titled Donald Trump vs. Women’s Health.
It focuses on two of Trump’s actions, attempting to deny funds to Planned Parenthood and his global gag rule in the context of easily preventable and early treatable cervical cancer.
As he says in his 2nd and 3rd paragraphs:
Yes, the phrase “war on women” may seem hyperbolic, but it also reflects the devastating impact of Trump’s policies on women’s health. One danger is that we’re so focused on the battles at the White House that we neglect the administration’s policy impact at the grass roots — on, say, women who will die unnecessarily all over the world from cervical cancer.
Cervical cancer, an excruciating way to die, is a prime example of how Trump’s policies weaken efforts against a disease we know how to defeat.
He gives examples both domestically and overseas. After the domestic example, we learn
At home, Trump is undermining the fight against cervical cancer by seeking to defund Planned Parenthood, which performs some 270,000 cervical cancer screenings annually.
Kristof’s overseas example is of a brilliant young woman in very poor Haiti.
Then Kristof writes:
This is the simplest and cheapest kind of tragedy to avert. Cervical cancer can usually be prevented with vaccination or an approach that begins with an inexpensive screening used in poor countries called the “vinegar test.” A nurse dabs vinegar on the cervix, and any precancerous lesion turns white. For treatment, a nurse freezes the lesion off with what looks like a plastic gun — and the woman’s life is saved for a total cost of about $3.
I’ve seen Marie Stopes International apply this lifesaving method in Vietnam — but the Trump administration is cutting off all assistance to Marie Stopes under the global gag rule. I watched in Haiti as a nurse, Holdie Fleurilus, administered the vinegar test at a hospital and then removed a precancerous lesion from a 33-year-old health worker, perhaps saving her life. It took 15 minutes.
Stop and think about that — preventing a painful cancer for $3. Then read this.
The U.N. Population Fund had hoped to scale up the vinegar test in Haiti to save more lives, but Trump has cut off all American funds to make that happen.
Kristof congratulates other countries trying to make up for the funds Trump is withholding from the UN Population Fund, and credits former President George W.Bush, who has
has made cervical cancer an important thread of his post-presidency, calling for funding and bringing much-needed visibility to the issue.
Kristof closes with the following words:
Why am I as a man writing about cervical cancer? Because reproductive health is always in peril of being marginalized as a “women’s issue.” Because men and women alike have a stake in saving lives. Because when President Trump embraces “pro-life” policies that are in fact “pro-death,” that should galvanize us all.
To this as a man a few weeks older than the President offers his strong agreement.
Because men and women alike have a stake in saving lives. That should apply to men whose wives are past childbearing age, as is mine, to men and women in families that chose not to have children, something that applies to my spouse and me. Health of all should be a concern of all.
The anti-women approach of too many in this country does lead to policies that are ‘pro-death” and we should not be afraid to say as did the child in the fable that for these policies the emperor has no clothes.
Health of all should be a concern of all.
Insofar as it is not, it is not acceptable. Not in Christianity. Not in Judaism. Not in ANY moral tradition.
I beg you.
Read Kristof’s column.
Then pass it on.
Including to your elected representatives, in state legislatures and Congress, regardless of gender and party.
If they will not pay attention, then they deserve not merely public condemnation, but public shaming.