War on Women?

In case we needed some things cleared up…

Desperate not to blow the current election, the Democrats use the old standby method of smearing one’s opponent (in this case,  the allegedly heartless Republicans) with the charge that they are waging a war on women, chiefly by denying coverage for contraception and abortion, two things that have been elevated to the status of human rights.

This bears some serious scrutiny.

According to the CDC, the leading causes of death in American women are heart disease, cancer and stroke. It stands to reason that a better use of resources would be to combat those particular causes of death. Yet the Democratic platform seems bereft of that. It’s bereft of a lot of things, actually. Yes, it brings up the $700 billion in cuts Obama made and tries to waffle on. However:

The fact is that Obamacare cuts Medicare by $700 billion over its first ten years to fund other programs and imposes a board of price controllers — the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) — over Medicare to cut costs in ways that (particularly by driving providers out of the business of serving Medicare patients through inadequate payment rates) would reduce the access of both current and future seniors to care.

And:

The proposal would also have this reform begin only ten years from now, and affect only new entrants into Medicare, so that all current seniors and everyone now over 55 would be left entirely untouched for the rest of their lives, unless they chose to enter the new system. Thus, today’s seniors have no reason to complain about the proposal, since it would not affect them, and tomorrow’s seniors have essentially nothing to lose by it, since they would still be guaranteed a comprehensive benefit at only today’s out-of-pocket costs.

More choice and a delayed start plan sound more reasonable than a nationalised health service that is both unpopular and has already cost billions.

But the real “health” issues for Democrats are abortion and contraception, not the three big killers listed above. Going head-to-head with the Catholic Church is fine and dandy because it is quite easy to paint the largest Christian denomination as “anti-woman” even though it reveres the Theodokos and doesn’t stone women to death unlike a certain mad theology in Egypt. That is immaterial to the darling party of Planned Parenthood who stand to continuously benefit from a Democrat victory in November. Never mind that Planned Parenthood does not nor had it ever provided mammograms but rather referred women to them making their claim that they safeguard women’s health disingenuous to say the least. Indeed, the bulk of their business is abortion with 332,278 abortions done in 2009. If the leading killer of women in the US is heart disease, why the funding for abortion? 

If one were to take the CDC’s abortion statistics on their face (consider that the latest information was issued in 2008, is voluntary and may, therefore, be incomplete, has scant or incomplete reporting, lists in-state abortions for out-of-state women), consider that the bulk of abortions are done for adult women between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine (as of 2008, 57.1% of 825,564 abortions reported from 45 reporting areas that have co-operated since 1999), were performed between 8 to 13 weeks gestation (when eye/ear/digit development quickens and nails grow and circulatory and urinary systems are working), that 84.3% of abortions are done for unmarried women, that black women have a higher ratio of abortions and that the use or availability of contraception remains a culprit of sorts even though its use depends on various socio-economic factors. If one were to take at face value these reasons for abortion (compiled by the Guttmacher Institute), they are largely for personal, social or financial reasons, not health ones. 

Again, why the funding for abortion?

Clearly, this is a partisan issue, not a health one and certainly should not be one with which to paint one’s opponent as some troglodyte who would drag women into the Stone Age. Women in North America have suffrage, educational and employment opportunities, homes, food and medicine. If you were to ask the average woman anywhere, would she say she is grateful to live in a country that allows abortion or a country that allows her to vote, own property and basically be a rounded-off human being under the thumb of no one? The biggest health risks are heart disease, cancer and stroke. Why waste rhetoric and resources on the clearly political issues of abortion and contraception? How can abortion- which is largely for personal reasons and done primarily for certain groups- be elevated to a human right that would necessitate not only public funds but a fear-driven campaign?

There is a total disregard, even war, on women but it is not the usual suspects who wage it.