By Karen Rubin, editor@news-photos-features.com, news-photos-features.com
From inside the White House, Paula White, Trump’s “spiritual advisor,” an evangelical huckster who lived in one of his coops for 20 years who he named to head his Office of Faith, said women should submit to men because ““God has an order... It’s not hard to submit.”
Mother’s Day is a perfect time to take stock on where we are in the Trump/MAGA White Christo Fascist accelerated war on women and women’s rights. Somehow this issue, fundamental to more than half the population, has gotten short shrift, even in the 2024 election campaign when yet again a woman candidate superior in every way was discarded for a decrepit demented degenerate convicted felon who did nothing but demean women.
Even now the fact that women are dying cruel, suffering deaths and pregnancy is being criminalized as they prosecute women who miscarry for infanticide (one in four pregnancies result in miscarriage) hardly comes to the surface at the massive protests over migrants rights to due process vs Gestapo-like deportation, tariffs and the collapse of the economy and global alliances, the offensive against academic freedom and Rule of Law, the disintegration of government services including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, CDC, FDA, NIH. All are critical to be sure as we watch our democracy being rolled over into autocracy, but under the radar, stealthfully, in the barrage of “flooding the zone,” is unfolding their multi-pronged crusade to render women with no more rights or purpose than a brood mare, less-than-fully sentient beings without the same autonomy and self-determination of men.
You can look to the contradictions of pushing for abortion bans and blocking access to contraception, with the fact that women living in states with abortion bans are twice as likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or shortly after giving birth, compared to those in states where abortion is legal and accessible, as the Gender Equity Policy Institute (GEPI) revealed in a new report, Maternal Mortality in the United States After Abortion Bans. Currently, 62.7 million women and girls live in states with abortion bans. (Read the full report: https://thegepi.org/maternal-mortality-abortion-bans/)
You can look at the contradiction of promoting large families (floating a $5000 bounty on a baby, awarding Motherhood National Medal to women who bear six children, and giving parents extra votes for their minor children), with the “pro-lifers” ending Biden’s expanded child tax credit that reduced child poverty in half, with the lack of paid parental leave in 30 states, available, affordable child care, with the lack of universal health care, reduction of services for children with disabilities, and the MAGA Republicans looking to repeal Obamacare and cut $888 billion from Medicaid, effectively canceling health insurance and access to health care for 75 million. Meanwhile, Trump is freezing funding for Planned Parenthood, often the only accessible medical clinic women can access (Reuters: “Trump administration to freeze family-planning funds for Planned Parenthood”).
The Center for Reproductive Rights is raising the alarm: “Right now, extremist lawmakers are moving to gut billions of dollars in Medicaid funding in the United States—jeopardizing care for 1 in 5 people including 16,75 million women of reproductive age. Medicaid covers 42% of all births, funds 75% of public family planning services, and provides essential care for communities historically excluded from the health system. If they succeed, the consequences will be devastating:
Planned Parenthood and other essential providers could be forced to close.
Maternal mortality and health disparities will worsen.
People of color, rural and low-income communities, LGBTQ+ individuals, and people with disabilities will be disproportionately harmed.
Medicaid isn't a luxury—it's a lifeline.
“This is a direct attack on sexual and reproductive health care: from birth control and cancer screenings to maternity care and HIV treatment. Defunding providers would strip millions of people of affordable, essential services and devastate reproductive health care access across America.”
How do you rationalize the inconsistency of the demand for labor with expelling immigrants, even Dreamers, and even, with a stroke of a Sharpie, overturning the Constitution’s promise of birthright citizenship, if your biggest concern for forcing women to give birth is to provide new workers whose wages will keep Social Security and Medicare solvent? Well, forced childbirth should provide sufficient number of low-wage workers, especially as they look to AI-endowed robots to do most of the really menial or repetitive labor like picking fruit or mining coal following the model of Japan which similarly is using robots to address its depopulation crisis while retaining its population purity by rejecting migration. But until AI robots become feasible, forced-birth states like Florida and Arkansas are repealing child-labor laws so that a 13-year old can work 8-hour overnight shifts in factories.
