The
leading GOP candidates have aligned themselves with a platform based on
endangering women’s health care access.
In the first two Republican presidential debates, the candidates
slugged it out over who hated Planned Parenthood the
most.
Virtually every hopeful promised to defund the organization. Some of them, including Senator Ted
Cruz, are vowing to force the issue — even if it means shutting down the
federal government.
The impetus for these latest attacks was a series of heavily edited, misleading videos released by a front
group calling itself the Center for Medical Progress. Though the videos
purported to show Planned Parenthood employees engaging in a range of
inappropriate behaviors, every impartial investigation since then has cleared the group of any wrongdoing.
Yet right-wing lawmakers across the country are using the
doctored videos as a bludgeon against an organization that’s done so much for
so many years to ensure affordable access to health care for women.
Beyond
providing access to abortion care that many women would otherwise lack, Planned
Parenthood provides many critical health services — often in the low-income
communities that need them most.
One especially telling example of the life-saving work the
organization does comes from rural Scott County, Indiana. The area’s Planned
Parenthood didn’t provide abortions, but it did provide preventative and
reproductive health care, including HIV testing.
After state-level funding cuts
caused Scott County’s Planned Parenthood to close, HIV infection rates in the
area skyrocketed to outbreak level.
Other communities across the country rely on Planned
Parenthood’s services — from STD testing to cancer screenings to contraception
access — but far-right politicians continue to ignore this fact.
Sadly, every leading Republican candidate for president supports
a platform based on endangering access to health care for women.
Over the summer, Jeb Bush went so far as to say he’s “not sure we need half a
billion dollars for women’s health issues.” And as early as July, Cruz raised
the battle cry for Congress to do everything it could to defund Planned
Parenthood — even if that meant holding up other critical government spending and shutting the
government down.
That’s right: Cruz and his allies have taken the ludicrous
stance that slashing funding for women’s health is more important than, for
example, ensuring that low-income pregnant women receive their much-needed nutritional benefits on time, providing loans to
small businesses and homeowners in rural areas, or enabling public servants in
the Department of Veterans Affairs to reduce their backlog of
claims.
This is all part of a broader strategy of shutting down all access
to legal abortion in the United States. By closing clinics through defunding
Planned Parenthood and passing burdensome,
unnecessary regulations that clinics are unable to comply with,
conservative extremists have effectively eliminated the reproductive rights of
millions of women — especially low-income women in rural areas.
As a side effect, women across the country are finding it more
difficult to access a wide range of affordable health care services like birth
control and cervical cancer testing. But that apparently doesn’t bother
anti-choice lawmakers. They’ll happily attack a woman’s right to choose, even
if it means taking her right to health care with it.
Kathleen Turner is an award-winning actress and
an advocate for women’s right to choose. She serves on the board of
the People For the American Way Foundation. Distributed
by OtherWords.org.