#The Republican Party, supposedly a pro-family party, just ushered in a damning bill that could make it much harder for women to be women, to avoid becoming pregnant, to experience healthy and positive pregnancies and to raise children. The #Party of No just became the Part of Alienated Women.
On Thursday, Ceilie Richards, #Planned Parenthood’s president, along with many other women in the United States, came down harshly on the Republicans’ flawed and drastic healthcare bill that aims to repeal and replace Obama's signature – and impressive – Affordable Care Act.
Being a woman in the United States, she explained, had just become more difficult.
Outrage at white, male privilege
The raft of changes to #Obamacare is a destructive and misogynistic take on healthcare from old, conservative white guys who clearly think that a woman's place is to be in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant, and without quality healthcare – or personal choice.
Photos circulated on Friday of Republican Party men with silver hair in their sixties and seventies who were gathered together to celebrate the passing of the bill. Many women in America commented on this bill as yet another example of #white male privilege, one that glaringly steals away freedoms and protections from women and turns healthcare into a deadly political game of have's and have not's.
#Planned Parenthood's Richards spoke the day that the American Health Care Act just was ushered swiftly through the (mostly male) House of Representatives. She has been a key fighter in the efforts to protect women's healthcare and heath rights, and she talked at length about the damaging bill and the freedoms women would lose under it.
She got a rousing standing ovation as she stood at the New School in New York to talk about the calamitous bill.
Jammed with errors and misogyny
Even though the bill only just crept through the House by about four votes Richards said that it was “jammed through” with errors and that it lacked a coherent and cogent argument for its eradication of women's rights.The bill is a relic of a previous era when men controlled women's bodies and told them what they could or couldn't do with their health and reproductive well being.
She cautioned that resistance efforts and campaigners needed to focus on obstructing the bill's effective passage through the Senate, where, if it passed ,it would create a whole new world for American health care.
Attempts to be positive
Even though Richards attempted to sound positive and optimistic and fair, she was clearly annoyed by the bill, as were many women across the world. She labelled the bill “a vampire resurrected”, and cautioned the audience about what the calamitous bill could do if it climbs into the #Senate and passes through.
Elsewhere in the media, the bill was labeled as #Donald Trump's homicidal healthcare bill and as having the potential to kill. #Bernie Sanders went on a Twitter spree pointing out the obvious flaws of the bill.
He began with saying that 24 million people would be left uninsured and that Donald trump blatantly lied to the American people in his election promises, about everyone having access to healthcare. Other women on Twitter posted photos of old white Republican men looking smug about their recent win. Women's groups and feminists were supported by men in damning the ultra-conservative Republican agenda.
The biggest issue in the bill is ending access to Planned Parenthood. This really hits lower income women and women of color - proving once again that the Republican Party is the party of old white guys. Yawn. It's hard to be a woman in America these days - it's even harder now to be a healthy one.
