The war on women is nothing new. Christine De Pizon was writing about it in the 16 hundreds, Mary Wollstonecraft in the 17 hundreds, and in 1928, Emma Goldman, a French anarchist and feminist advocate for reproductive rights, was speaking for it and eventually exiled to the Soviet Union.
Our Constitution says: We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.
So this is what our government is supposed to: promote the general welfare. It doesn’t say anything about supporting billionaires or supporting gangster capitalism.
We don’t have time to go into the detail of all the hits on women, so I’m just going to give you a summary covering: health care, food programs, abortion and reproductive health care, and normalizing violence against women. DEI is another whole topic.
To put it in context, the Save the Rich tax bill they passed will mean that the bottom 40% will lose income while the top .1%, those making more than $3.3 million per year, will gain about $100K annually.
Medicaid
They have gutted Medicaid, the government-sponsored health insurance program, leaving millions without coverage and ultimately increasing the federal deficit by $3.4 trillion. Today it went up by $1 trillion to the highest level ever and in the shortest time (last 2 months) with the exception of COVID pandemic. Since women are the main caregivers and responsible for both children and elderly these cuts hit women the most. 11.8 million Americans, the majority women and children, will lose Medicaid coverage by 2034. In GA, 19% of the rural population relies on Medicaid.
Nursing homes will be hard hit. 52% are independent single-facility homes; 60% are in rural communities; 25% said they would have to close. That means a loss of those jobs too in rural areas.
SNAP
They plan to slash $187 billion in food aid over the next 10 years which is unprecedented cuts to SNAP. SNAP helps more than 42 million people nationwide from 22.7 million households. Women are 57% of SNAP recipients.
The bill also raises work requirement from age 54 to 64 and if able-bodied, the recipient must work 80 hours per month or lose benefits. That is difficult for women who have children especially disabled children to care for and seniors too while being pushed into low-wage jobs, no advancement job. Hunger and poverty disproportionately impact women and children. It will also hit veterans and those in rural areas where there are no jobs.
Other pending changes will deny SNAP to the few immigrants who were previously eligible for benefits, such as asylum seekers, refugees and international survivors of domestic violence.
The funding lapse has forced FNS to direct all states and territories, to pause transmission of November benefit files to Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) vendors.
The stupidity of it is that every dollar spent on SNAP generates up to $1.80 in economic activity at the community level during economic downturns.
The other stupidity is the attack on school programs. We require children to be in school, but we refuse to feed them. It’s like putting someone in prison and saying well feed yourself. We know kids do better both in behavior and academics when they are not hungry. And the gut buster – the average daily benefits are only $6.20.
WIC
WIC serves nearly 7 million people with “free healthy foods, breastfeeding support, nutrition education and referrals to other services.” It is discretionary and subject to appropriation every year so very precarious. USDA has been using a $150 million contingency fund to keep the program going and is now transferring $300 million from child nutrition program to keep it running till the end of Oct.
REPEAL OF AFFORDABLE CARE ACT
What they are trying to do is repeal ACA by the backdoor of simply removing the funding. ACA didn’t just expand coverage but also prohibited higher rates for women, ensured that pregnancy is not a pre-existing condition, that rape is not a pre-existing condition, that maternal care is covered. The ACA has been especially important for poor women who are unlikely to have employer provided health care.
If the subsidies expire, 30 million people will lose insurance in the next decade, or pay a 50% or more increase, and the cost of insurance premiums for the rest of us will go up by 8% a year.
Without subsidies, a mother of two in Mississippi earning $50,000 (national average is $80,000) could see her premiums increased by almost 300 percent. Mississippi declared a public health emergency as the state’s infant mortality rate is nearly double the national average with roughly 10 deaths out of 1,000 live births.
Again these cuts hit women the hardest because women make 80 percent of healthcare decisions. Without insurance children miss check-ups and vaccinations, women delay care resulting in more cost and worse conditions, and families face greater financial strain and poorer health.
ABORTION AND REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH
The multipronged attack on abortion and birth control continues. They are attacking the pill, attacking sites of medical care, attacking dulas and midwifes, and criminalizing pregnancy.
Attacking the pill
The FDA is “reviewing” mifepristone that accounts for over half of abortions though there is no scientific reason for any review since the drug has been thoroughly studied. The EPA has been asked to review if mifepristone in ground water is dangerous. “There is absolutely no evidence that this is an environmental issue,” said Nathan Donley, the environmental health science director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “Pharmaceutical waste can be a big issue when we’re talking about widely used drugs, but to somehow point to mifepristone as a bad actor here is completely disingenuous.”
Jack Vanden Heuvel, a molecular toxicologist at Pennsylvania State University, agreed: “Most wastewater treatment plants are very effective at getting rid of any mifepristone that is there.” He described SFLA’s position as “a pretty weakly supported argument.”
Attacking sites of medical care
Because of the Medicaid cuts, at least 100 rural hospitals have stopped delivering babies. Fewer than 42% of rural hospitals still do; In 11 states less than one-third do. Rural hospitals are often the only source of care; 50% of children and 18% of adults rely on Medicaid, 50% of births are covered by Medicaid – until it’s gone.
