Why "Women's Issues" Should Matter to Everyone
There seems to be a bumper crop of right-wing loons this election cycle and the common thread is that they seem to really hate women. While we've thinned the worst of them out of the Presidential race, (Perry, Bachman, Santorum) they are still out there (no pun intended) and worse, their idiotic ideas are still (pun fully intended here) "out there." >insert weird Theremin music here<
For some strange reason they've all set their sights on Planned Parenthood. I admit freely that I'm a member of Planned Parenthood Shasta-Diablo. The right-wingers seem to think that Planned Parenthood clinics do nothing but "kill babies," all day, every day. This is simply not true. Abortions are actually a small percentage of the important work of Planned Parenthood, but because abortion is one of their services they must be eradicated because they are "icky."
Planned Parenthood clinics provide low or no cost birth control for women who might otherwise have no access. They offer classes for community sexuality education which are sorely needed since the miserable, abject failure of "abstinence only" education, as if you can call that disgusting campaign of misinformation "education." Planned Parenthood provide safer sex supplies like condoms, dental dams and lubricants. They also provide annual exams for women that include breast exams, cancer screenings, sexually transmitted infection testing and PAP tests that SAVE LIVES. But according to the right-wingers, unless it happens in the mens' room at an airport, anything remotely related to sex, sexuality or "down there," is "icky."
While I, personally, have never had an abortion I know lots of women who have and unless you've been living alone in a cave somewhere far, far away you do, too. It is never an "easy" decision. The right-wingers who think that some women use abortion as their primary form of birth control are just plain wrong. It is nothing more than a straw man. Very few women ever repeat that experience. The reasons are as individual as the women. Some women choose abortion because they know they are too young and/or don't have the ability to support a child. Some women already have as many children as they want or can support. I know one woman who got pregnant right after reconciling with her husband and he didn't believe it was his. She was left with the choice of her marriage or her pregnancy. And we all know women who are raising children alone because the fathers made promises to be there, but left anyway. So why don't Republicans think fathers running out on their responsibilities is "icky?"
The choice to have an abortion is heart-wrenching. I know women that secretly mourn on a "certain date" every year. I had a mid-pregnancy miscarriage (medically that is called "spontaneous abortion,") and every July 13th for the last 26 years I have had (at least) a moment of mourning. Maybe that gives me a little more understanding? I don't know. What I do know is that we need to trust women to make choices that will benefit their lives. I'm sure Republicans think women making informed decisions about their own health and futures are "icky."
One of the right-wingers weirdest battles in their war on women is the battle against birth control. It's not 1920, fergawdsake! Who cares what a bunch of old, single men in dresses who molested thousands of children, and then covered it up, think about birth control? Not anyone rational, that's for sure! The ability to choose when to have a child, and how many children a family wants to have, makes everyone's lives better. Criminalizing birth control does nothing but create a permanent underclass. That has to somehow be "icky," right?
My own great-great-grandmother committed suicide because she didn't want to have an eighth child. Women should not have to choose between having an unwanted child and dying. If she had only had the ability to choose when to have a baby, or not, my great-grandmother and her three sisters and three brothers would not have had to grow up motherless. And then there all the motherless children of women who didn't survive abortion before it was legal and safe. Women have always and will always have abortions. The only thing we can really control is whether or not they are safe. And motherless children are really "icky."
The only reason I can see to make birth control illegal, while at the same time eliminating the social safety net, is to make more little minimum wage and soldier "slaves" who have never known anything but abject poverty, if not an orphanage, and therefore think the "Three Hots and a Cot" that the military provides in exchange for risking their lives is a good deal. There can be no other reason, and that's what I call "icky."
In fact, that is the reason my son's friends had for enlisting. When young men cannot find jobs that pay a living wage and cannot afford to go to college they are left with no other legal way to make a living. Children of the wealthy certainly don't go into the military! That the right-wingers want endless wars, want to cut most Veterans's benefits, and in fact already have cut a lot, is supposed to go unnoticed. It takes a lot of soldier "slaves" to wage a never-ending global war. They don't understand what their lives will become after they are home-- until they do. And then it's too late. They just don't know that PTSD is "icky," too.
Please don't assume that I am against the military or even a pacifist. My Dad was a Marine marksman, for heaven's sake, a true "Jarhead" who always made the conscious decision to do the right thing. I am certain that the war on "terrorism" is just an excuse to keep the big bucks rolling in to the military-industrial complex, in other words, to make the rich even richer. That the increased taxes to support generations of war also makes the poor even poorer is just a "happy" accident, and not at all "icky" to Republicans.
I think the thing that gets to me the most is that the right-wingers usually use their religion as an excuse for their views on women, birth control and abortion. But here's the thing: Just because your religion doesn't allow you to, say, watch TV on Sundays doesn't mean you make a law that says nobody can watch TV on Sundays. It means you don't watch TV on Sundays. It's the same thing with birth control, abortion, and same-sex marriage, but that's another topic for another day.
I know I've rambled a bit here, tangling up birth control and abortion with the industrial war machine but that is the logical path of criminalizing all forms of birth control while simultaneously cutting off all forms of support. The Republican War on Women cannot be allowed to become the law of the land. In California's first Congressional District, my home and the home of my ancestors going back four generations, there is only one candidate that trusts women to make choices in their own best interest and that candidate is Jim Reed. Don't be "icky." Vote for Reed!