The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing on birth control without any women last week. It sounds like a joke — sadly, it isn’t.
The hearing was on a portion of the Affordable Care Act, a federal statute designed to reform private health care. One provision of the act would require health insurance providers to cover birth control and contraceptive options for women. It would also prohibit insurers from charging higher premiums based on gender.
These provisions of the Affordable Care Act would go into effect by 2014, and directly affect women’s health care options. But Chairman Darrell Issa apparently does not feel their input is important. During the hearing, no women were called to testify.
These provisions have come under fire recently from the religious right. Some feel requiring insurers to cover birth control and contraception is a violation of religious liberties. That’s why Congress held the hearings: To take a look at the provisions and make sure they didn’t infringe on anyone’s religious freedoms. And that’s fine. But religious freedoms aren’t the only freedoms at issue here.
This is about women’s rights to make medical decisions and control their own bodies. So it might have been important to have some women at the Congressional hearing on a law that affects a woman’s access to birth control options. Five men were invited to testify about the ways a “man’s conscience” should guide the birth control requirements.
This hearing encapsulates perfectly the way the right views women’s rights. They don’t think women should have any input at all. Apparently Republicans think a woman’s right to make health care decisions should be determined entirely by men. Perhaps they think men know better. Maybe they think women just can’t be trusted to make their own choices. And so women are excluded from the debate.
It’s tough to believe this is happening in 2012. It sounds like something from the 1930s. Is this how far right America has moved in the past few decades? Have we gone back to the days of men making personal health decisions for women? Time and again American conservatives have proven they don’t believe women should have the right to make their own choices.
From proposed abortion laws that would charge a woman with murder if she has a miscarriage to attempts to tell women what birth control they can have access to, it’s clear the right only cares about control — this from a political ideology that pretends to be concerned with “big government” infringing on civil rights. Here we have the government making health care decisions for women with no input at all from women. Is this small government? No, this is big government intruding on Americans’ most personal decisions, and it’s led by Republicans.
These provisions of the Affordable Care Act should be allowed to go forward. Women need to have access to birth control options. The law wouldn’t require anyone to use contraception. The only religious liberty it would supposedly infringe upon is the right for conservative religious leaders to control people’s personal decisions.
We need to make it clear to Congress we won’t tolerate this regression of basic civil rights. Congressional Republicans should be condemned for their hypocrisy. We should never see headlines like “Women excluded from women’s rights debate.” – See more at: file:///Volumes/argonaut$/stories/sections/opinion/stories/2012/Feb/22/health_hypocrisy.html#sthash.ECvytRBD.dpuf
The hearing was on a portion of the Affordable Care Act, a federal statute designed to reform private health care. One provision of the act would require health insurance providers to cover birth control and contraceptive options for women. It would also prohibit insurers from charging higher premiums based on gender.
These provisions of the Affordable Care Act would go into effect by 2014, and directly affect women’s health care options. But Chairman Darrell Issa apparently does not feel their input is important. During the hearing, no women were called to testify.
These provisions have come under fire recently from the religious right. Some feel requiring insurers to cover birth control and contraception is a violation of religious liberties. That’s why Congress held the hearings: To take a look at the provisions and make sure they didn’t infringe on anyone’s religious freedoms. And that’s fine. But religious freedoms aren’t the only freedoms at issue here.
This is about women’s rights to make medical decisions and control their own bodies. So it might have been important to have some women at the Congressional hearing on a law that affects a woman’s access to birth control options. Five men were invited to testify about the ways a “man’s conscience” should guide the birth control requirements.
This hearing encapsulates perfectly the way the right views women’s rights. They don’t think women should have any input at all. Apparently Republicans think a woman’s right to make health care decisions should be determined entirely by men. Perhaps they think men know better. Maybe they think women just can’t be trusted to make their own choices. And so women are excluded from the debate.
It’s tough to believe this is happening in 2012. It sounds like something from the 1930s. Is this how far right America has moved in the past few decades? Have we gone back to the days of men making personal health decisions for women? Time and again American conservatives have proven they don’t believe women should have the right to make their own choices.
From proposed abortion laws that would charge a woman with murder if she has a miscarriage to attempts to tell women what birth control they can have access to, it’s clear the right only cares about control — this from a political ideology that pretends to be concerned with “big government” infringing on civil rights. Here we have the government making health care decisions for women with no input at all from women. Is this small government? No, this is big government intruding on Americans’ most personal decisions, and it’s led by Republicans.
These provisions of the Affordable Care Act should be allowed to go forward. Women need to have access to birth control options. The law wouldn’t require anyone to use contraception. The only religious liberty it would supposedly infringe upon is the right for conservative religious leaders to control people’s personal decisions.
We need to make it clear to Congress we won’t tolerate this regression of basic civil rights. Congressional Republicans should be condemned for their hypocrisy. We should never see headlines like “Women excluded from women’s rights debate.” – See more at: file:///Volumes/argonaut$/stories/sections/opinion/stories/2012/Feb/22/health_hypocrisy.html#sthash.ECvytRBD.dpuf