The War on Women: A Progressive Man’s View

April 9, 2012

By Vincent Martin

A (self-admitted) conservative male acquaintance recently asked me what the War on Women means. Herein I will attempt to answer him.

First, let me provide a shortened definition of War: “War is an organized, armed, and often a prolonged conflict that is carried on between states, nations, or other parties typified by extreme aggression, social disruption, and usually high mortality…” 

 For the past ten years or so, there has been a nationwide assault by Right-wing Conservatives in this nation on women’s reproductive health (birth control, abortion, and access those services, etc.) that could certainly fit the definition of War. The political, social, and moral assaults by all strata of conservatism at the federal, state, and local levels of government across the U.S. have been unrelenting in nature and socially disruptive.

This Republican/Conservative sponsored War on Women has reached a fulcrum in the last two years, as state after state has introduced legislation designed to limit women’s access to abortion and or contraceptives and the health clinics set up to administer them. The nation’s most visible women’s health organization, Planned Parenthood, has come under withering, sustained, and unrelenting attack by the denizens of the Right for its support of abortion services to mostly low-income women across the nation.

The morality-based attack (most recently dressed up in the guise of religious freedom and thereby a question of Constitutional freedom) on women’s reproductive health issues across the nation certainly seems coordinated and calculated by the Right-wing and carried out by the Republican Party and their minions (e.g., Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Fox News) to disrupt and or upset established societal norms that were hard fought for and codified in establish law since the mid-1960s.

Below are links to some of the actions taking place on the battle-front:

1. Texas Loses Entire Women’s Health Program Over Planned Parenthood Law
2. Arizona Birth Control Bill Penalizes Women for Using Contraception For Non-Medical Reasons
3. Republican-Controlled Arizona Legislature On Cusp Of Defunding Planned Parenthood
4. Virginia Senate Passes Controversial Ultrasound bill
5. Gov. Corbett Defends Pennsylvania Ultrasound Bill Because ‘It’s Not Invasive’
6. Top Ten Shocking Attacks from the GOP’s War on Women
7. Over Half Of Women Of Reproductive Age Live In Abortion-Hostile States
8. Mitt Romney on Planned Parenthood: We Will ‘Get Rid’ of It
9. Rick Santorum: Women In Combat Could Create ‘Compromising Situation’ Because Of ‘Emotions’
10. Rick Santorum To Single Mothers: Government Paternity Tests Or No Welfare
11.  Senate Strikes Down Blunt Amendment on Contraception Rule
12. Romney clarifies stance on Blunt Amendment: “Of course” I’m for it
13. Limbaugh Calls Student Denied Spot At Contraception Hearing A ‘Slut’
14. New Hampshire House Passes A Bill That Falsely Claims Abortion Causes Breast Cancer
15. Mississippi House Passes Measure Aimed At Closing The State’s Only Abortion Clinic
16. Idaho Anti-Abortion Bill Could Send Women Seeking Abortions To Crisis Pregnancy Centers
17. Georgia Republican Compares Women to Cows, Pigs, And Chickens
18. Kansas Anti-Abortion Bill Threatens Doctors’ Training
19. Florida Anti-Abortion Bill Faces Uncertainty In Senate After House Passage
20. Indiana Lawmaker Accuses Girl Scouts Of Pushing ‘Pro-Abortion’ Agenda, ‘Homosexual Lifestyles’
21. The War on Women in the Courts

For me, the War on Women being waged by Conservatives/Republican Party is neither a moral nor an ethical issue, but one of the fundamental civil and human rights of women. The moral argument fails if the rights of women as full citizens in this nation are to be respected and upheld, and if women are to be afforded equal protection under law! This is a war with abortion and religion at its corrupted core.

Like it or not, detest it or not, support it or not, abortion is legal in the United States as settled by Roe vs. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973). While the language of Roe does mandate a compelling state interest in the third trimester, and does suggest women use their choice in consultation with their medical professional, in the end, 

a woman has a right to choose if, when, how, and where she will carry a child; her womb, her choice!  A woman’s womb does not belong to the state, nor to society, it is her, inside her body, it is a part of her, like a kidney, a bladder, a heart, a lung.

Women’s wombs are not public property, nor do they belong to the Catholic Church, or to any religion for that matter; and they should not be the subject of public debate or public laws designed to govern their use and disposition.

The current onslaught of proposed and enacted laws is stunning in their seeming hatred and disrespect of women at a primal level, as they not only seek to make it next to impossible to obtain an abortion (Alabama is seeking to close the lone abortion clinic in the state), but to separate pregnant women from all other citizens, thereby creating a class of citizens whose every activity is scrutinized by the state and subject to criminal prosecution, as in the case of (then 15-year old) Rennie Gibbs who faces life in prison in Mississippi over the death of her unborn child.

These onerous and despicable laws not only seek State control over what a woman does with her body, her vagina, her womb, but would give that power to almost anyone else who seeks it as well (e.g., employers, insurance companies, clergy, husbands, boyfriends, rapists); anyone, that is, except the woman. 

In these legislative proposals, she is but a child, a scatterbrained, emotionally driven female who must be guided through life by level-headed (White) men who know best. These laws are debasing, demeaning, mean-spirited, misogynistic, and hateful; they are an affront to everything this nation is supposed to represent. 

And they must not be allowed to stand.

Noted feminist, satirist, and media critic Soraya Chemaly encapsulated the War on Women best in a recent article entitled: 10 Reasons the Rest of the World Thinks the U.S. Is Nuts in the Huffington Post, in which she wrote: “Mr. England unlike the calves and pigs for which you expressed so much empathy, I am not a beast of burden. I am a woman and I have these human rights:

The right to life.

The right to privacy.

The right to freedom.

The right to bodily integrity

.
The right to decide when and how I reproduce.”

She went on to state: “My human rights outweigh any you or the state corruptly and cynically seek to assign to a mass of dividing cells that will eventually turn into a ‘natural’ person. Personhood-for-zygote based bills and related legislation, like Georgia’s and hundreds of others, bills and laws that criminalize pregnancy and abortion and penalize women for being women, violate my human rights.”

Both she and I are pissed!!

