In late January, Japanese Health Minister Hakuo Yanagisawa was the subject of several news headlines around the world when he referred to women as "birth-giving machines" and urged them, in light of Japan's declining birthrate, to "do their best per head" as a public service. Consequently, some have called for the minister's removal, but Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has refused to do so.
Shocking? Not really. Feminists probably find this incident oddly familiar. That's because our own Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is chock-full of Hakuos, and our administration doesn't want for a Shinzo who ignores our protests—his name is George. The only difference is that the Hakuos of the West shy away from using such stark metaphors. Instead, people like HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt, HHS Assistant Secretary for Children and Families Wade Horn, and HHS Deputy Assistant Secretary for Population Affairs Eric Keroack choose the sneakier route of changing policy and funding allocations so that more women in the U.S., ready or not, become "birth-giving machines."
In a country where you're hard pressed to find a state legislature that doesn't house a number of extreme conservatives opposed to abortion and birth control, and where already close to 90 percent of counties have no abortion provider, and where national policies (or the lack thereof) make it nearly impossible for most women to balance work and family, Leavitt, Keroack, Horn, & Co. were installed to keep machinations working in favor of birth-giving machines, but not for women and their multi-faceted lives.
Indeed, these men were appointed to these positions in part because it was never a secret that they'd be on board with the plan. Eric Keroack was the medical director of an anti-contraception, anti-abortion network of so-called pregnancy counseling centers that deliberately endanger women's reproductive health in pursuit of an anti-abortion rights, anti-woman political agenda. Who puts that guy in charge of $283 million in grants designed to provide access to contraceptive supplies and information without some foresight that access to birth control probably won't expand on his clock?
Likewise, we weren't expecting any added security for women when Secretary Leavitt came to Washington. When he was Utah's governor, he was not only bent on getting his state "the toughest abortion law" in the country, but also vetoed abstinence-only legislation because it would have permitted discussion of contraception. So were we surprised when he did his political best to keep Plan B emergency contraception bottled up at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), another agency under his purview? Not a bit.
Wade Horn's past was just as scary. Opposing everything NOW stands for (from abortion rights to economic justice), Horn founded The National Organization of Fathers, and openly stated his belief that "the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church." He even advocated that federal benefits, such as Head Start and subsidized housing, should only be available to children of married couples, not single parents. So of course the Bush administration put him in charge of all the welfare and public assistance programs that primarily serve those very same single mothers he so detests. And did he find a way to derail the funding away from single moms? You bet he did.
All three men were given positions with expansive power over women's (and, well, everyone's) reproductive, rights, health care and insurance in this country, and NOW, along with countless other organizations, protested their ascent, but to no avail.
Together, the three Hakuos of the HHS are funneling millions to misogynist, inaccurate, and harmful abstinence-only "education" programs, not only for kids, but for adults, too, as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars to similarly hazardous "crisis pregnancy centers" that mislead vulnerable women. Now Leavitt is funneling $5 million to Wade Horn's own National Fatherhood Initiative—the right-wing organization Horn founded.
Horn's National Fatherhood Initiative is just one organization thriving on funding from the Bush administration's "Responsible Fatherhood" program, carried out by guess who? — the Department of Health and Human Services. And herein lies how the men of the HHS — and the Bushies who hired them — are showing their anti-woman colors as vividly as Hakuo showed his.
Through this "Responsible Fatherhood" initiative, the administration has given over $80 million to men-only and fathers-only education programs. That's right, while the HHS is actively ensuring that women's access to contraception, abortion, and other reproductive healthcare is being stripped to nothing, it's simultaneously pumping millions into job-training and other education programs explicitly and solely for men.
All of that is sexist, and the last part is completely illegal. Allocating federal funds to any education program or activity that discriminates on the basis of sex has been illegal since 1972, when NOW helped pass Title IX of the Education Amendments into law. NOW and Legal Momentum are preparing to file complaints against the Bush administration alleging sex discrimination in violation of Title IX.
Besides ignoring the law, by throwing money at men-only education and training programs the administration is also ignoring hard statistics that women need it too. It's not confidential information that women hold the majority of minimum and low-wage jobs. According to the Economic Policy Institute, in 2005, 29.4 percent of women were paid poverty-level wages or less, compared to 19.9 percent of men, with women of color disproportionately represented. Nor is it insignificant that over 90 percent of the adult Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (welfare) clients are women, most of whom are single mothers.
There are a slew of statistics I could list as further evidence, but you already know that a bunch of guys of the woman-submit-to-husband, power-to-the-father(land) mindset probably don't think women should be doing the kind of jobs they might need training for in the first place. No, no, birth-giving machines belong at home!
It's kind of the same perverted reasoning behind abstinence-only "education"—the Bushies don't think anyone who isn't heterosexual and married should be having sex, so they won't tell them how to protect themselves and make healthy decisions related to sex. Similarly, they don't think women should be working, so they refuse to help them do so.
The reality that people aren't going to stop having sex outside of marriage and that women can't (or don't want to) stop working outside the home doesn't matter much to the right wing. Those who don't fit into the all-faithful, all-American, men-rule, women-make-babies cookie cutter mold the Bushies envision as part of their "culture of life" get left behind (a kind of political judgment prior to your evangelical judgment day) and left out of policy and opportunity.
Which reminds me (again) why we need a feminist president in 2008—to restore genuine morality and good judgment to U.S. policies at home and abroad. And it won't be a moment too soon.
Of course, the US had a feminist president for 8 years, and all too little changed for women. Most of the damage is done at the state level, where anti-choice activists control the legislatures and the courts, and the severe damage done during the Reagan-Bush I era still reverberates loudly. But federal priorities do set a tone, and changing the tune can only help.
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