Once more on the backs of the poor*

by Leigh Graham · 2009-01-27 12:30:00 UTC
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Not 100% Effective, by nateOne; bc pills are 92-99.7% effective - LeighConsider my inaugural honeymoon officially over.  President Obama has requested that House Dems drop family planning funds for low-income households from the stimulus bill, in order to appease House Rethugs who plan to oppose the bill anyway.

Apparently, making it easier for low-income parents (women) to keep their jobs by providing them with the resources needed to control their own reproduction and family size isn't an economic stimulus.  Of course!  I suppose if we're already laying off hotel and restaurant workers, child care providers, home health aides, cashiers, and the like then restricting affordable access to contraception and healthcare service providers is superfluous anyway.  In fact, if all these women are now lying around at home, then clearly they have time to raise all those extra mouths to feed!  It's not like the cost of food and utilities has risen or anything.  It's not like they had health insurance to begin with, or good health insurance anyway, and they can probably get it for those kids on the way.  Right?

Shall we revisit one of the more contentious popular posts here, in which we noted that "The most commonly cited reasons for abortion were "that having a child would interfere with a woman's education, work or ability to care for dependents (74%) [or] that she could not afford a baby now (73%)"."

Fortunately, abortion's totally not a big deal in this country, so failing to providing contraception to prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place isn't really necessary.

Right.

As Susie from Philly says:

Only someone who’s never been poor is breathtakingly stupid enough to believe that birth control doesn’t have an immediate effect on the economic health of a family...What, an additional wage earner has no economic impact on a family? Or have we suddenly awakened in a world where free daycare, diapers and formula abound?

As Feministe - this doesn't even make sense (if I haven't driven that point home already):

...contraception spending saves money in the long run — some $200 million over five years, according to a Congressional Budget Office evaluation of a nearly identical plan from 2007.

No doubt the ideological anti-woman zealots in the GOP deserve our ire.  But this kind of capitulation from Obama on the backs of women has been in evidence since his campaign days.  This is just like asking Rick Warren to do the invocation, because anti-gay bigotry is just an innocuous display of bipartisan difference.

Right again.

This is one of these posts where I'm so furious that I don't know how to wrap up, so I'll just let the ever irate Amanda over at Pandagon take care of it for me.

* If this wasn't a professional group blog, I might write switch out "backs" for "uteruses".

(photo credit: nateOne)

Leigh Graham
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