I am tired of having to fight for rights that are already guaranteed under the Federal and all fifty state constitutions. Are these laws, these stains on the intellect and common decency of any rational human being, the mark of an “exceptional” nation Mr. Santorum?  I say no, far, far, from it!  I want America to be exceptional, to live out the lofty principles of her founding. But how can we, as a nation of over 300 million diverse people, move ahead when Conservative Republicans seek to drag us back to 1900 (or earlier) with their archaic, openly misogynist laws?

This is not the nation I want to bequeath to my four daughters and my eight nieces; a country wherein they are branded “sluts” and “prostitutes” for daring to have sex outside of marriage like so many men habitually do.  This is not the nation I want to live in now where such hatred towards my wife, my daughters, my nieces, my friends is tolerated and held up as sane when in fact, it is denigrating and degrading to ALL women, and ultimately to all Americans.

At the end of her article, Soraya Chemaly wrote: “In an 1851 speech in which she argued for equal rights for women, Sojourner Truth said the following: ‘The poor men seems to be all in confusion, and don’t know what to do. Why children, if you have woman’s rights, give it to her and you will feel better. You will have your own rights, and they won’t be so much trouble.’”

And so, I have joined the battle on the side of the Angels because I truly believe in equal rights for all Americans, not just some. Human rights are universal, and they are not just for those who wield a penis and wear fair skin. We all deserve to live our lives with dignity, respect, and a modicum of happiness no matter where and how we choose to seek it.

Men: women are sexual beings, they want and enjoy sex every bit as much as we do, deal with it! Abortion is legal, and contraception is a medical necessity for a modern American woman’s reproductive health; deal with it. Women are not our playthings, they are not our property; they are human beings who deserve our respect, our understanding, and our support!

And so, I fight side-by-side with women on this issue, I stand shoulder-to-shoulder with my beautiful wife, daughters, nieces, friends, and citizens to let them know THIS man has their backs!  Like them, I will see these laws and these men—and in some sad cases, women—turned out of office, and struck from the airwaves and this hateful, destructive War on Women brought to a swift close with the victory flag waving high on the side of the Progressive, the rational, the sane.

Enough is enough.

Have you had enough? Join us on April 28, 2012 for the National Protest Against The War on Women being held in all 50 states simultaneously.

___________________________
Vincent Martin is a retired 15-year Navy Veteran, who now lives in Aurora, IL with his wife of 12 years.  Vincent works for a mid-sized financial services firm in Chicago, IL.  Vincent has four daughters, ranging in age from 17 – 32.

What Romney needs to do now

By: Jonathan Martin and Reid J. Epstein April 11, 2012 04:27 AM EDT         Romney must now turn anti-Obama passion into enthusiastic support for his bid. | AP Photo

