Trump and Male Christofascists War on Poor Women

Although the Trump/Pence regime has rankled its Christofascist supporters with the alleged effort to decriminalize homosexuality across the globe - personally, I think it is a ruse - it has not failed to thrill the GOP's religious extremist base when it comes to abortion and depriving poor women of access to birth control and basic medical access. Now, in a rule released last week, a prohibition has been put in place that prohibits Title X, a federal family-planning program that serves around four million low-income women, from funding organizations that also provide abortions.  Planned Parenthood is the principal target.  That the organization is the sole source of medical access to many poor women isn't even on Trump or Christofascists' radar. To me, it's a further demonstration of the far right's attitude that poor people simply need to die and disappear even as the "godly folk" park their wide, hypocrisy filled asses in church pews. A column in the New York Times looks at this latest attack on poor women and their right to control their own bodies.  Here are excerpts (for the record, I am not pro-abortion per se, but I believe in medical access for all and that medical decision should not be in the hands of those who cling to Bronze Age myths):

In “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Margaret Atwood’s ever-resonant tale of misogynist dystopia, Christian fascism has a sordid, perverse underbelly. On the surface, the Republic of Gilead, Atwood’s imaginary successor to America, is a place of totalitarian religious austerity. But as the book’s enslaved narrator discovers, the society’s leaders also maintain a brothel, Jezebel’s, full of women who couldn’t fit into the new order. It’s the inevitable flip side of a regime that dehumanizes women, reducing them to their reproductive organs.

Donald Trump’s administration turns the Gilead model upside down. Its public image is louche and decadent, with tabloid scandal swirling around the president and many of his associates. This can make it hard to focus on the unprecedented lengths the administration is going to curtail American women’s reproductive rights and enrich the anti-abortion movement.

On Friday, the Trump administration escalated its war on Planned Parenthood and the women who use it. It released a rule prohibiting Title X, a federal family-planning program that serves around four million low-income women, from funding organizations that also provide abortions. Further, the administration instituted an American version of the global gag rule, barring doctors and nurses receiving Title X funds from making abortion referrals to their patients except in certain emergency situations.

The rule is meant to cut Planned Parenthood, which serves 41 percent of Title X recipients, out of the program. But for many women who rely on Title X, there are no alternatives. Planned Parenthood’s president, Dr. Leana Wen, told me that in Wisconsin, as of 2017, Planned Parenthood served 80 percent of Title X patients and was the only Title X provider in seven counties. In Ohio, Planned Parenthood was the only Title X provider in nine counties. “We know that when patients cannot access their provider of choice, they delay care,” or they end up forgoing care altogether, she said.

The new regulation jettisons a requirement that Title X clinics provide “medically approved” family planning services. That means that funds that once went to Planned Parenthood could flow instead to anti-abortion groups that promote so-called natural family planning. Unless the courts halt the new policy, struggling women who need refills on their birth control pills could get federally funded lectures on the rhythm method instead.

This move to turn a lifesaving women’s health program into pork for the religious right should be major news. Instead, it’s been overshadowed by a series of scandals, each offering telling glimpses of the sexual ethics of Trumpworld’s golf-shirted Commanders.

On Thursday, a federal judge ruled that prosecutors working under former Miami U.S. attorney Alex Acosta, now Trump’s secretary of labor, broke the law in the process of making an inexplicably lenient plea deal with the financier Jeffrey Epstein, who’d been accused of sexually abusing underage girls.

Then, on Friday, news broke that the billionaire Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots and a close friend of and donor to Trump, was being charged with soliciting prostitution, part of a wide-ranging Florida sex-trafficking investigation. One of the 100 richest men in the country, Kraft was allegedly a patron of a strip-mall massage parlor staffed by women who, according to police, were virtual prisoners, forced to service up to 1,000 men a year. It’s hard to imagine why a man with Kraft’s resources would visit such a place unless the squalor, and the women’s evident powerlessness, were part of the point. (Kraft has denied the allegations; the police reportedly have video evidence.)

 The cruelty and moral bankruptcy of Trump and his Christofascist supporters is stunning.