Not content with depriving women of reproductive healthcare, House Republicans want to starve them and their children too. Their budget cuts the Women, Infants and Children Health and Nutrition program by $750 million and Head Start by $1 billion. It cuts $50 million from a block grant that pays for prenatal healthcare for 2.5 million low-income women and healthcare for 31 million children each year. As Charles Blow writes in the New York Times, proposed cuts to medical research strike directly at efforts to roll back the US infant mortality rate, now the highest among advanced economies. The Republicans seem bent on proving the truth of the bitter joke that “prolifers” care about children only before they are born. As for caring about women? Even as fetal vessels, the ladies just don’t count. After all, one in five women has visited a Planned Parenthood clinic—often for routine gynecological care. Is the GOP going to set up a replacement network of clinics to provide Pap smears and breast exams and STD testing and such? Or is Jesus now the national gynecologist? What on earth is the matter with these people?
Only bad, immoral Dirty F'ckin' Hippie women need Planned Parenthood clinic visits (they have sex) or Head Start (they're bad mothers) or WIC (they're poor). Good, Christian, Republican women don't need any of this. Therefore making cuts to these programs doesn't hurt anyone who actually matters. Why should my tax dollars pay for your gynecology, they say.
Pro-choice women say "This is an assault on all women's rights." Pro-life women say "Only yours, dear. I'm a good girl." In the end, it's about punishing "bad" women.
Maybe Bon can chime in more on this. That's just my observation.
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