Republican Lawmaker Now Supports Obama, Says GOP Presidential Candidates ‘Would Take Women Back Decades’

By Alex Seitz-Wald/Think Progress


Questions about women and womens’ health have dominated the political debate over the past weeks, and at least one female Republican lawmaker is unhappy with her party’s record. New York Assemblyman Teresa Sayward (R), who is retiring after serving a decade in Albany, told the New York political program Capital Tonight that she does not support any of her party’s presidential candidates, because of their stances on women.

She also took an apparent shot at Republicans’ opposition to President Obama’s birth control mandate, saying, “It’s disheartening for me to see our party move away from what it was always about and that is to stay out of people’s lives, let them live their lives, don’t impose their religion on anybody else.”

Asked which Republican candidate she supports, Sayward replied:

SAYWARD: I do not have a favorite in the presidential race, if I had to vote today, I’d vote for Obama.

INTERVIEW: Really?

SAYWARD: Absolutely… Because I really, truly think that the candidates that are out there today for the Republican side would take women back decades.

Watch it:

Sayward said she was retiring for personal reasons, as well as become of her belief in term limits.

Sayward said she got her start in politics when she attended a local farmers’ meeting and was told women were to gather in the kitchen while men discussed business. “I didn’t come here to sit in the kitchen,” Sayward remembers saying, recounting how she soon integrated the meetings.

In Response To A String Of Sexual Assaults, New York Police Tell Women To Cover Up Instead Of Catching The Attacker

By Marie Diamond/Think Progress

In response to a string of at least 10 unsolved sexual assaults in Brooklyn, New York police are reportedly stopping women on the street who are wearing clothing they say is revealing and advising them to cover up if they don’t want to be raped. The Wall Street Journal reports on the disturbing message police officers are allegedly spreading:

Lauren, a South Slope resident, was walking home three blocks from the gym on Monday when she was stopped. The 25-year-old, who did not want her last name to be used, was wearing shorts and a T-shirt when she claims a police officer asked if she would stop and talk to him. He also stopped two other women wearing dresses. [...]

“He pointed at my outfit and said, ‘Don’t you think your shorts are a little short?‘” she recalled. “He pointed at their dresses and said they were showing a lot of skin.”

He said that such clothing could make the suspect think he had “easy access,”said Lauren. She said the officer explained that “you’re exactly the kind of girl this guy is targeting.”

The New York City Police Department did not deny that officers were stopping women to talk to them about their clothing, but reasoned, “They are simply pointing out that as part of the pattern involving one or more men that the assailant(s) have targeted women wearing skirts.” But however well-intentioned, focusing on women’s choices — rather than the attackers’ — is just another way of blaming potential victims. It’s wrong to suggest that women are responsible for the actions of the attacker, or can somehow control whether they are targeted or raped.

Jessica Silk, the founder of a community group formed in the wake of the attacks, Safe Slope, criticizes the reported tactic as “completely inappropriate.” She says that instead of discouraging women from wearing certain types of clothing, police should be sending the message “Here are ways you can protect yourself.”

Many women in the neighborhood, who are already frightened and taking steps to protect themselves, are protesting that their clothing choices shouldn’t even be part of the discussion. Lauren, one of the women who was stopped, asks, “Where do you draw the line? I can’t wear shorts?” She says she thanked the officer but said she would prefer that he focus on catching the perpetrators, rather than scrutinizing women’s appearance.

Fox ‘Expert’ Blasts Expanding Access To Birth Control: ‘Are We Going To Do Pedicures And Manicures As Well?’

By Tanya Somanader/Think Progress


This week, the Obama administration announced that all health insurers will be required to cover birth control and other women’s health services without charging co-pays. This historic move has sent the burgeoning right-wing campaign against birth control into an apoplectic fit. Today, Fox News’ America’s Newsroom decided to feature one such activist in a “fair and balanced debate” on whether ensuring a woman’s access to birth control is a good idea.

Former Women’s Media Center president Jehmu Greeneoffered the facts that support greater access to birth control. Namely, “50 percent of pregnancies in this country are unintended pregnancies” –the leading reason why women seek abortions — which costs the U.S. over $11 billion a year. Noting that contraception not only allows women to space out their pregnancies and commit to parenting, but also reduces the number of abortions, Greene determined the new policy to be a “text-book definition of win-win.”

