Not Under the Bus! Women and Health Care Reform

Writing this post, the first thing that comes to mind is, "Why do I even need to be writing about health care reform and women?"  To think that in 2009, women are still an other, needing special attention and consideration when it comes to basic health care, is not only mind-boggling, but utterly outrageous.  Consider the following clip from a recent Senate Finance Committee debate regarding health care reform as well as comments from Rush Limbaugh from his 12/17/09 show "upset by 'women's issues' in Health Care Bill":

 

To even be having a conversation questioning the need for quality maternity, reproductive, and other health care for women is, I believe, a direct violation of basic human rights.  Does this mean that women and children are not worthy of basic human rights?  Are we not human?  To some it may seem like I'm blowing things out of proportion, but consider the work of the women's liberation and the second wave feminist movements in the late 1960's and 1970's. What have and have we not accomplished 30 plus years later?

Too many women do not believe that there is a need for feminism.  They think that we live in a post-feminist era and that the need to pay attention to women's "issues" is a thing of the past. This conviction, however, hardly seems justified when women's basic human right to health care is being challenged on the world's center stage. The right to determine how we use our bodies and the opportunites that we have to take care of them are at great risk.  There are people other than ourselves wanting to make a decision about what we are allowed or, in the case of health care reform, financially able to do with our bodies.  Whatever you call it--feminism, equal rights for women, choice, or the way in which we feel free to walk down the street, wear what we like, work, live, play freely--is silently taken for granted.  It is in this silence that women are more likely to slip through the cracks and have our voices taken away.

The Women's Media Center is working diligently to ensure that every woman's voice is heard and to prevent Congress from running over women's health!  They have numerous facts, resources, petitions, opportunites for action, and more on their website, Not Under the Bus.

For more information about health care reform and women's rights, visit www.notunderthebus.com.  If you are intersted in organizing around a particular topic and would like the support of the WCC, contact us to get organized!