Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Life

The Looming Government Shutdown, and the War on Women’s Health

If the government shuts down today, we’ll have come to a new zenith of institutionalized misogyny in American government — a level of disregard for women that is so powerful it might bring that government to a halt. Even if it doesn’t and a deal is reached, the fact that women’s health was the last thing standing in the way of an agreement for over 24 hours is both alarming and telling.

As I and others have been noting during the past two days, the negotiations to settle on a budget and a avoid a catastrophic government shutdown (which still could happen in the next few hours) almost entirely boiled down to the issue of Planned Parenthood funding.

While many had predicted that the House GOP’s drive to strip the institution of its family-planning federal funding under Title X — the Hyde Amendment currently prevents it from receiving abortion funding — would be easily killed in the Senate, they underestimated, in my opinion, the sheer level of hatred for women’s bodily autonomy by some members of the D.C. legislative corps.

And so this became the major sword of Damocles threatening to shut the government down. It was not the budget, as both sides essentially agreed on that days before the deadline — leaving the GOP with more cuts, monetarily-speaking, than they initially requested when negotiations began. No, this “rider” on Planned Parenthood funding remained the chip on the negotiating table, even after voices like the hardly-centrist Michele Bachmann’s suggested stripping such riders for a “clean bill.”

It’s crucial for allies on women’s health issues to remember, whatever happens today, that if the conversation turns to the shutdown this weekend over dinner with family and friends, the following points can’t be stressed enough:

•That this was no about “the budget,” since a number had essentially been agreed upon before the deadline.

•That this is not about “abortion,” since federal funding for abortion has already been prohibited, by the Hyde Amendment, and under the health care reform bill.

•That leaves us with the truth: it was about condoms and birth control and women’s health.

As Jodi Jacobson noted so eloquently yesterday, the mistake of saying the phrase “abortion funding” when you actually are referring to funding for mostly poor women’s preventive health care and family planning, a mistake being made repeatedly by the mainstream media, is a very dangerous bait-and-switch. Jacobson wrote:

Why is getting this right so important? By parroting the talking points of the extreme right wing, major media outlets are reinforcing a series of lies about care provided to poor and low-income women in this country and in doing so, escalating the war on women’s health.

Whatever happens with these negotiations, the course they have taken proves that this war is far from over.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.