Besides the gobsmackng stupidity at a variety of state levels, we have the budget bill pushed through the the House last saturday which contained:
- Defunding of Planned Parenthood
- The elimination of support for Title X, the federal family planning program for low-income women that provides birth control, breast and cervical cancer screenings, and testing for H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted diseases.
- Slash support for international Family Planning, reimposing the odious global “gag” rule, which forbids giving federal money to any group that even talks about abortions.
- Cut by 10 percent the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, better known as WIC, which serves 9.6 million low-income women, new mothers, and infants each month, and has been linked in studies to higher birth weight and lower infant mortality.
- The G.O.P. bill also slices $50 million from the block grant supporting programs providing prenatal health care to 2.5 million low-income women and health care to 31 million children annually.
- $50 million in cuts to the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant that “supports state-based prenatal care programs and services for children with special needs.”
- $1 billion in cuts to programs at the National Institutes of Health that support “lifesaving biomedical research aimed at finding the causes and developing strategies for preventing preterm birth.”
- Nearly $1 billion in cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for its preventive health programs, including to its preterm birth studies.
Additional bills include:
- Two bills in the Republican House would go even further than the current Democrat agreement to stop insurance companies from offering plans that cover abortions in denying coverage to the 30 percent or so of women who have an abortion during child-bearing years.
- A bill, offered by Representative Joe Pitts of Pennsylvania, has a provision that would allow hospitals receiving federal funds to refuse to terminate a pregnancy even when necessary to save a woman’s life.
In the opinion section there is a somewhat more strongly worded article (hooray!) which states:
It is savagely immoral and profoundly inconsistent to insist that women endure unwanted — and in some cases dangerous — pregnancies for the sake of “unborn children,” then eliminate financing designed to prevent those children from being delivered prematurely, rendering them the most fragile and vulnerable of newborns. How is this humane?
...
Of the 33 countries that the International Monetary Fund describes as “advanced economies,” the United States now has the highest infant mortality rate according to data from the World Bank. It took us decades to arrive at this dubious distinction. In 1960, we were 15th. In 1980, we were 13th. And, in 2000, we were 2nd.
While I am a little anxious about graphs than mix a large number of things up on the same axis wo/ units, this still tells the tell tale story:
This is a fucking mess. If one of these cowards who voted for this ever contends than they think of women as less than secondary citizens, call them out for the lying shitbags that they are. Cutting access to health care to the majority of all women will require a whole lot more spine than the "firm leadership" called for in the same NYT article. I am pleased that they printed the article, but the democrats can not be counted on to do anything but throwing women's health and equal rights issues under the bus to placate their theocrat wingnut opponents.
s.e.
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