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Women deserve better than Biden
Congratulations to Joe Biden, who may have just set a new record for the world’s fastest flip-flop. On Wednesday, Biden’s campaign confirmed that the candidate still supports the Hyde amendment, which stops federal Medicaid funding being used for most abortion services. Less than 24 hours later, following intense criticism from reproductive rights groups and other Democratic candidates, Biden announced he didn’t support the amendment, after all.
“I can’t justify leaving millions of women without access to the care they need and the ability ... to exercise their constitutional protected right [to abortion],” Biden said at a fundraising gala on Thursday. The devout Roman Catholic explained that he’d changed his longstanding position on the 43-year-old law because banning federal funding for abortion services hadn’t, he believed, previously prevented low-income women from accessing the procedure.
“There was sufficient monies and circumstances where women were able to exercise that right [to an abortion], women of color, poor women,” Biden said. He further noted that the right to an abortion wasn’t previously under attack “as it is now”.
There is nothing wrong with politicians changing their minds; however there is a big difference between genuinely evolving your views and disingenuous flip-flopping. Biden’s abrupt reversal on the Hyde amendment would seem to be the latter: women should hold out no hope that Biden will actually act on his new-found beliefs.
Biden’s explanation for his U-turn isn’t just disingenuous – his assertion that the Hyde amendment didn’t previously prevent poorer women from accessing abortion services is downright dishonest. There is a mountain of research from both pro-choice and anti-abortion groups showing that the Hyde amendment prevented huge numbers of women from accessing safe and legal abortions. Studies show that the birthrate among women on Medicaid increased by 13% after the amendment was passed, for example. And a 2016 report by the Charlotte Lozier Institute, an anti-abortion organization, asserts that since 1976 the amendment is responsible for over two million births.
The Hyde amendment hasn’t just compelled women to give birth against their wishes; it has killed them. Biden’s blithe avowal that there were “sufficient monies and circumstances” to help poor women access abortions in the past insults the memory of women like Rosie Jimenez, who died because they couldn’t afford a safe abortion.
Centrists frequently scold the left for having unreasonable exceptions of politicians, asserting that we shouldn’t expect our politicians to be “ideologically pure”. That’s fair enough, but we should expect our politicians to have a functioning moral compass. We should expect them to take responsibility for their actions and apologize when they are wrong. We should expect them to take women’s rights seriously. If Biden had genuinely evolved in his attitudes toward abortion he would have acknowledged the much-documented impact of the Hyde amendment and apologized for supporting it. (Particularly considering that he didn’t just support the law, he repeatedly tried to prevent rape and incest exceptions from being added to it.) But Biden seems to be allergic to taking responsibility – “I make no apologies for my last position,” he announced on Thursday.
Biden has demonstrated time and time again that he doesn’t take women’s rights seriously, that he doesn’t take women seriously. He’s declined to take any real responsibility for how he handled Anita Hill’s testimony against Clarence Thomas, for example. And he’s treated allegations of unwanted touching as one big joke. He presents himself as the anti-Trump but the reality is that Trump and Biden are two sides of the same misogynistic coin. Trump’s disdain for women manifests itself in crass braggadocio, Biden’s in patronizing paternalism. Women should cut Biden no slack just because he isn’t Trump: we deserve far better.
My wiiiiiiife, I love my wife
It’s been a big week for Internet Wife Guy analysis, with New York Magazine, the New York Times, and the New Yorker all weighing in on the phenomenon. A Wife Guy, for those who aren’t Extremely Online, is someone who has crafted a personal brand by posting a lot of Wife Content. According to the Times “the identification and mocking of ‘wife guys’ evidences a mild discomfort with the tradition of marriage itself …[but is also] a specific reaction to marriage in its current form, as a highly individualized pursuit in which a man may express his purest self”.
Japan’s painful high heel debate
Japan’s health and labour minister, Takumi Nemoto, has said that it is “necessary and appropriate” for women to wear high heels at work. Nemoto’s remarks were in response to a campaign called #KuToo, that asks the government to ban employers from forcing professional women to wear heels. I reckon Nemoto should be forced to wear stilettos for a week and see if he still feels the same.
Some morons in Boston are planning ‘Straight Pride’
The organizers aren’t just attention-seeking homophobes, they’ve also got worrying ties to white supremacist groups.
Australian female soccer players score a pay victory
There’s a huge gender pay gap in professional sports, however some progress is slowly being made to fix it. On Friday, the Football Federation Australia announced that professional women soccer players will get the same base pay as men. Meanwhile, in America, the US women’s national team is suing US Soccer for years of “institutionalized gender discrimination”.
The quilts that made America quake
I had the privilege of interviewing Faith Ringgold, a true feminist icon, recently for the Guardian. If you’re in London, do go check out her new exhibition at the Serpentine.
Killing the crazy cat lady
We all know the “crazy cat lady” trope; it has stubbornly persisted for centuries. However a new book called Girls and Cats aims to modernize the stereotype, and make cat ladies cool. Sounds like the purrfect way to fight meowsogyny.