Author: Cordelia Kenney
The federal government reopened last Wednesday after nearly two weeks of being shut down. The inability of the House and the Senate to come to consensus on how to fund a bill, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), started the shutdown. Although the United States’ government escaped a potential financial crisis and things are “back to normal,” the shutdown had virtually no effect on House Republicans’ efforts to impede women’s access to health care. Republicans adamantly rejected and continue to attack coverage of birth control mandated by the ACA. Nothing, it seems, will bring this minority constituency into the 21st century.
Part of House Republicans’ abhorrence of the ACA (or as they call it, “Obamacare”) relates to the health benefits and services it will provide for women, including routine screenings for cervical and breast cancer, counseling services and birth control. In an article written for CNN, President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America Cecile Richards argued that women’s health is indeed at the crux of the hullabaloo on the
Hill.
Although the government reopened with the ACA’s funding intact and its birth control benefits untouched – two of House Republicans’ main targets leading up to the shutdown – House Republicans are still after an amendment that would let companies and employers evade having to provide healthcare coverage of women on the grounds of “moral objections.” Throughout the shutdown, Tea Partiers pushed this so-called “conscience clause” still remaining on their agenda.
Richards also makes a connection that few newscasters covering the shutdown made. In 2011, these same Republicans did exactly what they are doing now: they threatened to shutter the federal government’s doors over these very same issues — women’s access to preventive health services — except this time they succeeded. The novelty of the ACA and its subsequent technical hangups went into effect, as well as the looming debt ceiling during the shutdown, proved far more palatable topics for primetime television viewers. In the United States, the topic of sex is everywhere and nowhere: advertisements glamorize sex to sell products, but when it comes to the brass tacks of family planning and safe sex practices, Americans and mainstream American journalism tend to squirm. Somehow in 2013, it is still taboo to publicly talk about contraception even though numerous studies underscore the rationale of supporting women’s healthcare services.
“These investments in women’s health services are not only providing
women with more control over their health and their own family planning,
but they are also a great deal for taxpayers,” Richards said.
Citing a recent study conducted by the Guttmacher Institute, Richards stated that investment in contraception saves $6 for every dollar spent. But hard data, polls of the American public and any other potentially
persuasive information about the necessity of better health coverage for women falls on deaf ears when it comes to House Republicans.
Sen. Ted Cruz, arguably the most outspoken of the Tea Partiers, helped block the vote needed to pass the budget on Oct. 1 and has been the most stringent in his opposition to funding the ACA. Coincidentally, the Texan senator has publicly equated birth control to “abortifacients” – drugs that cause a fertilized egg to be expelled from a woman’s uterus. With birth control, there is no fertilized egg in the first place. It is more than a little distressing to discover that Cruz, among other elected representatives of this country, cannot understand (or refuses to understand) the difference between birth control, which prevents ovulation, and mifepristone, which is the “abortion pill” and not necessarily covered by the ACA.
Speaking with the sentimental conviction of an evangelical preacher, Cruz promulgates the ignorance of the basic biological mechanisms of reproduction, which reflects his and other Tea Partiers’ utter lack of concern for the interests and needs of women. He reinforces the false idea that birth control, emergency contraception and mifepristone are all basically the same thing, and employers will have to personally foot the bill for every abortion of every American woman who has sex outside of marriage.
For Cruz, it is immaterial that birth control, emergency contraception and the abortion pill function in significantly different ways, or that the ACA mandates coverage of preventive services, not abortion. Cruz and his constituents instead envision a world where women have no control over their fertility and refrain from sex until marriage, evidenced by their insistence of abstinence-only education. The extent to which House Republicans like Cruz loathe the specter of the sexually active, autonomous woman is evidenced by their inflexibility on funding for the ACA.
Consider the shutdown another way. Undeterred after over 40 failed attempts to challenge the ACA, House Republicans made the eleventh-hour effort to stop its implementation by shutting the whole government down. An online article from the Chicago Tribune details this obstinacy:
“Any deal would also have to win approval in the House of
Representatives, where conservative Republicans have insisted that any
continued government funding must include measures to undercut President
Barack Obama’s signature health law – a nonstarter for Democrats,” the article stated. The bill that reopened the government, however, while approved by the House, does not address this or other divisive issues, according to CNN.
The ACA was signed into law in 2010 and was declared
constitutional by the Supreme Court in June 2012, with almost three quarters of the American public endorsing full coverage of contraception, according to The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. Yet Tea Partiers insist that the ACA and access to birth control are downright evil. Rep. Todd Rokita (R-Indiana) went so far as to call the ACA “one of the most insidious laws ever created by man” the day before the shutdown started. Right, because Nuremberg laws and Jim Crow were not all that bad (as Jon Stewart pointed out the October 1 edition of The Daily Show).
Although the detachment from reality that most House Republicans exhibit is laughable, it should make Americans mad. It should make the entire Occidental community mad. It should make you mad. Not because some parks were shut down for fall break but because over nine million low-income mothers and children who rely on the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants
and Children
(WIC) went hungry. Aside from the cessation of WIC funding, some domestic violence programs that receive federal funding temporarily closed and federal investigations of collegiate sexual assault policies were suspended. As entertaining as it might be to laugh at the ridiculous, inaccurate and highly ideological statements that Tea Party Republicans make, laughing will not change the stranglehold Tea Partiers have on government, nor will it affect the very real consequences of their inflexibility.
A common headline in the days following Oct. 1 asked, “How does the shutdown affect me?” Are we really that self-interested that we will let bad things happen in the world for the simple-minded reason that it does not immediately and viscerally affect us personally? The shutdown is a great opportunity to open the conversation about what women’s position in society is today. Americans should interrogate the rationale behind withholding birth control and basic preventive healthcare from women. Most importantly, we need to raise our political consciousness so that we can accurately understand for ourselves and explain to our friends and foes what exactly is going on in Congress. We must articulate our dissatisfaction— collectively — to those in power who are hurting the health of our nation and attacking the rights of women.
Cordelia Kenney is a senior history major. She can be reached at ckenney@oxy.edu or on Twitter at @WklyOpinions.
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