Meanwhile, while a faction of the ProNatalist movement, the Evangelical Christians, oppose such technological marvels as IVF (because what do you do with the remaining embryos when you believe in the superior personhood of a clump of cells to its mother?), others see the opportunity to pump out five, six, seven “best and brightest” through genetic engineering (eugenics).
It’s because the ProNatalist movement is less about increasing population than it is about changing the demographics of an America headed toward becoming majority Minority (by 2041), and continuing to expand the gap in where wealth, which means power, reside.
What is consistent in all of this – and the key tool to overturn democracy - is control over women and undoing any progress toward gender equality (only since 1972), where women earn as much as men for the same job, have the same access to education and career, and share parenting with their partner (for the ProNatalist, who is always a husband) – that is the basis for actually making DEI “illegal,” and subject to prosecution by Trump Department of Injustice.
They don’t give a crap that a key reason for the declining birthrate is that young people are delaying having babies largely because can’t afford them. They may want babies – people used to want 2 or 3 – but only have 1 or none because they run out of money and the biological clock has rung. They are doing nothing to enable women stay in their career so they can rise up the ladder in position and salary. Women wind up staying at home because of the lack of paid parental leave and the cost of child care is greater than their take-home pay.
The Trump/MAGA/Musk/DOGE anti-DEI crusade, unraveling the slow-as-molasses accommodations employers were making to keep women in their workforce (job-sharing, work-at-home, subsidized childcare), is merely an excuse to reimpose unconstitutional discrimination against women, minorities, and people with disabilities – to make women second class citizens with less access to voting, to jobs (the SAVE Act and Trump’s unconstitutional EO changing voting eligibility), to college admission, housing, business loans and entrepreneurial opportunities. (This generation of women who take their rights for granted do not remember that in the 1960s, a woman required a man’s signature to get a loan or a lease.)
Trump even scoffed at the panic expectant parents are having over baby necessities becoming either unaffordable or unavailable - like car seats (hospitals don’t let you take the baby home without one, 97% produced in China), strollers (“the thing you push the baby in”), cribs. He dismissed pleas for tariff exemptions, saying “I don’t want confusion.” (Translation: he only wants to give waivers to the billionaire and corporate donors in his circle.)
The WhiteChristoFascist ProNatalist Movement has honed in on the Sexual Revolution and Women’s Movement of the 1960s as the culprit and are trying to unwind. Imagine, women having sex for reasons other than propagation or being hired for jobs or getting admitted to colleges that white men felt entitled to, being able to get their own credit cards, mortgage, business loan without a father or husband to co-sign.
The contempt for women – and the campaign to remove them from positions of authority or power, and especially wealth – is clear in the multi-pronged actions to both force women to give birth while doing nothing to provide for health care, paid parental leave, child care, affordable housing, equal pay.
So Trump has issued a slew of Executive Orders (all of them unconstitutional and a betrayal of his oath and mandate to “faithfully executive the laws of the united States”) to reverse enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, opening the way for employers, financial institutions, landlords to reject women – even threatening prosecution for hiring or admissions activities (not just policies) that suggest of “DEI” (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion). Ridiculously, just as he is doing throughout federal agencies, they are clawing back – firing any woman from a prominent position, and erasing women from history and culture.
Attorney General Pam Bondi has ordered the Department of Justice to rescind funding from domestic violence and crime victims programs, as ‘No longer aligned with the administration’s” priorities, ideology or values – despite the fact they are created (and funded) under the Victims of Crime Act of 1984 which established the Crime Victims Fund that is funded from fines and restitution, not taxes, and through the Violence Against Women Act (which MAGA Republicans did not want to renew).
Meanwhile, the movement to eradicate so-called DEI and measures like the SAVE Act (which would add obstacles to married or divorced women to register to vote) is intended to disenfranchise women and re-establish legal discrimination in college admissions, career, housing, while re-educating generations to see women as not just inferior, but subservient to men and dependent upon men, just as Jesus wants.