Fox’s anti-birth control “expert,” Family PAC Federal Vice President Sandy Rios, however, found her own reasons to lambast the policy as “ridiculous.” Telling Greene that she lives in “la la land,” Rios offered the following “arguments” against the new policy and a woman’s right to use birth control, which are so ludicrous they’re worth listing:

– “Is the White House out of their mind? Does the West Wing not know what the left wing is doing? We’re $14 trillion in debt and now we’re going to cover birth control, breast pumps, counseling for abuse? Are we going to do pedicures and manicures as well?”

– “Why in the world would you encourage your daughters, and your granddaughters, and whoever else comes behind you to have unrestricted, unlimited sex anytime, anywhere and that, somehow if you prevent pregnancy, that somehow you’ve helped them. I would submit to you that uncontrolled sexual behavior is what is harming our girls, not our lack of birth control — which by the way they don’t seem interested in taking anyway.Having a baby is not the worst thing. I think having multiple sex partners without any kind of restraint or responsibility is much more damning, why would you support that?”

– “In Red China, they have this down to a science. The local health care centers make women come in every month to be examined to see if they’ve had their cycle to make sure they are taking their medication and if they have a baby they are roundly punished, if they have an extra baby that baby is aborted. That is the control we’re moving toward.”

– “I’d like to say that the morning-after pill has other detrimental affects. In Great Britain where it was legalized first, there was an outbreak of older men taking young girls in for the morning-after pill so they wouldn’t get caught and so there are no consequences.”

Watch the segment:

Surveying all of Rios’s “arguments,” Greene stated that Rios’s ultimate goal “is she wants to put ideology over public health.” To which Rios replied, “Yes, I suppose I do.” Rios then offered these parting words to Greene: “You all make science a laughing stock. You present science and facts just to present your viewpoint.”

Bachmann Only Got Law Degree Because Her Husband Told Her To, Urged Women To ‘Be Submissive To Your Husbands’

By Tanya Somanader/Think Progress




Late last month, the House GOP freshmen women stormed the House floor to combat the GOP’s “war on women” image. As Politico reports, the “rock ribbed, younger conservative working mothers” members launched the “I am a Republican woman” coordinated campaign to paint the Republican agenda as distinctly pro-woman. GOP Reps. Kristi Noem (SD) and Sandy Adams (FL) pounded the message of women as trailblazers in Congress and at home, pointing to a Prudential Financial study that says “84 percent of married women are either the chief or joint financial executors of their families” and “decision-makers of their households.” Notably missing from this Republican “pro-woman boosterism,” however, was GOP presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann (MN).

Indeed, the AP reports that the coordinated speeches were a chance for Republican women to explicitly make clear “what they stand for and, implicitly, who they are not: Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann.” Given Bachmann’s belief on the role of women, their effort to distance themselves is not entirely surprising. As the Washington Post’s profile of Bachmann’s husband today notes, Dr. Bachmann — not his wife — is the decision-maker of the household, and that “is an article of faith within the family.” An article that, in 2006, Rep. Bachmann preached to a congregation. Noting that she only pursued a law degree because her husband “told her to,” Bachmann told women in the audience “The Lord says: Be submissive, wives“:

“He is her godly husband,” said Peter Bachmann, Dr. Bachmann’s oldest brother, who lives on the family dairy farm across the eastern border in Wisconsin. “The husband is to be the head of the wife, according to God.” It is a philosophy that Michele Bachmann echoed to congregants of the the Living Word Christian Center in 2006, when she stated that she pursued her degree in tax law only because her husband had told her to. “The Lord says: Be submissive, wives. You are to be submissive to your husbands,” she said.

The fact that Bachmann needed permission from her husband to pursue an education, let alone public office, certainly cannot sit well with the “trailblazing” ways of the new GOP congresswomen. Noem, after all, decided to run for office in order “to stand up and defend” her principles presumably without asking her husband for permission. Adams left her marriage to a Navy officer at 22 “to escape an abusive relationship” and then “worked two jobs while studying for her GED.” As an advocate for victims’ rights, would she support Bachmann’s principle of submission?

Bachmann herself rejects the title of “feminist,” envisioning herself instead as an “empowered American.” But given that she attributes her critical life decisions to her husband, the question must be asked: Empowered by whom?

Pregnant Women Who Lose Babies Face Criminal Charges In Mississippi, Alabama

By Marie Diamond/Think Progress

This year, the Georgia legislature considered a bill that would require women to prove their miscarriages “occurred naturally” and weren’t secret abortions. In a similar vein, the Guardian reports that states including Mississippi and Alabama are charging dozens of women with murder or other serious crimes who have miscarried or had stillbirths:

Across the US more and more prosecutions are being brought that seek to turn pregnant women into criminals.[...]

