Yes, the economy will decide the election.
But if you can’t afford your birth control, a cancer screening, or yes, an abortion, that’s a potential economic crisis too.
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By continuing to revive long-settled debates about women’s health care, Mitt Romney and friends are exposing the GOP for the archaic, bizarro Republican Party they’ve become in recent years. (Frank Rich breaks down this history of the GOP and women in a new New York magazine article, and it’s astounding to think about how far the Republican Party has slid backward since being on the forefront of the women’s suffrage movement.) It’s really no wonder Romney is losing the women vote to President Obama by 17 points.
"Real women buy their own birth control!" was a Tea Party rallying cry outside the Supreme Court today, providing evidence that there’s no end in sight to the GOP War on Women. The battle over abortion rights has devolved to a battle over contraception.
Mitt and Ann Romney would very much like everybody to forget about how extreme Mitt’s views on women’s health actually are. Even if Etch-A-Sketchy Mitt tries to adopt more moderate views later on, he can't be trusted to protect fundamental rights and basic health care.
As Rich explains:
The notion that Romney will somehow be more “moderate” on women’s issues than his opponents or party is not credible. The fact that he and his wife long ago supported Planned Parenthood in Massachusetts is no more a predictor of his agenda in the White House than the Bush family’s links to Planned Parenthood were of either Bush presidency. On policy, Romney and Santorum are on exactly the same page. Both endorsed the Blunt Amendment and the short-lived Komen defunding of Planned Parenthood. (Romney has called for the termination of all federal funding of Planned Parenthood.) Both men also want to shut down Title X—the main federal family-planning program supported by Nixon and then-Congressman Bush at its creation in 1970. Title X prevents abortions and unintended pregnancies by the hundreds of thousands per year, according to federal research. In addition to birth control, it also pays for preventive health care that includes cervical- and breast-cancer screening, testing for sexually transmitted diseases like HIV, and even some abstinence counseling for teenagers. It would be overstating the case to say that the men running for president and running Congress in the GOP are opposed to all these services; the evidence suggests that such female concerns aren’t on their radar screen.
It’s our job to make sure Mitt Romney and the GOP’s extreme positions
stay in the spotlight. As MSNBC’s Richard Wolffe explains in the above video, pointing out all Romney’s flaws won’t be enough — President Obama needs to continue standing up for women and progress and the entire last century and give people a good reason to cast a vote in November.