Any American who believed the Trump White House was finished ravaging women’s healthcare after past two weeks was tragically mistaken. It seemed impossible the evangelicals running Trump’s America could get any worse after the Health and Human Service’s (HHS) declaration that a single-celled organism is a living person worthy of federal government protections. That biblically- and biologically-incorrect “myth” that the moment of conception is a person according to Vatican dogmata was a preview of what the Trump theocrats have in store for women in 2018; it is not good.
A recently leaked White House memo portends an America in the image of the Emmy Award Winning HULU original series and 1986 dystopian novel “The Handmaids Tale,” and the beginning of the end of birth control in America.
Two weeks ago Trump granted religious authority to all employers to withhold contraceptives from their employees according to their Vatican-inspired belief that “any artificial” means of birth control is a mortal sin and abortion. Trump granted that religious authority to protect evangelicals’ religious liberty to control women.
One week ago, the Department of Health and Human Services’ “mission statement” revealed that going forward in the United States, a zygote is a person the government exists to protect. Both of those actions insinuated exactly what the evangelicals Trump authorized to wage war on women and families are planning for 2018 according to the leaked White House document.
The memo was acquired by Crooked Media and it was almost certainly written by the evangelicals prosecuting Trump’s war against women, families, and their freedom of self-determination; all part of the evangelicals’ religious crusade to control women.
The Trump administration’s policy agenda on women’s reproductive health “guts” funding for all federal evidence-based pregnancy prevention programs and transfers that money directly to evangelicals’ failed “abstinence only education” and “fertility awareness programs.”
Fertility awareness is code for the only Vatican-approved form of “natural” family planning and birth control, the unreliable “rhythm method.” It is important to note for the ten-thousandth time that these attacks on women’s rights are founded on the 1968 Papal encyclical Humanae Vitae. A religious document claiming that using “unnatural” or “artificial” forms of birth control is a ticket straight to the biblical Hell; even though it doesn’t say that in any Christian bible.
Some of the “wish list’s” more offensive features are defunding “Title X” because it is the only federally-funded family planning initiative and it does not ban “artificial” contraception or promote “abstinence only education” or “fertility awareness” programs as the only acceptable form of birth control. They aren’t promoted because they don’t work.
The “list” also included ending the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) budget because, that’s right, it doesn’t promote “ abstinence only and fertility awareness” as the only Vatican-approved form of “natural” birth control.
Also on the evangelicals’ chopping block is the federal Teen Pregnancy Prevention program (TPP) because it doesn’t mandate abstinence-only education. And just to demonstrate that the evangelicals are not content warring against American women, the World Health Organization (WHO) is on the outs because of the “Let Girls Learn” initiative that’s part of USAID.
The memo calls for cutting Title X funding “at least in half” because it helps low-income women afford access to forms of birth control banned by the Vatican. The evangelicals want the money diverted to what Republicans in Congress might allow to remain of “childcare programs” because according to the Guttmacher Institute, Title X is preventing at least one million unintended pregnancies every year.
The remaining Title X funds will go straight to “fertility awareness” programs; that is code for the so-called “rhythm method.” It is the only Catholic approved “natural” form of birth control and relies on abstinence during the period a woman is fertile each month. But it is not dependable by any measure and that appears to be the point; women will remain celibate or birth more babies according to the Vatican.
The “rhythm method” fails to prevent pregnancy over 25 percent of the time and was appropriate for 19th Century “family planning.” Conversely, Vatican-condemned “unnatural” and “artificial” forms of birth control have failure rates from “less than one percent to one percent” when used correctly. To make sure young women are ignorant about using any form of “unnatural” or “artificial” birth control “correctly,” the evangelical memo calls for completely wiping out the “Teen Pregnancy Prevention” program (TPP).
That highly successful program initiated in 2010 is “evidence-based policy-making” and not founded on a 1986 papal encyclical, so Trump’s evangelicals say it has to be eliminated in its entirety. Trump’s evangelicals said “the program has not worked and there is no positive evidence and some negative evidence.”
Trump’s lying evangelicals made an easily debunked and “categorically false statement” about TPP in their crusade to control women. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), between 2010 and 2015 the teen pregnancy birth rate dropped a whopping 35 percent; today the teen pregnancy birth rate is at “an all time low.”
Obviously the Trump administration is making it more difficult for women to access effective forms of contraception and want tax dollars spent teaching women how to use the least effective method because it is Vatican approved. This is not a religious liberty issue, or a pro-life issue. It is a forced childbirth crusade and and a religious war on over half the population’s personal freedoms and nothing else.
It is stunning, really, that few Americans recognized the pattern of attacks on women over the past seven years, or that religion is behind all of the attacks. It should have been a clarion call to action when evangelical employers won the right to deny birth control access to their workers, but it wasn’t. Now, all employers can claim “religious freedom” to withhold contraceptives from their employees and the federal government says a zygote is a living person. This is an evangelical holy war against birth control and the religious right is winning with little to no opposition.
One would like to claim that it is high time for women to take to the streets to save their right to self-determination and personal freedom, but it is too late. The religious right controls the halls of power and are using that authority to force women into perpetual childbirth according to a 1968 religious edict with no scriptural basis whatsoever. Not that a “scriptural basis” would make these attacks any less of an affront to women or the U.S. secular Constitution.
If men think they aren’t affected by an evangelical administration they are stupider than the moron in the Oval Office. It’s likely there aren’t too many men that relish struggling to support a family of ten or eleven children, or remain celibate to avoid living in poverty, but that is precisely what Republicans and evangelicals are pushing. If nothing else, men should be enraged that a bunch of old white Republican guys with bibles and misogynists wearing funny religious costumes are crusading to control their wives, daughters, mothers and sisters, but it’s glaringly apparent they could not care less or they would have marched on Washington years ago.
Most Americans with an ounce of awareness knew a Republican-dominated government would attack women’s rights; they have to pay tribute to their evangelical voting bloc. However, it is unlikely they were aware the attacks would come as fast and furious as they have thus far. If the Trump evangelicals get their way, and there is every reason to believe they will, 2018 will be the beginning of the end of women’s reproductive rights and Trump’s evangelical cabal will have imposed a Vatican policy nationwide with little opposition.
This is a monumental escalation in the war on women and a damn dark sign America is inching closer to being an evangelical theocracy where women are nothing more than birth machines; all while everyone watches Trump’s tweets instead of the vicious religious assault on women’s right to self-determination.