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From Obama and the ACA to modern gender ideology, Democrats have repeatedly sold out women to the highest bidder
Last year, a personal situation unraveled badly, and a friend told me that while it was understandable that I was upset, what I was mourning was my delusion about what I thought I had. Just like when someone breaks up with you and you didn’t see it coming, if you thought the relationship was in good shape … delusion.
So it is with feminists and the left, and what looks to be a SCOTUS decision overturning Roe v. Wade and Casey. I’m sure others are preparing state by state maps about where it will still be possible to get an abortion and how much it will cost a woman in rural Texas, say, to get to the nearest clinic. I mainly want to assist with removing a few delusions some feminists may still harbor about how we got here.
The situation is complex, and I don’t think it can be fixed either by any small group of people, or by people who don’t understand how very badly wrong everything has been going for a long time now.
Just like with the Obergefell decision, while there’s a party that will be happy over the loss of Roe, and a party that will be sad, that this happened through the Supreme Court takes pressure off the parties to have to claim responsibility for it. In this case, what the Supreme Court gave, they are now likely to take away.
“Why have women’s rights hung for so long on a poorly handled court decision, rather than a proper law?”
You could argue that it’s Republican-appointed justices who did it, or that Obama’s failure to press the Merrick Garland nomination was a major contributor, but conservatives who worry about backlash can point to the courts as being at cause, as can liberals who don’t want Biden or Obama to have to answer for it.
And really, why have women’s rights hung for so long on a poorly handled court decision, rather than a proper law? Recall that although Democrats have gone out of their way to plaster rainbow everything all over themselves in the years since the Obergefell ruling in 2015, the party didn’t start coming out in support of full marriage equality until Obama’s hand was forced in 2012.
That is, Democrats have taken a lot of credit for same-sex marriage, but the Court did it. It’s important to remember that real power often lies with those who take action, no matter how much theoretical power is in the hands of foot-draggers who are immobilized by the fear of being disliked. Elected officials don’t actually like being ahead of public opinion, which often means being out of step with an effective voter coalition that will keep returning them to office.
Abortion rights in the Obama Era: Lip-service, at best
In 2008, I remember arguing with Obama supporters that his anti-choice record as a legislator was a bad sign for women. This was roundly dismissed as paranoia.
Barack Obama proved to be a vindictive president, and he got donors to defund at least one critical organization that I know of before he even got into office because they’d taken him at his word and made noise about holding him to his campaign promises. Dissent wasn’t allowed. From the outset, it was made very clear to all the organizations that he was going to run a tight ship, and you could be on board, or your donors would get a call. This included tight control over major pro-choice organizations like Planned Parenthood and National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL).
In office, in order to pass the Affordable Care Act (ACA,) multiple senior people with NARAL told me at the time that Obama kept the heads of NARAL and Planned Parenthood from saying anything about the upcoming plan to give up abortion coverage under the ACA in order to win support from conservative Democrats. The women were invited regularly to the White House and rewarded with copious attention. When the leash was finally let slip and they were allowed to mobilize their followers to oppose the Stupak amendment (which would prevent federal funds from being used for abortion), the vote was imminent and there was no time to really influence it.
The deal was done. The big abortion rights groups got to pretend like they’d really tried their best, and abortion opponents got to lament the intransigence of a left that supposedly refused to compromise. What’s true about what happened? When so many people are involved in a decision, there’s always a version of the story available to suit any audience. In retrospect, it’s possible we’d have a better result today if everyone had dropped the dishonest posturing and sat down to really talk, given that the Democrats weren’t who they needed to pretend to be in order to fire up the women’s vote, and never did step up on the rural organizing that everyone knew was necessary to build a national consensus that could withstand the test of time.
“The big abortion rights groups got to pretend like they’d really tried their best.”
Obama also signed an additional executive order after the ACA was passed, to clarify very thoroughly that no ACA money was ever to pay for an abortion.
When Obama released his budgets, although this is to some extent ceremonial, he included the Hyde restrictions on abortion funding that Republicans in Congress always added in themselves later in the process, and his administration elsewhere referred to them as “settled law,” indicating there would be no fight.