After a bruising primary season, Mitt Romney has finally become his party’s presumptive presidential nominee — but that doesn’t mean he can fully turn his attention to President Barack Obama. During a confusing and confounding winter and spring for the GOP, one truth has remained self-evident; the party is energetically united in wanting to evict Obama from the White House. But given that a less-than-stellar cast of opponents glaringly exposed Romney’s weaknesses among core Republican constituencies in contests that stretched from Minnesota to Mississippi, it’s imperative that he take public and private steps to ensure that he can turn that anti-Obama passion into enthusiastic, not pro forma, support. There are five key individuals and constituencies in the Republican Party that Romney must spend time courting between now and the Tampa convention to ensure the GOP is both unified and excited about his candidacy. Rick Santorum In the near term, the most important endorsement Romney must secure is that of his chief rival. “There’s no better way to wholesale move voters than to show those voters that their favorite is now reconciled with you as the nominee,” said Gary Bauer, a former White House candidate and leading Santorum backer. Santorum’s Tuesday withdrawal speech was conspicuously free of any mention of the party’s inevitable standard-bearer. That’s partly because Santorum wanted the day to be about his own improbable campaign. But the GOP primary left some blood on the floor and the former Pennsylvania senator is going to require some balm. Romney sought to start the healing process by beginning an event Tuesday night by assuring that his former rival would “continue to have a major role in the Republican Party.” With eleven victories, a slew of bound delegates and an important bloc of Christian conservatives backing his candidacy, Santorum certainly has some leverage. But he has needs, too — namely a pile of campaign debt he admitted to in an email to donors after he suspended his campaign on Tuesday. So the question for Romney becomes this: How does he bring Santorum and his supporters inside the tent at a moment when he also wants to appeal to a broader, general election audience? It could prove a tricky task. Some high-profile conservatives are warning Romney not to marginalize Santorum. “If they want to be successful, they have to figure out a way to incorporate him into the campaign,” said Family Research Council head Tony Perkins, noting that Santorum “could’ve held this thing out even longer.” That may mean prime time at the GOP convention this summer. “I think he should have a very prominent role there,” Perkins said. But even before Santorum left Gettysburg on Tuesday, some senior Republicans were fretting about the specter of Tampa being hijacked by one of the losing candidates and their supporters. “We can’t let somebody who’s a better performer upstage Romney,” said one influential party leader, recalling GOP conventions in 1976 (Ronald Reagan) and 1992 (Pat Buchanan) when the nominee’s message was stepped on by his chief primary opponent. “We can’t have another shrill speech like what Pat did in 1992 with our gender gap.” The base In exit polls throughout the primary, Romney consistently fared poorly with born-again Christians and the most conservative Republicans. But the hope in Boston is that such Republicans will turn out in droves at the polls to ensure Obama’s defeat. “Some of that will happen organically,” a Romney adviser said of the expected party coalescing. “Now in some ways, the biggest unifier of the Republican Party will be Barack Obama.” Still, the adviser allowed that Romney will have to make overtures to welcome conservative stalwarts aboard. “We need their enthusiasm and their passion and I think we need to turn a begrudging affiliation into enthusiastic support,” the adviser said. “I think that’s a process. It doesn’t happen overnight but I think it will happen.” And indeed, many of the remaining unaffiliated, big-name Republicans began throwing their support behind Romney on Tuesday afternoon. Govs. Rick Scott of Florida and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana announced their support, along with Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, who appeared with Romney at a GOP dinner outside Philadelphia. Next up will be a cascade of tea party stars — like Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina — who will signal to the party’s most conservative elements that Romney is the choice. “We’ll get a guy like DeMint who has been kind of friendly but not really over the line,” a Romney campaign source said. The bigger issue for Romney is not whether he’ll win over the conservative skeptics, but whether he can maximize turnout among core Republicans. “It’s not that they’re going to abandon him, it’s that he needs to get the numbers up,” said longtime GOP strategist Frank Donatelli. Donatelli pointed out that 7 percent more self-identified Democrats voted than did self-identified Republicans in 2008 — the biggest disparity since Reagan’s 1980 landslide. Evangelical leaders say Romney must lead with his actions to ensure the base is fully engaged. “I don’t need stroking, I’m going to go all out for Gov. Romney,” Bauer said. “But as I told Sen. McCain four years ago, if you want somebody like me to be effective, then you’ve got to make it easier, not harder.” And the way to do that? “By sticking with the conservative message,” Bauer said. That includes discussing issues such as gay marriage, abortion and religious liberty, said longtime conservative thinker Jeff Bell, who has just written a book about the impact of social conservatism on American politics. “His advisers would like these issues to never come up but they will,” Bell said. “And he has to be unapologetic about them.” Some conservatives want to receive some assurances that Romney intends to do just that before getting on board. “The jury is still out,” Perkins said when asked whether Romney is committed to the conservative cultural agenda. He added: “If he hopes to garner even a portion of the enthusiasm Rick Santorum had behind his candidacy, it means he’s got to pick up the message behind Rick Santorum’s candidacy.” And Perkins rejects the notion that intense opposition to Obama is sufficient for Romney to win. “Negative motivation is not as strong as positive motivation,” he said. “Look at Santorum supporters — they didn’t simply do that because Barack Obama is president. They gave their time, money and sweat equity because of the message he carried.” Newt Gingrich Despite Santorum’s exit, Gingrich indicated Tuesday that he was sticking to his pledge to carry his campaign to Tampa. Given the former speaker’s waning relevance in the primary and movement toward Romney that had already begun to place before Santorum’s decision, such a promise may not matter much. But Gingrich, even at his low ebb, has a knack for garnering publicity. He could be a nuisance for Romney in the weeks ahead if not handled with care. Gingrich has made clear, in both his public comments and in a private meeting with Romney, that he’s realistic about his chances and is remaining in the race to have his voice heard. That means Boston must make him feel loved — or at least respected. “I think Newt wants to be part of the campaign,” Bell said. “He clearly wants to make his peace and help lead the crusade against Obama. Romney can accommodate that, and tell him they’ll listen to anything he has to say about the platform.” Noting Gingrich’s controversial support for the moderate Republican Dede Scozzafava in the high-profile New York special House race in 2009, Bell added: “Newt is a party unity type of person. He has a tendency to swing behind whoever the Republican nominee is in a race.” Still, some in the party fret about giving the often-undisciplined Gingrich too much of a high profile in Tampa, worrying he’ll veer off message from the podium. “Can you imagine Gingrich being told to vet his speech through Romney’s campaign staff?” asked one senior Republican. Ron Paul One of the most fascinating subtexts of the GOP primary has been the de facto non-aggression pact between Paul and Romney. While Paul has taken a few swipes at the former Massachusetts governor, they were mild compared with his all-out assault on the other Republicans in the race. Romney officials hope this era of good feeling continues into the fall and that the libertarian-leaning congressman doesn’t run as a third-party candidate or exhort his loyal followers to abandon the GOP. This can partly be done by Romney continuing to show the septuagenarian the respect he’s offered during the campaign. But Paul has at least two other interests: the ambitions of his son, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and the fate of his agenda. The first can be taken care of with a convention role. The latter is more delicate. “It’s not a quid pro quo thing, but [Paul] should know that the issues he raised in the primary, especially on monetary reform, will get attention,” said Bell. “Romney should make clear he’s open to looking at different options at the Fed.” The other issue with Paul: how to tame his youthful supporters, few of which have any allegiance to the GOP. Romney officials will have to spend some time and money in the next months minding state Republican conventions to ensure that the actual delegates elected to be on the floor in Tampa are truly loyal to him. “You don’t want to have closet Ron Paul delegates there,” Donatelli said. “We had to spend at least a half-million dollars after John McCain was the presumptive candidate on state convention stuff just to make sure real McCain people were elected as delegates.” The reluctant party regulars The last constituency Romney needs fully motivated should be the easiest one — the GOP establishment types who either endorsed him with little enthusiasm or held out during the entire primary. This includes the likes of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner. Romney got some help on this front Tuesday with the backing of Jindal and Scott and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham. But the true test will be how soon the establishment figures dispense with the paper statements and stand shoulder to shoulder with Romney, serve as his surrogate and help him raise money. Romney advisers are conscious of what one called “the lack of enthusiasm meme” and want to kill it well before the convention.

Foster Friess swings to Romney

By: Kenneth P. Vogel and Dave Levinthal April 10, 2012 05:51 PM EDT                 Friess and his wife have donated $1.9M to Republican candidates in 2012. | AP Photo