In Alabama at least 40 cases have been brought under the state’s “chemical endangerment” law. Introduced in 2006, the statute was designed to protect children whose parents were cooking methamphetamine in the home and thus putting their children at risk from inhaling the fumes. Amanda Kimbrough is one of the women who have been ensnared as a result of the law being applied in a wholly different way.[...]

The baby was delivered by caesarean section prematurely in April 2008 and died 19 minutes after birth. Six months later Kimbrough was arrested at home and charged with “chemical endangerment” of her unborn child on the grounds that she had taken drugs during the pregnancy – a claim she has denied.

“That shocked me, it really did,” Kimbrough said. “I had lost a child, that was enough.”

Kimbrough is now facing a 10-year sentence if her case is not reversed on appeal — a 10 year sentence that will deprive her three other children of their mother.

A common tactic by prosecutors is singling out a group of women who are unlikely to draw public sympathy — women who may have used drugs while pregnant — to blur the line between abortion and homicide. Rennie Gibbs, for example, was 15 when she became pregnant and lost her baby in a stillbirth. Prosecutors charged her with a “depraved heart murder” after they discovered she had used cocaine, although there was “no evidence that drug abuse had anything to do with the baby’s death.” She now faces life in prison in Mississippi.

Targeting women who use drugs while they are pregnant is exactly the wrong policy for protecting the health of their future children. When a woman who is addicted to drug becomes pregnant, she needs immediate treatment to ensure that her addiction does not lead to serious birth defects for her child. But the threat of criminal prosecution — especially for a crime as serious as murder — will only drive her into the shadows. For this reason, dozens of public health organizations including the American Public Health Association have all denounced these prosecutions as harmful to both woman and child.

Other prosecutors are twisting laws designed to protect pregnant women and their unborn children into attacks on childbearers themselves. At least 38 states have introduced fetal homicide laws that were intended to be used against violent attacks by third parties like abusive male partners. But in South Carolina, only one case has been brought against a man for assaulting a pregnant woman, while up to 300 women have been arrested under the law, according to the National Advocates for Pregnant Women.

These prosecutions are part of a much broader assault on women’s reproductive rights. Indeed, it’s been a banner year for the right’s war on women, with state legislatures passing a slew of restrictive legislation across the country that not only impede women’s constitutional right to abortions but also jeopardize their access to basic health care. Four states have defunded Planned Parenthood so far, a new Ohio law bans abortions as early as six weeks without exceptions for rape or incest, and Texas is one of several states that now forces women seeking abortions to undergo waiting periods and mandatory sonograms. Some groups and lawmakers are even pushing to outlaw contraceptives like birth control pills.

As GOP Continues Its War On Women, Study Shows Female Life Expectancy Is Declining In 313 Counties

By Travis Waldron/Think Progress

The United States is rapidly falling behind the rest of the industrialized world when it comes to life expectancy, and no demographic is facing a more rapid decline in life expectancy than women. According to a new study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, the life expectancy of the American woman is not just growing too slowly — in 313 American counties, it is actually declining.

In these counties, primarily located in the Southeast, Central Appalachia, and the lower Midwest, life expectancy rates for women are as many as 50 years behind the best-performing countries. In other words, the worst female life expectancy rates in the U.S. are equal to the rate the best countries experienced in the 1950s.

Researchers and analysts caution against attributing the decline to any one factor, but say it is clear that “income plays a very large role in determining adult health outcomes,” suggesting that poverty and socioeconomic status play a key role in raising — or lowering — life expectancy. And while there may not be consensus as to why the decline is occurring, University of Wisconsin professor Dave Kindig told Remapping Debate that, to reverse the trend, the U.S. needs to strengthen its investment into public health programs, particularly those focused on preventive medicine and nutrition:

“If we tripled our investment in public health, and did it in a smart way, we would almost certainly get that money back in savings in the long run because fewer people would be going to the hospital for heart attacks and strokes and cancer and diabetes.”

But the increasing political pressure to cap health care costs, he added, creates a vicious cycle. As more money is spent on treatment, the temptation is to spend less money on public health initiatives that are aimed at prevention.With fewer funds available to increase access in underserved areas, improve environmental conditions, and enhance health awareness, even more money will have to be spent on treatment, ultimately squeezing public health budgets even further.