Texas and other states have been trying to restrict pregnant women from traveling out of state (how would they know if they are pregnant? One imagines women of child-bearing age would have to undergo some test); they are inspecting young women’s genitalia in order to join sports team.
They are also using high-tech tracking. In Texas, they are monitoring women’s cell phones, tapping into their ovulation calendars, and paying vigilantes to report women and anyone who helps a woman obtain reproductive health care, while a Republican TX Senator introduced a bill to test water sources for medication abortion. (White House says Americans should be ‘really careful’ about using period tracker apps, CNN, July 8, 2022; Rolling Stone: “Trump and Vance Have Backed States That Want to Surveil Pregnant Women”)
The activist group, Ultraviolet, raised the alarm that the Trump administration is paying companies, including ShadowDragon, to track pregnant people. ShadowDragon scrapes data from hundreds of websites, social networks, apps, and services across the web--from BabyCenter to Instagram, Pinterest to Amazon--to map our activities, movements, and relationships. In Texas,
Texas and Lousiana filed charges against a New York State doctor for providing the abortion medication, mifepristone, to a resident (New York said fck-off).
On the one-year anniversary of Donald Trump backing states that want to monitor women’s pregnancies, DNC spokesperson Aida Ross stated, “One year ago, Donald Trump told women across the country that they don’t have a fundamental right to privacy and that states should be able to monitor women’s pregnancies. Now, 100 days into his already-disastrous second term, Trump is staying true to the toxic Project 2025 blueprint he ran on by slashing maternal health care access and gutting lifesaving protections for women – and making it clear the rest of his extreme anti-choice agenda is next. After ‘proudly’ overturning Roe v. Wade, Trump has already shown he’ll stop at nothing to enact his dangerous plans – including ripping away reproductive freedoms and privacy from millions of Americans.”
The New Republic reported (“Trump Sneaks Dangerous Rights for Fetuses Into Executive Order”): “By describing a fetus as a person from conception, Trump has legitimized fetal personhood. … The legal language employed by fetal personhood also effectively categorizes any person receiving an abortion at any stage as a murderer.”
Daily Beast reported, “Trump Administration Removes Reproductive Rights Website”
This contempt for women and mothers (and the lie that their anti-reproductive freedom crusade has anything to do with being “pro-life”) carries through with the backsliding on gun safety – even ordering Justice Department lawyers to restore gun rights to domestic abusers, and reversing the consent decrees in police departments. “Thoughts and prayers” for the Florida State University students only the most recent casualties, just as Florida’s state legislature rolls back the minor gun regulations passed in the wake of the Parkland tragedy, to lower the age to purchase a gun back to 18 and (get this) allow conceal carry on campuses.
“Each day in America, 125 people are shot and killed, and more than 200 others are wounded,” writes Angela Ferrell-Zabala, Executive Director, Moms Demand Action & Senior Vice President of Movement Building for Everytown for Gun Safety. “Behind every number is a story—of heartbreak, trauma, and, too often, of lives forever changed.”
They simply do not give a crap about the lives of mothers, wives, daughters, or for that matter the trauma of mourning their husbands, sons and fathers.
An average of 24 people per minute are victims of rape, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner in the United States — more than 12 million women and men over the course of a single year, the National Domestic Violence Hotline reports (at risk of being defunded ).
Women in the US are 11 times more likely to be killed with guns than women in other high-income countries.
Female intimate partners are more likely to be killed with a firearm than all other means combined.
The presence of a gun in domestic violence situations increases the risk of homicide for women by 500%. More than half of women killed by gun violence are killed by family members or intimate partners.
The Trump Administration intends to “address” the violence and discrimination meted on women and girls by simply not keeping track while cancelling funding for the nonprofit organizations in place to help women, children and marginalized people.
See also:
NEW REPORT: MOTHERS FACE DOUBLE THE RISK OF DYING DURING PREGNANCY AND CHILDBIRTH IN STATES THAT BAN ABORTION
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