In this op-ed, senior director of the Women's Rights Initiative at American Bridge Dawn Huckelbridge explains how the Health and Human Services department is impacting reproductive rights.
This week the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee held a confirmation hearing for the president’s Health and Human Services secretary nominee, Alex Azar. There are a number of reasons to be concerned, including Azar’s long history with the pharmaceutical industry and Eli Lilly's (the company where Azar was a senior executive) record of drug price fixing, but he’s also made it clear where he stands on women’s reproductive rights: in line with an already and increasingly out of touch Department of Health and Human Services. Trump has been stacking the agency with anti-choice ideologues with an extreme and dangerous anti-women agenda.
President Trump may be failing on many counts, from legislative victories to simple acts of diplomacy or civility, but he’s been remarkably effective at rebuilding an administration and a judiciary with a particular worldview. And it’s not just one that is conservative; the ideas around women and families spreading throughout the administration are primeval. The recent reversal of the birth control mandate — coverage which was, by the way, quite popular — was largely engineered by two Trump appointees and anti-choice zealots, White House health care policy adviser Katy Talento and HHS special assistant Matthew Bowman.
Both Talento and Bowman are peddling junk science to oppose women’s access to contraception and abortion, and conflating the two. They have an ironic notion that government should not interfere in women’s reproductive destiny to bear children, that the Affordable Care Act pushed an “anti-fertility, anti-human, bureaucratically dictated regime of health care.” But they do believe that their extreme political and religious ideology should be codified in law. Bowman has spent much of his career connected to a conservative organization and fellowship program that explicitly “seeks to recover the robust Christendomic theology of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th centuries.”
It doesn’t stop there. Bowman stated that birth control methods “correlate with unhealthy lifestyles especially by enabling promiscuity.” He noted that employers who offer insurance coverage for contraception are “kill[ing] embryos and bow[ing] to the altar of fruitless intercourse.” Talento wrote that “the longer you stay on the pill, the more likely you are to ruin your uterus for baby-hosting.” Bowman stated, “…the scientific fact is that pregnancy is children, who are just in a specific circumstance.” And in regards to the “malpractice” and dangers Talento attributes to birth control, she notes, “There’s also economic and relational devastation that has left women and children abandoned by men who now feel entitled to consequence-free orgasms.”
And, incredibly, these are the political beliefs and agenda of architects of our current health care policy. It seems hard to believe that in 2017 we still must argue the merits of planned pregnancies, that birth control is not harmful to women's reproductive health, and that on the contrary, it is an important part of women's health and the well-being of whole families.
Talento and Bowman aren’t alone. Key appointees and nominees throughout HHS — including former Secretary Price — embrace the idea that life begins at conception, even fertilization, and that embryos and fetuses should have legal rights. In an unprecedented move, HHS has even inserted the concept of fetal personhood into its strategic plan and mission, giving a “road map” of the dangerous direction the agency is going.
It doesn’t stop at HHS either. Trump has installed extreme anti-choice and personhood peddlers throughout the administration and federal courts. And this extends to Capitol Hill, where the House version of the tax bill bizarrely included personhood in a provision about college saving plans, noting they are allowed for “unborn children.”
Azar has also made comments about the rights of the “unborn.” We should be abundantly concerned; these references are an indication that our government is heading in a direction that takes women’s reproductive health and choices out of women’s hands and instead into the government’s control. And this worldview is out of touch with the American people, in red states and blue.
Make no mistake, Trump and his appointees are working to clear a path for a direct or effective challenge to Roe v. Wade, to the very health, well-being, and autonomy of women. The war on women is real, and growing. Azar’s confirmation would be yet another coup for the far right and opponents of women’s rights.
Related: You Don't Need to Be Sick to Deserve Birth Control