More than 400 hospitals are at risk of closing, 63 in GA alone. The closures impact not only birth but if a person has a stroke or heart attack, they have to drive farther to get care while every minute counts.
Clinicians across practice areas are also leaving ban states due to fear of severe criminal and civil penalties resulting in care deserts. In states with abortion bans, women are twice as likely to die during pregnancy. As doctors flee abortion-ban states, women are losing the basic care they need to stay healthy and carry a pregnancy safely to term. Between August 2022 and December 2024, Idaho lost 35 percent of its OB-GYN physicians, lengthening wait times for reproductive healthcare, forcing longer travel time for basic care and closing maternity wards in rural areas. Texas is seeing similar departures, and abortion bans are driving away medical residents.
Yet in Texas, the governor just signed a new law that authorizes lawsuits against anyone who helps a woman obtain abortion care, promising a $100,000 award to encourage lawsuits.
By defunding Planned Parenthood, they abolish health care sites. Few other providers take Medicaid. Try finding a doctor who will. State-run health departments if they exist have long waiting lists. When Planned Parenthood is denied Medicaid, then women are denied all services like mammograms, STI screenings, cancer screenings, birth control, and annual exams.
According to Planned Parenthood, more than 90 percent of likely clinic closures will occur in states where abortion is currently legal. Sixty percent of those clinics are located in medically underserved areas, such as rural areas with a shortage of primary healthcare physicians.
In 2023, over 170,000 women traveled out of state to seek abortion care; between 2020 and the first half of 2023, the number of women traveling out of state for care jumped from 1 in 10 to 1 in 5. However, some cannot travel because of their immigration status and risk of deportation or because of their parole and probation status.
The bans also affect quality of care. I’m sure you have seen the news about pregnant women experiencing miscarriage who have been forced to wait until they are septic before receiving treatment, even when the pregnancy is no longer viable. Providers fear giving clear information about pregnancy options for fear of being charged with “facilitating”, yet we have plenty of fake clinics telling lies.
Abortion restrictions have cascading effects far beyond reproductive health care, resulting in discriminatory treatment of women even outside pregnancy-related care. Fear of criminalization has led physicians to prescribe less effective drugs in fields ranging from oncology to dermatology out of fear of legal repercussions should the woman become pregnant and need an abortion. Due to fear of abortion-related criminalization, pharmacies and physicians have denied critical mifepristone, misoprostol, and methotrexate prescriptions for chronic conditions from cancer to rheumatoid arthritis on the basis of sex, violating federal civil rights.
Attacking dulas and midwives
Midwives and doulas increasingly face threats of criminalization for providing birthing care and support during labor and delivery. Oct 13, eight midwifes were charged with felonies in TX for assisting in abortions. In Georgia, where Black midwives have a long history of skillfully caring for families, the law now excludes all trained midwives except those with a nursing degree and masters level midwifery degree
Criminalization of pregnancy
Pregnancy Justice reports that over 400 women have been charged with “pregnancy related crimes” since Dobbs. Of the 412 defendants, 441 charges were brought against them. Most of the charges were alleging child neglect, endangerment, or abuse.
31 prosecutions targeted women who experienced a pregnancy loss, with the State in those cases viewing a woman’s miscarriage or stillbirth with suspicion. Imagine losing your wanted baby and then facing criminal charges besides. 25% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage so it is not unusual or suspicious. Have you heard about the man who went to the emergency room and the doctors had to call the lawyers before they could decide whether to treat him? No, me neither.
More than three-quarters of charges were made against women with lower incomes. Over three-quarters of the charges stemmed from allegations relating to substance use during pregnancy — claims that aren’t always accurate. In Arizona we have seen cases of women taking the drugs the doctor prescribed and then the hospital turning them in for drug use and the local agency taking the newborn baby.
In 378 of the 441 charges — almost 86 percent of all charges examined by the report — no proof of harm had been required for prosecutors to bring charges. Twenty-nine cases involved charges against women for failure to obtain prenatal care, which is harder for women to access if they have low incomes if it even exists in their area.
In nine cases, women faced charges relating to “obtaining, attempting or researching an abortion.” So even looking it up on the internet is now a crime. States are “giving separate legal rights to fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses,” which we knew was their goal all along. Why care about a living woman when a fetus might be a male something.
Normalizing violence against women
The criminal administration tried to sto the grants to domestic violence organization. It was stopped with a lawsuit. We don’t need to belabor their protection of rapists and pedophiles or their attacks on survivors of such violence. They eliminated the protections against campus sexual harassment and assault that we had worked decades for. Violent pornography is proliferating, normalizing sexual choking that endangers the lives of women and girls who are showing up in ERs.
In states banning abortion, intimate partner violence has risen across the board, with the sharpest increases among women ages 25 to 34. In the first year after Dobbs, calls to the National Domestic Violence Hotline involving reproductive coercion doubled.
Women, immigrants, people of color are the canaries in the coal mine, and we are going down fast. While some signs at No Kings said – my sign is not big enough for what brings me here – let’s not forget the vicious attack on women including Hegspeth saying women should not be in the military and some “Christian” nationalist preacher suggesting that the 19th Amendment that gave women the right to vote should be repealed. This is not a warning; this is not a test; this is a civil war, and they are attacking our infrastructure which is what happens first in wars.
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