A No-Nonsense Plea for Women's Rights

Well, I intended to begin a post today about some great live music events that are coming up in the Shiver Cities in the next few months, but this whole week, my mind has been a bit preoccupied...

As many of you know, a lot has been going on in the Capitol building lately. A new Congress is in session, and in the new Republican-controlled House, some very disturbing trends have begun to arise. It is here, in 2011, that the U.S. House of Representatives has begun a voting streak that I personally believe is driving the country backward by about 60 years.

Aside from slashing time-tested public services, stripping vital protections for America's working-class families, and gutting safeguards for the health of the environment, the last few weeks of Congressional deliberations have marked the beginning of what can only be categorized as the long-brewing, but recently real, war on women's rights.

From attempting to redefine rape to de-funding family planning organizations, the progress the GOP has made in the last month against women and families is, to put it as non-hysterically as possible: shocking.

The issues are complex and the scope is grand, but MoveOn.org has done a great job boiling down a list of some of the most unabashed hits the GOP has taken at women's health:

1) Republicans not only want to reduce women's access to abortion care, they're actually trying to redefine rape. After a major backlash, they promised to stop. But they have not yet.

2) A state legislator in Georgia wants to change the legal term for victims of rape, stalking, and domestic violence to "accuser." But victims of other less gendered crimes, like burglary, would remain "victims."

3) In South Dakota, Republicans proposed a bill that could make it legal to murder a doctor who provides abortion care. (Yep, for real.)

4) Republicans want to cut nearly a billion dollars of food and other aid to low-income pregnant women, mothers, babies, and kids. 

5) In Congress, Republicans have a bill that would let hospitals allow a woman to die rather than perform an abortion necessary to save her life.

6) Maryland Republicans ended all county money for a low-income kids' preschool program. Why? No need, they said. (Women should really be home with the kids, not out working.)

7) And at the federal level, Republicans want to cut that same program, Head Start, by $1 billion. That means over 200,000 kids could lose their spots in preschool.

8) Two-thirds of the elderly poor are women, and Republicans are taking aim at them too. A spending bill would cut funding for employment services, meals, and housing for senior citizens.

9) Congress just voted for a Republican amendment to cut all federal funding from Planned Parenthood health centers, one of the most trusted providers of basic health care and family planning in our country.

10) And if that wasn't enough, Republicans are pushing to eliminate all funds for the only federal family planning program. (For humans. But Republican Dan Burton has a bill to provide contraception for wild horses. You can't make this stuff up). 

True, the language is a bit vitriolic, but the message is real, so please forgive proponents of respecting women's lives and bodies if we get a bit worked up about these matters. I encourage everyone to do more research on the matter, and to please support local and national-level petitions calling for the re-examination and withdrawal of any of these bills.

For anyone who has a wife, girlfriend, mother, sister, daughter, or friend: please care.

-K