She’s a young mother, pregnant with her second child, who relies on the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children – WIC - for food and medicine when her son gets sick. When the federal government shut down she became one of almost nine million mothers, and their children under five, who lost their vouchers for food, baby formula, and breastfeeding support.
She’s a victim of domestic violence who has nowhere to go for help because funds usually available under the Violence Against Women Act have been reduced or eliminated.
She’s Michele Langbehn, a beautiful young mother who told her story on CNN and then started a Change.org petition to try to save her life. Having endured multiple surgeries, nine months of chemo, and two cycles of radiation to stop the spread of her rare form of cancer, she was under consideration for a clinical trial of a new medication that just might save her life when the shutdown hit the National Institutes of Health.
“I’m furious that Congress has chosen to shut down the government and leave so many of us behind,” Langbehn’s petition said. “This is not just about the debt ceiling or national parks. For me, the shutdown means that Congress is denying me potentially life-saving treatment. I speak for everyone battling cancer when I saw we don’t have time to wait.”
Why, I wonder, haven’t the critical needs of women like these – caretakers, breadwinners, mothers, daughters, elders in need - been given the priority of parks, monuments, food safety, and deserving veterans when it comes to policy and publicity?
All over this country, women who struggle to make ends meet in the best of times now face disastrous challenges, setbacks, and fears for the future of their families. Most of these women remain invisible, certainly in the eyes of privileged, uninformed, insensitive, politically driven policymakers under that big white dome in Washington. What do they know of moms who have to miss work and lose pay because Head Start programs or adult day care facilities for their aging parents have been closed? How many of them have looked at the face of a sick child and had to choose between food and medicine? Who among them has a child who won’t be able to attend college because financial aid has been cut?
As one blogger noted on slate.com, “Republicans are all about how babies are so great that women shouldn’t be able to say no to having one. … However, they clearly don’t love babies enough to make sure the alive ones are fed.”
That observation reminds me of what feminists pointed out back in the 1990s: Mean-spirited conservatives in Congress are all for supporting children from conception to birth. After that, it’s up to you, Mom.
And it’s not just about mothers. It’s about young women in college – and there are more of them than men – whose financial aid is being cut. Will they skimp on contraception, or meals, or meds, to make ends meet?
It’s about elderly women who can’t afford to heat their homes in winter if they depend on help from the Low Income Home Energy Program.
It’s about single women whose economic stability is seriously challenged when they are furloughed, and it’s about their health and wellbeing when they have to forego health care or preventive services like birth control, HPV testing, and pap smears for lack of funds or because of the moral objections of Neanderthals who get to hold them hostage.
The Affordable Care Act – can we please stop calling it Obamacare – has already meant that millions of women across the country have been able to access preventive health care without a co-pay, and more will benefit when the law takes full effect. It has already been measurably cost-saving: The Guttamacher Institute, for example, has shown that for every dollar invested in birth control services, nearly six dollars is saved in the long term.
As Dr. Atul Gawande, who writes for The New Yorker, and others have made clear, to date the Affordable Care Act has allowed more than three million people under age twenty-six to stay on their parents’ insurance policy. Seventeen million children with pre-existing medical conditions cannot be excluded from insurance eligibility or forced to pay inflated rates. And more than twenty million uninsured people will gain protection they didn’t have. A “new norm is coming,” Gawande says. It’s a norm that underscores that Americans are “entitled to basic protection.”
Who but the meanest and most politically driven could be against that?
The answer is a group of nasty, small-minded, heartless Tea Party members who are about to go down in flames. It gives me no pause to watch that happen. But taking women like Michele Langbehn and so many others down with them positively turns my stomach.