Foster Friess, the retired investor who spent nearly $1.7 million boosting Rick Santorum’s presidential run, is ready to help Mitt Romney. “I’m obviously going to be of help in whatever way I can,” Friess told POLITICO Tuesday afternoon, hours after Santorum suspended his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination, cementing Romney’s status as the party’s presumptive nominee. Friess, who was in Washington to accept an award from the Horatio Alger Association, said he had yet to discuss his planned shift in allegiance with Romney’s campaign campaign or the Washington-based super PAC supporting it. “I’ve got some plans as to how I might be able to be of help,” said Friess. “The bottom line is, I’m going to be very supportive and I’ll probably have plans to share with you a little later on.” Friess had mostly refrained from echoing Santorum’s sharp attacks on Romney, and in fact, had donated $1,000 to Romney’s campaign last May. He subsequently emerged as the biggest patron of Santorum’s campaign, as well as a prominent traveling surrogate. He also became one of the faces of a new breed of big-money politics in which a single donor can essentially float a presidential campaign with unlimited contributions outside groups including super PACs. The $1.7 million that Friess donated to super PACs supporting Santorum played a pivotal role in boosting the former Pennsylvania senator’s cash-strapped campaign to a surprising Iowa caucus win, as well as a subsequent sweep of the primaries in Colorado, Missouri and Minnesota. Friess suggested he might support the Karl Rove-linked Crossroads groups, which are planning to spend as much as $300 million attacking President Barack Obama and boosting Romney. “I’m not sure if I have already,” Friess said when asked about whether he intended to donate to Crossroads, which is comprised of both a super PAC called American Crossroads and a non-profit group called Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies. “I know that I have contributed to some other groups, but I can’t remember which ones. There are so many of them. They’re all over the place.” Federal Election Commission records show that Friess, a retired mutual fund guru, and his wife Lynn, have donated $1.9 million to Republican candidates and causes in the 2012 election cycle. Most of that - $1.6 million – went to the Red, White and Blue Fund, a super PAC that spent about $7.5 million supporting Santorum and attacking his opponents. Friess also gave $50,000 to the Leaders For Families Super PAC, which is associated with influential Iowa Christian conservative leader Bob Vander Plaats. It was established in December, quickly raked in $150,000 – half of which came from the Red, White and Blue Fund – and used the cash to air radio and television ads and place automated telephone calls touting the endorsement of Santorum by Vander Plaats. “His endorsement was world changing,” Friess told POLITICO not long after the Iowa win. He added Tuesday that Santorum’s campaign was “a historical political miracle … And now, the challenge is how do we keep as much of that momentum that he generated alive and well to go into the fall elections.” Leaders for Families finished last year with more debt than cash on hand. But the Red White and Blue Fund ended February with about $365,000 in the bank, though its spending slowed over the last several weeks — often an indication of fundraising trouble. As a super PAC, it could potentially switch its allegiances to another candidate, or, as in the case of the formerly pro-Herman Cain 9-9-9- Fund super PAC, transfer the money to another super PAC. A source familiar with the Red White and Blue Fund suggested the PAC might follow the lead of Santorum, who in his Tuesday announcement did not endorse Romney. “It was formed to help Rick,” the source emailed. “Really need to let the dust settle, and see what Rick does, too.”

The Daily Show: March 29, 2012

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Thursday March 29, 2012

Hot Docket - Animating the Health Care Hearing

Since the Supreme Court doesn't allow cameras, The Daily Show imagines the day's proceedings with the help of a Taiwanese animation studio.

The Daily Show: March 29, 2012

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Thursday March 29, 2012

Rachel Maddow

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow details what changes the government can make to help citizens feel connected to the men and women in uniform.

The Colbert Nation: April, 11. 2012

The Colbert Report

Wednesday April 11, 2012

Amped Up for Michelle Obama

Flooded with Secret Service, Stephen's studio gears up for First Lady Michelle Obama.

The Colbert Report

Wednesday April 11, 2012

Michelle Obama Pt. 1

Michelle Obama discusses her national initiative for helping military families, Joining Forces, and the importance of lowering veterans' unemployment rates.

The Colbert Report 

Wednesday April 11, 2012

Michelle Obama Pt. 2

First Lady Michelle Obama announces her endorsement of Barack Obama in the 2012 election, and pundit Sergeant Bryan Escobedo adds some gravitas.

Diplomats surprised as nuclear talks with Iran 'constructive and useful'

12

hours

ago

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Leaders from around the world have gathered in Turkey with representatives from Iran, hoping to resolve an ongoing nuclear controversy that is threatening relations in the Middle East. NBC's Ali Arouzi reports.

By Reuters

Updated 3:42 p.m. ET: ISTANBUL -- Iran and world powers discussed Tehran's controversial nuclear program for the first time in over a year on Saturday and, in what Western diplomats called a constructive development given their low expectations, agreed to meet again.
Catherine Ashton, the European Union's foreign policy chief who has headed negotiations for the six international powers, told a news conference they had arranged to meet the Iranian delegation again in Baghdad on May 23.
The West accuses Iran of trying to develop a nuclear weapons capability. Israel – believed to be the only Middle East state with an atomic arsenal – sees Iran's atomic plans as a threat to its existence and has threatened military action.
Amid Iran tensions, neighbor becomes den of spies
Iran has said its program is peaceful and has threatened to retaliate for any attack by closing a major oil shipping route.
The United States and Israel have not ruled out military action to destroy Iran's nuclear sites.
Saeed Jalili, the chief Iranian negotiator, told a news conference there had been differences of opinion but that some important points had been agreed and that the next talks should focus on arranging measures to build mutual confidence. Iran has been hit by new waves of Western economic sanctions this year.
Western participants had said previously that agreeing to meet for a second round of talks would constitute a successful day. It may remove some heat from a crisis in which warnings from Israel of a possible strike against Iranian facilities have stoked fears of a major war in an already unsettled Middle East.
One non-Iranian diplomat called the atmosphere "completely different" from that of previous meetings, as Western delegates watched out for signs that Iran was ready to engage after more than a year of threats in defense of its right to pursue nuclear energy and denials it wants to be able to build an atom bomb.
After a day in which diplomats had spoken of a more engaged tone from Iranian officials compared to the 15 months of angry rhetoric on either side that has filled the hiatus since the last meetings, Ashton called the talks useful and constructive.
"We want now to move to a sustained process of serious dialogue, where we can take urgent, practical steps to build confidence," she said.
The six world powers present were the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – Russia, China, the United States, France, Britain and Germany.
The talks were never expected to yield any major breakthrough but diplomats believed a serious commitment from Iran would be enough to schedule another round of talks for next month and start discussing issues at the heart of the dispute.
During the day's meeting, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, who is leading the Russian delegation, told Interfax news agency: "The atmosphere is constructive, the conversation is businesslike. As of the moment, things are going well."

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

MSNBC's Richard Lui speaks with former U.S. Ambassador to Morocco Marc Ginsberg about North Korea's suspected plans for a new nuclear test, and the deployment of a second U.S. aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf ahead of nuclear talks with Iran.

An Oklahoman Apologizes for Oklahoma's Politicians

by Sarah Burris, Future Majority
April 13, 2012 - 11:19am

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Wednesday April 11, 2012

Bro-Choice

Al Madrigal reports on location from Oklahoma, where a proposed amendment to its "personhood" bill would effectively outlaw male masturbation.

Dear Americans,

On behalf of the great state of Oklahoma I want to take this opportunity to apologize. Wednesday evening, the Daily Show with Jon Stewart interviewed our Senator Ralph Shorty, the architect of the Oklahoma Personhood bill intended to declare a fertilized egg a person. Shorty explained that he couldn't add Senator Constance Johnson's "Every Sperm is Sacred" Amendment to his bill controlling women's bodies, because her amendment was an effort to control men's bodies. Senator Shorty will control women's bodies, but control of men's bodies Is. Not. Allowed. I promise you not all of our elected officials are this hypocritical, and most Oklahomans absolutely are not.