Later, the Obama administration argued in court that voter ID laws disadvantaged young voters, voters of color, and the poor. The administration also argued against making the morning-after pill an over the counter medication, and the court ruled against them, pointing out their own reasoning on other issues, that making Plan B available only with a valid ID disadvantaged younger and minority women, and the poor.
When it came time to decide eligibility for ACA coverage, the Obama administration set out qualifying conditions that would open up a new window of eligibility outside the usual enrollment window. Pregnancy wasn’t one of these conditions. Obama’s White House ignored efforts I was part of to get them to make pregnancy a qualifying event for enrollment in an ACA plan at any time of year.
This was important because health insurance companies often have pregnancy exclusions, especially lower cost plans that are available for individual purchase rather than through an employer. The math is simple. Pregnancy is often one of the most expensive medical events of a woman’s life. Men, and women who are never pregnant, will often live their whole lives out without such a costly hospitalization as a pregnancy can be. The Obama administration was content to ignore that. I’d guess that it probably shaved a few million off the estimated Congressional Budget Office projections of the overall cost of the policy.
Read full story here: https://4w.pub/how-a-decade-of-democratic-delusions-failed-women-on-abortion/
It doesn't help that white women vote conservative. Black women can't do all of the work for you.
I've always voted Democrat but I've been disappointed everytime. Liberals keep shooting themselves in the foot, because no candidate is perfect enough. And then there's many liberals/leftists who don't even believe in voting anymore and just want to see America collapse. the Republicans and conservatives are able to maintain a united front, that's why they get awful shit done
Gender supremacist ideology (that is, the gender self-identication is paramount over physical sex) has indeed been written into law by the Democrats.
One of Biden's first acts as president was signing the so-called "Equalities Act."
Direct result...inmates transferring into women's prisons from men's prisons based SOLELY on self identification claims.
While you're a super nice person cos you don't care who uses the bathroom...what a sweetie!...nobody trying to live in a California prison with a newly-minted, self-declared woman who is really a male sex offender using the Equalites Act to access more victims has the same luxury to be nice.
Compare and contrast with real act-based abortion protections being put into place by the Democrats.
The point is valid about who the Democrats can afford to care about.
I really like this piece and there was a lot I learned, especially about the Obama administration. I would love to be able to share this on social media, but I just can’t do that with a very intense language that is anti-trans. Please understand I’m not saying this because I am “woke” but because the subject so nuclear on social media that it prevents me from posting it because I might receive attacks. I have some questions about the same things this article has questions about with regards to how ideology for trans rights seems to have overtaken that for women’s rights, but the risks to me personally of sharing this are too high Which I guess is part of the problem with the author points out. I don’t think any of us want to discriminate against trans people. I don’t care who uses my bathroom. But the discourse has become so toxic that we can’t even discuss the fact that removing the word woman makes women less likely to support abortion, without having our lives threatened online It’s a dilemma. I am glad we have the space to discuss these kinds of issues thoughtfully and with the love and concern I know we all have for the most vulnerable among us, which at times is us cis women and at times is trans women- and trans men, who also often left out if the conversations that are so often dominated by white trans women.
I truly appreciate this political discourse—I did not know this level of involvement from the Obama administration and usually only have access to inflammatory news sources without in-depth discussion. Are there any sources you can recommend as someone clearly more familiar with the field?
The way the political right works is that they don't attack each other, even when they don't agree or their star politician does shitty things. Trump cheated on his wives? Doesn't matter to the political right. Trump doesn't pay anyone? Doesn't matter to the political right. Trump fucked a porn star? Doesn't matter to the political right. Trump said the word "Pussy"? Doesn't matter to the political right.
What does matter is that people were able to bond over Trump. People were able to join forces behind Trump. Trump was able to get a wall between the US and Mexico. Republicans were able to get Supreme Justices installed. Trump advanced the rights of white supremacists.
Think pieces that attack what is supposedly their own side, (you know the political left is for abortions, correct?) weakens the political left. When you attack this and sow doubt, how are people supposed to get behind anything and join together?
The quote at the end of the story:
If we cannot trust either major political party to secure our rights and safety as women, where do we go from here? How do we fight for our rights? Is there a 3rd party that is worth supporting?