In Congress and state legislatures across the country, however, Republicans have targeted public health programs for drastic spending cuts or full elimination, focusing especially onprograms that benefit women the most. ThinkProgress compiled a list of the most drastic cuts the GOP has attempted to make to women’s health programs:

WIC: The GOP’s initial budget sought to cut 10 percent from the 2010 spending level for the Special Supplemental Nutritional Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), which provides aid to low-income pregnant and nursing women and their infant children. The spending resolution passed on April 12, which averted a government shutdown, slashed $500 million from WIC’s 2010 spending levels. Total cuts to the program for fiscal year 2012 are estimated at $833 million.

Title X: The budget plan the GOP released in February sought to eliminatefunding for Title X, which provides family planning to low-income families, altogether. The program’s $317 million budget was cut by $17 million in the April 12 spending resolution.

Planned Parenthood: The GOP took the government to the brink of shutdownover funding for Planned Parenthood, which provides millions of women with basic health services each year. The deal to avoid a shutdown kept Planned Parenthood’s funding intact, but states across the country have sought todefund its state chapters. In Indiana, defunding Planned Parenthood keptthousands of women from getting care provided by Medicaid. Wisconsin is the latest state to launch an attack on the organization.

Medicare/Medicaid: The House GOP budget authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) would end Medicare as we know it and turn Medicaid into a block-grant system, disproportionately hurting women. Both programs aid more women than men, and women in general retire at lower incomes than men. The average retired woman earns $14,000 in income each year — $12,000 of which comes from Social Security. Under Ryan’s plan, the average female senior would pay all of that $12,000 for Medicare coverage.

Affordable Care Act: During the health care debate, Republicans fought toprevent maternity care from becoming a standard inclusion on medical plans and attempted to keep the bill from passing despite its many benefits for women. Those benefits include better coverage of preventive procedures like mammograms and cervical cancer scans, the establishment of community health centers to make it easier for low-income women to see doctors, and coverage protection for those with pre-existing conditions, all of which will save lives and allow women to stay healthier longer. The House GOP voted to repeal the law in January and has fought to defund many of its programs, including a Free Choice Voucher program that would have helped give low-income Americans more options when they chose their health coverage had it not been gutted by Republicans.

It’s not too late for the United States to reverse the trend and begin catching up to the best countries in the world when it comes to life expectancy. But cutting programs that are vital to ensuring women’s health is not the way to do it. As Kindig told Remapping Debate, this is a “national problem” that needs to be addressed now.

“Changing these trends is very much in the social and public interest,” he said. “We can’t just assume that everybody is going to get better eventually if we continue down the same path.”

Progressive groups launch campaign to fight GOP’s ‘War on Women’

By Sahil Kapur

WASHINGTON – A trio of progressive and women's groups will unveil a new front in their ongoing campaign Friday afternoon calling on House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to "stop the war on women," Raw Story has first learned – a reference to the anti-abortion measures Republicans are advancing.

The abortion-rights organization NARAL has joined forces with the women's group EMILY's List and MoveOn.org to mobilize activists against what they call a "war on women currently raging on Capitol Hill." The three groups will mobilize their supporters and gather signatures to deliver to Boehner on Tax Day in a show of opposition to a provision in the bill that may conceivably permit IRS agents to audit women who had an abortion due to rape or incest.

"Talk about putting government in our bedrooms!" said EMILY's List President Stephanie Schriock, calling the measure a "major intrusion into the private medical decisions" of women. "Boehner's Boys will hear from Americans across the country with one clear message: Stop the War on Women. Now."

The heart of the campaign is to express disgust for H.R. 3, a top GOP priority called "The No Taxpayer For Abortion Act," which beefs up restrictions on abortion access in the United States. The bill has secured the votes necessary for passage on the House floor, and has been successfully maneuvered through theJudiciary and Ways And Means Committees.

"Americans have had it," said NARAL president Nancy Keenan, "and are spurring into action against Speaker Boehner and the 221 co-sponsors of H.R. 3, who will face a public backlash from all over the country come Tax Day and beyond."

"This bill is invasive and reckless," added MoveOn director Kat Barr. "So it's no wonder so many Americans have spoken out in strong opposition to it, and to Speaker Boehner's war on women."

H.R. 3 eliminates employer tax deductions on employee health insurance plans that cover abortion. The GOP stripped out some of its most controversial provisions -- such as denying exemptions to a woman even in cases of rape, incest and when her life is in danger.