While I'm at it, I also want to apologize for all those oil companies encouraging Sen. Inhofe to declare global climate change is fake. You see, Oklahoma is where the oil comes from. We horde it like dominated squirrels so when we suck the Middle East dry everyone at home becomes a billionaire. I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time.
I'm so, so sorry about Senator Sally Kern. I really don't know what her problem is. She just seems to hate it when people are happy. I would psychoanalyze her, but she's blocked me from asking these questions on Twitter. To be fair, though, she's originally from Arkansas, so maybe that's what it is.
I apologize to Arkansas for that last remark. You're not any better or worse.
Governor Mary Fallin really just can't help herself and I'm profoundly sorry for her. It isn't that she's a super religious, pro-family values person; I mean… obviously, it's just that she'll say anything to get elected, even if it's a lie or it's hurtful. It's just politics, you know?
And finally I want to apologize for the most conservative Democrat in the US Congress, Dan Boren who really only votes with Republicans a majority of the time. I don't know what to say. His district isn't that conservative, his father wasn't that conservative, he's just …. I don't know. I'm really, really sorry for Dan Boren, and want to apologize especially to Leader Pelosi. At least he voted for her for Speaker in 2006. At least I think he did.
Oklahoma isn't a bad place. We're the home of Will Rogers, Garth Brooks, and Kane (from Project Runway). Of the wild and crazy weather that spun off the cult classic Twister! We bring you juicy steaks and when there isn't a drought, we bring you the stuff to make bread. We're so beautifully culturally diverse - despite our resistance to diversity. And, while some might exhibit CGB-like ways, bless their hearts, they're not evil people; they sometimes just don't understand. Some just don't know any better.
So it's our responsibility as progressives, as women, as LGBT persons, as environmentalists, as "rest-of-the-week" people of faith, to explain that what Oklahoma conservatives are actually doing has lasting cultural, economic, and quite honestly emotional impacts on all of us. Plus, it makes the state look like crazy town, and if there's one thing Oklahomans can all agree on, we don't want to end up looking like Texas.
I do not apologize to Texas for that remark, because I'm an Oklahoman, damnit.
So, I'm sorry. On behalf of all thinking and non-thinking Oklahomans. On behalf of moderate Republicans who are disgusted by their party and Democrats who've just thrown up their hands. On behalf of women who just roll they're eyes and assume the courts will protect them. On behalf of the young gay teens who somehow make it through high school while just trying to live their lives. I apologize. I'm so, so, so very sorry. Please, forgive us.
Signed,
Sarah Burris
On Behalf of Oklahoma

The War on Women: Back to the Future?

by Patti Miller
April 10, 2012 - 10:25pm

Republican strategists and political prognosticators are quick to assure us that Romney’s gender gap—which at 19 points is now more like a gender chasm—will evaporate as general election campaigning gears up and the attention of voters returns to bread-and-butter issues like the economy. Even Romney seems to think it’s just a blip—assuring reporters that women are talking about “the debt that we're leaving the next generation” and “the failure of this economy to put people back to work,” not access to reproductive health care.

The Republicans seem to think they can erase the past four months and their “war on women,” but if history is any guide, this is wishful thinking. In fact, the historical record suggests we may be witnessing a re-awakening of the reproductive rights movement, especially among groups where concern about access to contraception and abortion has languished: young women and independent women. There is an eerie parallel between the awakening that is currently happening and the beginning of the reproductive rights revolution that resulted in the legalization of abortion in the early 1970s.

It all comes back to a scene that was unimaginably galling to women: a group of men sitting solemnly before microphones at a committee table testifying about whether women should have access to reproductive health care that they could never need. This may sound like the already infamous Issa congressional hearing that was ostensibly about “religious freedom,” but it wasn’t. This hearing happened more than 40 years ago and helped to light a revolution.
The late 1960s were still the dark ages for reproductive health. The Supreme Court had only just given married couples the right to use contraception; states could still ban unmarried people from buying birth control. Abortion was illegal in every state except to save a woman’s life. There was a small reform movement underway, run mostly by men, to make abortion more available under limited conditions:  in cases of rape or incest, if a fetus was severely deformed, or if a woman’s health was at risk. However, even under these reforms doctors would still control access to abortion — a woman would have to get the permission of two doctors, who in those days were usually men, to have an abortion.

These reformers were interested in making abortion more “humane” because of the extraordinary high toll of the one million illegal abortions that were performed every year. In 1967 alone, 10,000 women were admitted to New York City municipal hospitals suffering from botched abortions. Some were left infertile from their run-ins with back alley butchers; others died. Nearly half of all maternal deaths in the city were caused by illegal abortions. Other big cities also had whole hospital wards full of women recovering from botched illegal abortions.

By 1969, a dozen states had passed bills making abortion more available in limited circumstances with a doctor’s permission. That year New York State began considering a reform bill. On February 13, the joint Public Health Committee held an hearing on the legislation in New York City. The panel consisted of 14 men and one woman—a Catholic nun, who represented her religion’s position that all abortions should be illegal. The panelists dutifully presented their positions—some against any liberalization of abortion law and some in favor of limited reforms. Women sat mutely in the audience watching men discuss their reproductive lives. But then, just as a white-haired former judge finished speaking, a woman named Kathy Amatniek stood up in audience and shouted: “All right, now let’s hear from some real experts — the women.”

The men on the panel “stared over their microphones in amazement,” according to the New York Times, apparently like Congressman Issa, astonished that women actually wanted to have a say about what happened to their bodies. Then Amatniek made a demand that was just gaining currently among feminists: “Repeal the abortion law, instead of wasting more time talking about these stupid reforms.” A handful of women were demanding the end of abortion laws that left doctors as gatekeepers to the procedure.

Amatniek’s outburst ensured that the otherwise staid hearing got media coverage. Women were so incensed over their exclusion from the hearing that the feminist group Redstockings organized an all-women abortion “speak-out” at the Washington Square Methodist Church. 

