Remember when Nancy Pelosi brought "poor," (she's rich) "23-year-old" (she's 30) Georgetown Law student (she is also a feminist activist who specifically went to Georgetown, a Catholic University, with a goal of forcing the school to cover and pay for birth control despite moral opposition to doing so) Sandra Fluk before Congress to ask you to pay for her birth control because it was costing $3000 a year? And remember when Pelosi accused conservatives of waging a war on women because they didn't want to pay for Fluk's contraception and Pelosi then claimed Republicans wanted to strip all funding from women's health programs? The Washington Post fact checker is crying fowl and asks "A GOP 'assault' on women's health?" Yeah, not so much.
Here is Pelosi's original statement:
“In order to pay for it, [House Republicans] are going to make an assault on women’s health, make another assault on women’s health, continue our assault on women’s health and pay for this with prevention initiatives that are in effect right now for childhood immunization; for screening for breast cancer, for cervical cancer; and for initiatives to reduce birth defects – a large part of what the Center for Disease Control does in terms of prevention.”
And here is WaPo's analysis:
From Pelosi’s statement, one could imagine a wholesale “assault” to strip funding for women’s health programs. But in fact, there are virtually no specific programs aimed at women currently in the fund. In the future, the administration hopes to add such programs, but that is not the reality today, as evidenced by the fact the administration never raised this concern last year when the GOP-led House also voted to kill the preventive health care fund.
Pelosi could have raised concerns about perceived cuts in preventive health. She could have also noted that women benefit greatly from such efforts. But she — and fellow Democrats — went too far to label this “an assault on women’s health.” Maybe evidence of that will emerge through the regular appropriations process—at which point we could revisit this ruling — but for the moment this smacks of political opportunism.
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