Heather Wilhelm:
If you were an inquisitive space alien who decided to drift down to visit America in 2016 — as a tour guide, I probably wouldn’t recommend this year in particular, as people are kind of crabby, and good-natured hijinks are at a general low, but that’s another story — you could be forgiven for thinking that women simply can’t do a thing for themselves. You could be forgiven, that is, if your only human contacts were today’s leading “feminists.”
Take Tuesday’s news regarding the nomination of Tom Price, a pro-life congressman from Georgia, as the incoming Trump administration’s secretary of health and human services. To hear feminists tell it, if Price gets confirmed, we lady folk might as well call it a day, don sackcloth and ashes, and wail while we wait for the fearsome and inevitable arrival of the tsunami of patriarchal oppression.
“Trump Health Czar Tom Price is a Nightmare for Women,” declared Erin Gloria Ryan on Tuesday in the Daily Beast. “Price helming HHS is a nightmare scenario for advocates of reproductive choice,” she continued, “and a dream for those with a nostalgia for the time before Roe v. Wade, if not Griswold v. Connecticut.”
Yikes. This Price guy sounds pretty retrograde! Did he announce an improbable plan to singlehandedly overturn Roe v. Wade, thereby banning abortion, even though he’s not on the Supreme Court? Has he unleashed a scheme to outlaw contraceptives, even though Griswold already declared that unconstitutional? Has he proposed a forced nationwide return to modest poodle skirts and drive-ins and people who exclaim things like “Gee, Linda, I sure don’t trust the punch at this sock hop!” in a completely un-ironic fashion?
Well, no. Get ready, America, and prepare to be shocked: Tom Price doesn’t think you should be forced to pay for everyone else’s abortion and contraceptives.
Price, as McClatchy news service reported on Wednesday, “would be able to repeal one of President Barack Obama’s most controversial initiatives: free birth control for women under the Affordable Care Act.” Because of this — and likely because her organization received a whopping $500 million in tax dollars last year, which would be a real bummer to lose — Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards served as one of the first to sound an alarm at the news. “Tom Price poses a grave threat to women’s health in this country,” she announced. “Price would take women back decades.”
Actually, Price would likely take women back seven years, to the notorious hell-scape of 2009, when people actually had to shell out around $10 a month for birth control. Also, in 2009 — gird your loins, for this way horror lurks — you couldn’t just waltz into your doctor’s office and demand a $500 IUD for “free.” (The IUD is never “free,” of course. Other people pay for it, or you pay for it in quieter, more indirect ways. Amazingly, for much of the political Left, this lesson never seems to sink in.)
Let’s set aside, at least for now, the Left’s many fears about the socially moderate Trump’s supposedly incoming reign of hardcore social-conservative terror. Let’s look at the real subtext beneath the panic. It’s the sad truth that feminism, once a plucky movement with worthy elements dedicated to fighting structural inequities faced by women, has collapsed into an often-sulky shambles with one overarching, consistent demand: “I’m helpless! Pay for my stuff!”
“Every little girl dreams of one day growing up and falling in love,” writes Ryan in the Daily Beast, “and one day, when a squeamish insurance executive decides it’s time to stop paying for healthcare that enables women to have non-procreative sex, getting accidentally pregnant.”
We are familiar with RINO (Republicans In Name Only).
Well there was an example of FINO (Free In Name Only).
There are no insurance policies under ObamaCare where the women get FREE birth control.
Even Subsidized premiums leave women holding the bag for deductibles and out-of-pocket costs.
The Pill, if a relatively healthy woman wants it, will be under all those ceilings.
She will pay for it 100% all 12 months of the year.
Can you imagine a ”poor” woman whose premiums are totally paid for by taxpayers, coming up with her $3,500 deductible to afford an IUD or a subcutaneous implant?
Me either.
She’d be better off sneaking into a school and grabbing a handful of those free condoms left out for the kids to use.
Liberals are working overtime trying to work themselves up into a frenzy imagining all the evils Trump will impose on the nation. The media used all their power to vilify Trump into some demonic oppressor in order to TRY to make him out to be worse than Hillary actually IS. This far, all he has done is show reason and restraint.
By January 20, the entire left will have worked themselves into a dysentery-weakened state of malaise. Well, the whiny crybabies have only themselves to blame.