There women on the panel did something that no women had done before: they went public about their abortions. They told of the fear, pain, and humiliation they endured. Then a really extraordinary thing happened. Women in the audience stood up and, unprompted, began talking about their abortions. Irene Peslikis, who was at the hearing, told historian Ninia Baehr that it was like a “bomb” went off in the audience. “All of the sudden they realized that this was something that had been bothering them for the longest time,” she said.

The publicity from the speak-out galvanized women across the country. They held abortion speak-outs in their living rooms. They questioned why they disproportionately suffered the consequences of sexual activity, why they had to risk their lives or health to get an illegal abortion or beg a man for a legal abortion. The result of this consciousness-raising was a sea change in how women perceived the politics of abortion. They started to see access to abortion as a right, an expression of their full personhood, not a favor to be granted by men. 

Members of New York’s feminist movement found a Republican woman legislator, Connie Cook, who was on their side and she introduced a bill in the New York Assembly to completely remove abortion from the state’s criminal code, making it an entirely personal decision. It failed, but it moved the debate from just broadening the circumstances under which doctors could dole out abortions to making women the center of the abortion decision. A compromise measure was proposed that would allow women to make the decision about abortion up through the first 24 weeks of pregnancy but banned it thereafter except to save a woman’s life. This law passed and became the model for Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationally three years later.

It was the anger of women excluded from the abortion hearing that created the impetus for the widespread decriminalization of abortion. Forty-three years later, a similar outrage has woken women up to the implication of men who want to make reproductive decisions for them. From the furor over Virginia’s vaginal ultrasound bill, which is reverberating in states like Idaho that just killed a similar measure, to the continuing fallout from the Komen Foundation’s attempt to defund Planned Parenthood, it’s a good bet that this issue isn’t going away any time soon.

. . . . . . . . . .

Romney's women jobs-loss claim paints incomplete picture

3

days

ago

FACT CHECK:

By Domenico Montanaro, Deputy Political Editor, NBC News

In an effort to bolster his sagging poll numbers with female voters, Mitt Romney and his campaign have made this new charge: that women have accounted for 92 percent of the job losses since President Obama took office.
Here’s what Romney said yesterday while campaigning in Delaware:

"There's been some talk about a war on women. The real war on women has been waged by the Obama administration's failure on the economy. Do you know what percentage of job losses during the Obama years of have been casualties of women losing jobs as opposed to men? Do you know how many women, what percent of the job losses were women? 92.3 percent of the job losses during the Obama years have been women who've lost those jobs."

The Romney campaign also held a conference call making this same point. "The number of unemployed women has increased by nearly a million under Barack Obama," surrogate Bay Buchanan said. "Ninety-two percent of the jobs lost since he took office are women."
But First Read contacted the Bureau of Labor Statistics to get to the bottom of this 92 percent charge. The conclusion: The Romney campaign’s figures don’t tell the whole story.
The campaign, in a research document circulated yesterday and on its website, said the numbers come from the “Current Employment Statistics” database at BLS. The document notes that there was a net change of -740,000 nonfarm payroll jobs from January 2009 to March 2012 -- and that women accounted for 683,000 of those jobs.
That is accurate, according to BLS. But Brian Davidson, an economist at BLS, told First Read: “The math they use is correct; the terminology is completely wrong.”
Davidson noted that women actually make up a larger share of the workforce now than they did in Jan. 2008 before the financial meltdown, and since January 2009, it is a statistically insignificant change.
In January 2008, women made up 48.8 percent of the workforce; in January 2009, 49.5 percent; now 49.3 percent.
“Do we still have the same amount of women workers relative to men in the ‘net-change’? Yes we do,” Davidson said.
He added, “It’s like trying to pull a bunny out of a hat, but there’s no bunny inside.”
Independent fact-checkers like Politifact and the Washington Post’s Fact Checker also took on the claim.
Giving the claim a “Mostly False,” Politifact called it “misleading”: “We found that though the numbers are accurate, their reading of them isn’t.”
“One could reasonably argue that January 2009 employment figures are more a result of President George W. Bush’s policies, at least as far as any president can be blamed or credited for private-sector hiring,” Politifact wrote. “We reached out to Gary Steinberg, spokesman for the BLS, for his take on the claim. He pointed out that women’s job losses are high for that period of time because millions of men had already lost their jobs. Women were next. … [I]f you count all those jobs lost beginning in 2007, women account for just 39.7 percent of the total. … There is a small amount of truth to the claim, but it ignores critical facts that would give a different impression.”
The Washington Post’s fact checker, Glenn Kessler, begins this way: “[W]e frown on the somewhat arbitrary dividing line of measuring jobs statistics by presidential terms. It is a common journalistic — and political — metric. But restarting the employment clock from the moment the president takes the oath of office doesn’t tell you much about a his performance, especially since it takes time for the new president’s policies to take effect.”
In fact, he writes, “[T]here is less to this stat than meets the eye. … If you start the data in February, then the overall job loss is just 16,000 jobs—while women lost 484,000 jobs. … How could women lose more jobs than the overall total? It’s a function of the dates one picks.”
And notably: “[T]he picture becomes clearer if you start running the data from the date the recession began — December 2007. With that starting point, the total decline in jobs was just over 5 million, with women accounting for nearly 1.8 million of those jobs. Now look what happens when we just look at the past year, March 2011 to March 2012. Men gained nearly 1.9 million jobs while women gained 635,000 jobs.”

*** CORRECTION *** An earlier version of this post noted that the Romney campaign used numbers from January 2009. The campaign has reached out to First Read and notes that it used January 2009 as a "baseline."
"We use January 2009 as the baseline, which means the first month of losses charged to Obama is the decline in February vs. January," said campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul.

*** UPDATE *** Saul also passes along a letter written by its policy director, Lanhee Chen, to dispute the Politifact story (and "Mostly False" rating) that attempted a fact check on a Tweet by Saul referencing the numbers. Chen accuses Politifact of a "failure to focus on the appropriate context."
"First, why should it matter that men had already lost millions of jobs?" Chen wrote. "Was it now women’s 'turn'? Is this part of the President’s conception of “fairness” that he talks about so frequently? If the data showed the opposite (i.e. that women had been disproportionately hurt prior to the President taking office), we imagine you would have used that as an indictment of Ms. Saul by arguing that the trend was inherent to the recession and predated the President."
Chen concluded, "In summary, your piece confirms Ms. Saul’s claim as accurate, and then relies on a direct contradiction with a prior Politifact piece and incorrect claims from two publicly acknowledged Obama supporters (including one Administration official!) as the basis for rating it “Mostly False.”  I hope you will agree that this rating was inappropriate and that the piece does not reflect the journalistic standards to which your organization intends to hold itself.  Please retract the piece and issue a correction as soon as possible."

