Guest Column

It Looks Like a War on Our Moms and Daughters

by Roberta Madden

All Americans - Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike - are concerned about our nation. We worry about the recession, about jobs, about the future. But rather than creating jobs for Americans, Republicans are pushing a reckless budget to deny women and their families access to critical health care services like cancer screenings, maternity care, and contraception.

It’s a war on women - our mothers, our daughters, our sisters, our friends.

The Republicans in Congress want to cut $725 million from nutritional programs for children and pregnant women. One in six people in Western North Carolina are having trouble putting food on the table, and one in six kids here will have life-threatening diseases due to poor nutrition.

Many Republicans are out to gut Social Security. If they succeed, they will drive hundreds of thousands more women into poverty. Women rely more on Social Security than men do, both in numbers and in percentage of our retirement income. (I checked, and Social Security is 67% of my retirement income!)

Wage discrimination is a huge factor, with women still being paid just 77 cents for every $1 men are paid, making it much harder to make ends meet, much less to save for retirement. And less than a third of women work in jobs that provide pensions.

Republicans propose cutting $318 million from a program called “Title X,” which funds family planning. Title X already does not allow for the funding of abortions, but the new proposal would eliminate access to affordable contraception. The best way I know to reduce the number of abortions in this country is to make affordable contraception easily available.

The Republicans in Congress also want to cut $1 billion from Head Start, a program that has made it possible for thousands of low-income kids to graduate from high school. If the cuts are passed, more than 16,000 classrooms would close, 55,000 teachers would lose their jobs, and nearly 200,000 children would be dropped from this school-readiness program.

The U.S. House voted last month to cut $71 million from the Legal Services Corporation, which serves victims of domestic violence seeking shelter and protective orders, families fighting evictions and foreclosures, veterans and the disabled trying to get benefits, and elderly victims of consumer fraud (most of them women). Equality before the law is a founding principle of this nation, but we all know that without Legal Aid, that equality is a myth for many of us.

Turning to the North Carolina General Assembly, we see the Republicans now in control of both chambers for the first time in more than 100 years. And North Carolina women are bearing the brunt of their new power.

The Republicans in Raleigh seem to have forgotten their election promises about cutting taxes when it comes to thousands of our state’s working poor. They’re now considering a bill to do away with refunds from the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit, passed in 2007. This means low-wage earners, who already pay more of their small paychecks in taxes (10%) than do the wealthy (7%), will pay even more. The modest Earned Income Tax Credit gives a family with three or more children and an income of less than $44,000 a maximum credit of $288 - not a lot of money, but critical for low-income families, many of them headed by women.

It’s been said before, but bears repeating - "If American women would increase their voting turnout by 10 percent, I think we would see an end to all the budget cuts in programs benefitting women and children."

Finally, I want to talk about an issue that has been around for 87 years: the Equal Rights Amendment. Many people thought the ERA was a dead issue in 1982 when the artificial deadline imposed by Congress expired and only 35 of the needed 38 state legislatures had ratified it. But lo and behold! The 27th Amendment, proposed 203 years ago to limit congressional pay raises, was ratified in 1992. Given this precedent, many scholars believe that the ERA is still alive and only three more states are needed to make it part of the Constitution.

Thousands of laws throughout the U.S. still discriminate against women. Just this year, US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said in a published article that the due process clause does not apply to women. The rights to equal pay, equal protection, and equal benefits can be taken away at any time without the ERA.

North Carolina has not yet ratified the ERA, but there’s a new citizens’ organization whose purpose it to make that happen. We’ve met twice and have a website: www.era-nc.org. Another meeting is planned for April 9 in Black Mountain. Our plan is to introduce the ERA in 2013. We invite you to join us!