Stop the Bush/Right-Wing Attacks on Women!

August 26, 2004

The harmful policies of the Bush administration and right-wing members of Congress—affecting everything from women's health to women's take-home pay—have been adopted, while the national spotlight has diverted public attention to right-wing attacks on women's reproductive rights. George W. Bush and his Republican allies have:

• Deepened discrimination and pay inequality. The administration aided inequality in the workforce by abolishing the Equal Pay Matters Initiative, weakening the enforcement of laws regarding sex discrimination and harassment, repealing paid family leave regulations, and proposing new regulations that would deprive millions of women of overtime pay. In addition, legislation that would advance pay equality has been bottled up in committees in Congress for years.

• Rolled back women's educational opportunity gains. By significantly reducing funding for programs which promote gender equality, discouraging affirmative action, refusing to research gender inequity in male-dominated math and science programs, and weakening Title IX athletic policies, the Bush administration policy has increased inequity in eduation.

• Placed poor women and children at more risk. The latest proposed budget cuts child care for 300,000 children by the year 2009, as well as freezes funding for after school programs, barely increases funding for the Head Start program, and further advocates for an increase in the work hours required of welfare recipients while opposing increases in child care assistance. The administration's solution to poverty is a simple-minded and risky effort to get poor women to marry—despite evidence that many poor women are fleeing violent relationships.

• Expanded the gulf between rich and poor. Tax cuts for the wealthy have been made at the expense of social programming that benefits women, such as grants for college tuition, spending to K-12 education, child care and early education, career education, services for domestic violence victims and possibly Social Security benefits as well. The average tax cut for taxpayers with incomes above $1 million is about $113,000, which is five times the annual income of a typical single mother with children ($22,637).

• Promises to return old-age poverty. Tax cuts for the wealthy are also draining retirement security for millions, and future plans to privatize Social Security promise to place very elderly, poor, never married/divorced/separated and disabled women at great risk of dire poverty. Concurrently, the tax cuts are accumulating hundreds of billions in debt that threaten the country's future economic stability and saddle future generations with an enormous burden.

• Severely restricted health care programs. The Bush administration weakened Medicare and Medicaid which provides the only health care services low-income and elderly women receive, while offering a phony prescription drug benefit for seniors. Most notably, the administration and Congressional colleagues prohibited the government from negotiating with drug companies for volume discounts on medications, awarding a multi-billion windfall to their contributors in the pharmaceutical industry. At the same time, the administration has pushed ineffective Medical Savings Accounts that favor the rich but do little to expand health care coverage to the approximately 45 million uninsured individuals.

• Cut VAWA funding. Showing a blatant disregard for the problem of violence against women, the budget for the Fiscal Year 2005 proposes funding for shelters and services to battered women that is 26% below the authorized level, and refused to include protections for battered women in the marriage protection programs that are part of the administration's welfare proposal.

• Inadequately responded to needs of military women. Bush undermined the recruitment and retention of women in the armed services, responded inadequately to relevations of sexual assault within the military, and supports a policy of prohibiting abortions in military hospitals overseas.

• Nominated numerous regressive judges. The vast majority of Bush's judicial nominees have records of racist and misogynistic beliefs or actions; one nominee advocates the subordination of wives to their husbands, another opposed the restriction of racist slurs from the workplace, and the vast majority of nominees are vehemently opposed to the Roe v. Wade ruling.

• Closed women's offices; appointed officials opposed to women's rights. Bush has consistently closed or undermined government offices and programs that benefit women, such as the White House Office for Women's Initiatives and Outreach, closed key offices of the Women's Bureau of the Labor Department; furthermore, he has consistently appointed officials that are hostile to women's issues.

• Pushed discriminatory constitutional amendment on same-sex marriage. The Bush administration, with right-wing allies in Congress, is backing legislation that would place in the U.S. Constitution a discriminatory amendment banning same-sex marriages. At the same time, the Republican leadership is waging a high-profile anti-gay and lesbian campaign that has fueled divisiveness and danger for lesbians and gays. The White House and many right-wing members of Congress have opposed expanding federal criminal statutes that would add the category of violent crimes against lesbians and gay men-as well as sex-based and disability-based hate crimes.

• Restricted women's reproductive rights. George W. Bush and right wing friends in Congress—who oppose abortion rights and contraception access—have carried on a persistent series of attacks through legislation, policy and litigation that have several times passed a ban on the safest abortion procedures. They have attempted to withdraw mifepristone (RU-486) from use, kept a safe emergency contraception from being available over-the-counter, limited reproductive health care access for adolescent girls, disseminated scientifically inaccurate and incomplete information about reproductive health care issues, and withdrawn critically important U.S. funding from population assistance and family planning programs in developing countries, risking the health and lives of more than 30 million poor women. They have channeled hundreds of millions of dollars to unproven abstinence-only programs and otherwise pursued a distorted and dangerous agenda that risks the health and lives of all U.S. women in their childbearing years.