Obama’s ‘War on Women’?

Posted on April 12, 2012

On the campaign trail, Mitt Romney has been hammering a statistic that “over 92 percent of the jobs lost under this president were lost by women,” evidence, he says, that President Obama’s policies amount to a “war on women.” Romney’s statistic is accurate, as far as it goes. But it’s not the whole story.
Looking back at the whole recession, men have lost many more jobs than women. But the biggest job losses for men came earlier in the recession, and recovery for men has come faster than it has for women.
With Romney under attack from the Obama campaign for policies it says are anti-woman (such as Romney’s opposition to abortion rights and support for federal de-funding of Planned Parenthood), Romney has tried to turn the tables, pointing to a statistic that shows the unemployment rate for women is recovering more slowly from the recession.
Here’s what Romney said in a Fox News interview on April 11 (at about the 5:45 mark):

Romney, April 11: He [Obama] has lost 800,000 jobs during his presidency. And by the way, do you know what percentage of those jobs lost were lost by women? Over 92 percent of the jobs lost under this president were lost by women. His policies have been, really, a war on women.

Romney’s statistic is accurate. It’s true, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that between January 2009, when Obama took office, and March 2012, there has been a net decline of 740,000 jobs for both men and women, and that among women there has been a net loss of 683,000 jobs. The Romney campaign did the math and calculated that 92.3 percent of the jobs lost under Obama were lost by women.
But is that a result of Obama’s policies, as Romney says? A look at this chart — which we created based on official Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly figures for seasonally adjusted nonfarm employment (the standard measure for jobs) — tells another story.

What the graph shows clearly, and the numbers back up, is that men took a bigger hit than women, and the decline in jobs for men began much earlier. The downturn in male employment began in May 2007 — a full seven months before the official start (in December 2007) of what became the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. Female employment continued to rise for 10 months after the downturn in male employment, and it peaked in March 2008.
By the time Obama took office in January 2009, both male and female employment were in a steep decline that continued for over a year. Male employment hit bottom in February 2010, and female employment continued to slump for another seven months, bottoming out in September 2010. And as the chart clearly shows, the job recovery for women not only started later, the rate of recovery has been slower.
Why is that? “If you look back to the start of the recession, many of the industries (construction and manufacturing) that were very hard hit initially were male-dominated,” said Margot Dorfman, CEO of the U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce, in an interview with FactCheck.org.
It wasn’t until later that jobs like retail and government jobs, particularly teaching jobs, began to take a hit, affecting women more, Dorfman said. Those jobs have been slower to recover.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor under George W. Bush, says Romney’s statistic isn’t properly focused. She notes that the unemployment rate for women has been about one full percentage point below the unemployment rate for men for much of the recession. It is only fairly recently that the gender gap has begun to close. The unemployment rate is now 8.3 percent for men, 8.1 percent for women.
“That’s why many people have called this a man-cession,” said Furchtgott-Roth, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Men have fared worse in the recession, she said, mainly because industries such as construction and manufacturing – male-dominated industries – have been harder hit than education and health care – female-dominated sectors.
Furchtgott-Roth said she couldn’t think of any Obama policies that have led to a slower recovery for women.
“Obama’s policies have been anti-growth,” she said. “But if anything, they have been anti-male jobs.”
For example, she said, his policies have hurt coal mining and oil drilling, which are typically male-dominated jobs, whereas the health care law will expand the health care industry, which should disproportionately help women.
“There’s an argument that some of the recent job losses have been from state and local governments,” said Dan Mitchell, an expert on fiscal policy issues at the libertarian Cato Institute. He said “women are disproportionately affected” now that federal stimulus funds no longer support state and local payrolls.
“At the same time, as the private sector slowly but surely gets back on its feet, men are benefiting since they suffered a disproportionate share of the jobs losses in recent years,” Mitchell said. “In other words, people are making too much out of short-term factors.”
Betsey Stevenson, a former chief economist for the Department of Labor under Obama, said that while men have fared somewhat better than women in the private sector, most of the phenomenon cited by Romney can be tied to a loss of government jobs.
About 78 percent of the decline in people on payrolls has been a decline in government employment, said Stevenson, now an assistant professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. And, she said, women have absorbed 76 percent of the net decline in government jobs.
“The recovery has not been particularly good for women, but a primary reason is the unprecedented decline in government jobs, particularly the loss of workers in education,” Stevenson wrote to us in an email. “It’s also the case that men bore the brunt of the job losses in the depths of the recession and are now yielding more of the benefits of jobs being added back in manufacturing and other areas where they experienced massive job loss.”
In addition, she said, men are also starting to compete with women in traditionally female jobs, “a transition that is necessary for our economy, but may cause some short run changes in employment.”
We asked the Romney campaign which policies Romney was specifically referring to when he said Obama’s policies amounted to a “war on women.” We got this response from campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul:

Saul, April 12: While women were losing their jobs by the hundreds of thousands, President Obama chose to focus on an agenda of more taxes, more regulations, and more expensive energy that only made our economy weaker. When Obamacare discourages employers from hiring and raises taxes on innovative medical companies, women are hurt. When Dodd-Frank prevents banks from making loans to small businesses, women are hurt. When EPA regulations drive up electricity prices and the Department of Interior prevents oil drilling, women are hurt. Of course, all Americans want a strong, prosperous economy and opportunity for themselves and their families, and men have been hurt by the President’s agenda as well. The reality is, on the issues that matter to the American people, President Obama has been a total failure.

We’ll let readers judge the extent to which Obama’s tax policy, energy policy, financial services regulation and health care legislation have affected the economic recovery. In none of that, however, could we discern an explanation for why women would be affected more than men.
– Robert Farley

Romney spins 'war on women' to close GOP gender gap

2

days

ago

Steven Senne / AP

Ann Romney and Mitt Romney address an audience during a victory rally in Schaumburg, Ill., on March 20.

