Women's Equality Day: A Time To Celebrate & Forge Ahead

Today is Women's Equality Day. It is a day that is meant to celebrate how women were granted the right to vote on August 26, 1920.

On this day, the White House Council on Women & Girls hosted a conference call with the media to celebrate this occasion and focus on a major piece of legislation that is going to affect all Americans, particularly women - the health care reform bill.

The Council was created to include every government agency in order to convey the message that the issues confronting women and girls are issues for every agency in the federal government to address and create policy for.  President Obama rightly proclaimed today that the "fight for women's equality is not a women's agenda, but an American agenda" - and I couldn't agree with him more.

On the call today, Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Melanie Barnes and Tina Tchen also gave some very compelling reasons as to why women should care deeply about the passage of the health care bill and why it matters to women's equality:

• Twenty-one million women and girls went without health insurance in 2007, and another 14 million relied on coverage through the individual insurance market.
• Women are less likely to be employed full-time than men (52% versus 73%), making them less likely to be eligible for employer-based health benefits themselves. In fact, less than half of women have the option of obtaining employer-based coverage on their own.
• Single women are twice as likely to be uninsured than married women (24% versus 12%).
• Women are often charged higher premiums than men during their reproductive years. Holding other factors constant, a 22 year old woman can be charged one and a half times the premium of a 22 year old man. This difference largely disappears - and sometimes reverses - by age 64.
• Women face a higher financial burden from medical care than men. Nearly one-third of women aged 50 to 64 are in households that have spent more than 10% of their income on health care, compared with one quarter of men of similar age.

It is clear that women are still not equal in the eyes of insurance companies, nor the government when it comes to access to affordable health care, which is a major reason to pass health care reform. Despite these compelling statistics, however, the discussion inevitably veered toward the major issue that will continue to prohibit women's equal access to health care: abortion.

And it seems that on this issue, women will continue to wait for the government to support this legal medical procedure.  The answer from the White House is that things will remain the same: the long standing federal policy about no public funding for abortion is not going to change, no matter if health care reform is passed.

After this was made clear, a contributor to the call asked the prescient question:  What is the cost of not providing abortion to the United States?

It seems that the government hasn't added those costs up yet, but with nearly 40 percent of women reportedly receiving an abortion in their lifetime, this isn't a debate that can afford to wait.