As one of many media manufactured crisis we are going to see in the next 6 months, the most recent comes from democratic strategist and CNN contributor Hillary Rosen. She recently created a firestorm with her comment attacking Mitt Romney's wife, Ann. In a discussion where Rosen was trying to point out the only way Mitt Romney can connect with women is through his wife, she said Ann Romney had, “never worked a day in her life”. So the media ran with it and turned it into an attack on stay at home moms. Ann Romney responded to Rosen by saying, “My career choice was to be a mother and I think all of us need to know we need to respect choices that women make. Other women make choices to have a career and raise a family, which I think Hilary Rosen has actually done herself. I respect that, that’s wonderful. But there are other people that have a choice, and we have to respect women and all those choices that they make”.
As soon as Rosen's comments hit the airwaves, President Obama, his chief advisers, and the Democratic party leadership, all denounced Rosen's comment. Nobody in 2012 thinks raising children at home is an easy job, that is not the issue, as much as Republicans would have us believe. Mitt and Ann Romney are Republicans. The latest ABC/Washington Post poll of women voters is Obama 57%, Romney 38%, that's a 19 point difference. It is not a "fiction", it is not the result of Obama's economic policies, it is based on facts. Aside from this incredibly lame attempt to put the President on the defensive, the "war on women" is, and continues to be, lead by Republicans. In their words, in their deeds, in their legislation, Republicans cannot run from their actions.
They want to defund Planned Parenthood, which provides thousands of women access to preventive health care they otherwise would not receive. They want life defined at conception. They have offered hundreds of pieces of legislation to limit abortion, access to abortion, and basic pre-natal care. They want to repeal health care reform that makes women pay more just because they're women. They balked on the renewal of the "Violence Against Women Act". When a Romney aide was asked if he supports the "Lilly Ledbetter Act" (which promotes equal pay for women in the workplace), after a 10 second pause he replied, "I'll have to get back to you on that..." The Blunt-Rubio Amendment to the President's health care reform would have allowed employers to deny contraception coverage to women "at their discretion" the amendment was so vague, employers could refuse coverage basically on a whim. Add the countless state efforts to extend waiting times for abortions, forcing women to have invasive and medically unnecessary procedures. They even go so far as to legalize giving women false and misleading information, like abortion increases the risk of breast cancer, which is patently false. They go even further to include protections for the doctors that, under law, have to provide this information. These are all REPUBLICAN IDEAS they may not want to talk about it, they can claim it's false, or fiction, but the truth speaks much louder than any Republican talking point.
The real question here is when Ann Romney says, "we have to respect women and all those choices that they make”, does that include a woman's right to choose? a woman's right to preventive health care? a women's right to be told the truth? a woman's right to be unencumbered by medically unnecessary and invasive procedures that make a difficult situation even more so? a woman's right to get health care at the same cost as men? That my friends is the REAL question here, and the FACTS say NO!
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