By Michael O'Brien, msnbc.com

The gender gap has returned to presidential politics with a vengeance as the general election begins to take shape and presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney finds his campaign struggling with the pivotal bloc of women voters.
The Romney campaign is waging an aggressive counter-offensive in response to weeks of Democratic assertions that the former Massachusetts governor and the Republican Party are waging a “war on women.”
“They're working desperately to change the subject, and that's why they've created this whole 'war on women' campaign,” Washington Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the top-ranking Republican woman in the House, on a conference call organized by the Romney campaign. “There's no war on women by Republicans. What's really going on is a ‘war on reality’ by Democrats.”
Republicans are now working to re-frame issues of importance to women after eager messaging efforts by Democrats to advance the “war on women” narrative, which has contributed to a Republican disadvantage with female voters in 2012. It's a deficit aided by a hard-charging fight over access to contraception led by some Republicans earlier this year.
When Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus asserted in an interview last week that the media would just as quickly report a “war on caterpillars” if Democrats insisted it were the case, the Democratic National Committee pounced, and hyper-actively accused Priebus of trivializing women’s rights by drawing such a comparison.

That Democratic argument reached a fever pitch on Wednesday when a Romney surrogate, speaking on a conference call, hesitated to say whether Romney supported a law making it easier for women to file lawsuits challenging pay disparities.
A spokesperson for Romney said later in the day that the former governor wouldn't do anything to change current law, but Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the DNC chairwoman, nonetheless called the Romney campaign's momentary failure to provide an answer "utterly shocking."

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Ann Romney, the wife of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, took to Twitter and the airwaves to defend her decision to be a stay-at-home mom.

Now with the primary campaign mostly behind him, Romney has begun working to address the issue on the trail. His rhetoric at a pair of campaign stops – at each of which there were plenty of women sharing the stage – on Wednesday marked a preliminary effort by the Romney campaign to push back against the Democratic storyline.
“The real war upon women has been waged by his economic policies,” Romney said Wednesday in Connecticut. “Let’s hammer day in and day out what has happened under his policies, and recognize those policies, those things he believes, do not work.”
But the Romney campaign’s struggles in their attempts to reach women voters were on equal display as the candidate and his campaign repeated a dubious statistic about women accounting for nine of 10 jobs lost during Obama’s time in office.
It wasn’t until a consultant outside of the Obama campaign suggested that the GOP candidate’s wife, Ann Romney, had “never worked a day in her life” that the Romney campaign was able to stanch Democratic momentum.
That gaffe, at least temporarily, gave Republicans an opening.
The Romney campaign quickly organized a conference call and Ann Romney hit the airwaves for an interview to combat the charges. (Senior Obama officials also quickly disavowed the comments by consultant Hilary Rosen).

But the back-and-forth bickering obscured a larger battle Romney must fight to make up ground with women. A Washington Post/ABC News poll released this week found Romney trailing Obama by 19 percent among registered women voters. (By contrast, Romney leads by eight percent among registered male voters.)
“It should definitely be a concern,” said Dan Judy, a Republican pollster for North Star Opinion Research. “I don't think they need to hit the panic button at this point, but that's something that you're going to see them work hard on.”

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

In the Daily Fix, NBC's Andrea Mitchell talks to The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza and the Daily Beast's Michelle Goldberg about the widening gender gap in the general election and Hilary Rosen's comments about Ann Romney.

Romney’s strategy to address his deficit among women has been virtually indistinguishable from his work to court other demographics – like Latinos – or, for that matter, the general electorate as a whole. That is, Romney argues that improving the overall economy is just as paramount to women as anybody else and that the president’s record has fallen far short on that score.
Republicans argue that the former Massachusetts governor’s struggles are partly attributable to collateral damage from a divisive Republican primary season and a persistent focus in Congress and on the state level about access to contraception.
A prime example came in Virginia, where Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell had to back off supporting a controversial proposal to require women to undergo an invasive ultrasound procedure before terminating a pregnancy.  And Rick Santorum, who suspended his presidential campaign this week, spent weeks answering questions about his personal opposition to birth control.
Romney is likely to make up some of that ground just by virtue of campaigning in a general election environment. ("People haven't had a chance to listen to us or hear us," his wife said in an interview on FOX News.)

But the million-dollar question involves whether much of that collateral damage will linger with Romney, and how he might go about addressing his gender gap.
“They need to drive the conversation away from women’s bodies to the economy," said Sabrina Schaeffer, the executive director of the conservative Independent Women’s Forum, adding Romney should "come up with some tangible examples of how they can help women on things like employment, health care, education and other issues.”
Schaeffer argued that Romney might package together squarely conservative proposals on entitlements, education and health care in a way that’s appealing to women. She also warned the campaign against being caught flat-footed on issues like the fair pay law a surrogate had declined to speak about on Wednesday.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

RealClearPolitic's Erin McPike and The Atlantic's Molly Ball talk about Ann Romney's response to Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen's comments.

“They need to think carefully about how to respond to issues like Lilly Ledbetter,” she said.
Cheri Jacobus, the founder of Capitol Strategies, a Republican consulting firm, also encouraged the Romney campaign to employ more women surrogates.
“I think that it’s always helpful to have effective surrogates from all walks of life,” she said.
For their part, Democrats argue that Romney’s deficit with women is about far more than messaging.
“When it comes to connecting with women, it’s not just an optics problem – it’s a substance problem,” said Jess McIntosh, the deputy communications director for the Democratic women’s group, EMILY’s List. “Even if Romney could put a really great spin on his anti-woman regressive policies, they would still be anti-woman regressive policies. And despite what the GOP may think, women notice that.”

But for Romney, making inroads with women might also depend on the kind of women he targets.
The Republican pollster, Judy, suggested that young, unmarried women might be a taller order for Romney to win than, say, suburban, middle-aged mothers. These voters are the ones the Romney campaign is targeting when it rolls out Ann Romney, one of its most effective surrogates for the campaign due to her biography as a mother of five who’s suffered from breast cancer and multiple sclerosis.
Republican thinking suggests that if Romney steers clear of hot-button social issues like contraception and keeps his focus on the economy, he could be more competitive with Obama in winning the female vote.
“Women voters, especially the more independent-minded female voters in the swing states are critical to either party if they want to win,” Judy said. “Mitt Romney has an opportunity to get some of those women back."