional Republicans are scared of another tussle. They are bleating that it’s not fair to attach these provisions in an election year, because voting them down would make Republicans look bad. Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, put it this way: “I favor the Violence Against Women Act and have supported it at various points over the years, but there are matters put on that bill that almost seem to invite opposition,” he said.
They only invite opposition if you are ant-immigrant or homophobic.
Including same-sex couples in domestic violence programs would not diminish their value for couples of opposite genders in any conceivable way. And giving a battered illegal immigrant woman a temporary visa is not a threat to national security.
The real agenda here is obvious: If a federal bill recognizes that there is such a thing as domestic violence in same-sex families, then that implicitly recognizes the legitimacy of those couples and that could lead – gasp – to giving them actual rights.
By: Andrew Rosenthal, The Loyal Opposition, The New York Times, March 15, 2012
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