Feminista Fridays: MAGA Comes for Women

This is what America voted for when it voted for Donald Trump

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MAGA’s War on Women

It is not enough that in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Louisiana passed one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the nation. Not content with threatening abortion providers with up to 15 years in prison and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines in his own state, Governor Jeff Landry just signed an extradition order for the arrest of a New York doctor who was indicted by a West Baton Rouge grand jury last month for prescribing abortion pills online that were used by a fifteen-year-old Louisiana girl.

In 2024, a mother ordered abortion medication from Dr. Margaret Carpenter and then gave the pills to her underage daughter, in violation of Louisiana’s abortion ban. The mother was also charged, arrested and released on bond.

It’s not just Louisiana. Yesterday, a Texas judge fined Carpenter more than $100,000 in penalties for prescribing abortion pills to a woman near Dallas. Texas also has a near-ban on abortion.

Last year, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed a shield law that protects New York doctors who prescribe abortion pills to out-of-state patients. In the wake of Landry’s order, Hochul said that she would never extradite Carpenter to Louisiana. This will eventually end up before the United States Supreme Court and it’s a pretty safe bet as to how the theocratic majority on the court will rule.

That’s not all. Congress is taking aim at defunding Planned Parenthood, which would lead to many more unwanted pregnancies because it would drastically reduce access to birth control, particularly for poorer women and girls. In December, Politico reported that:

[The Congressional Budget Office] found that eliminating the taxpayer dollars the group receives through Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Title X family planning program — none of which can be used for abortions under longstanding federal law — would save about $520 million over a decade, but cost about $650 million.

That’s because “as much as 25 percent of the estimated 2.6 million clients served by Planned Parenthood would face reduced access to care,” the nonpartisan office said, particularly “services that help women avert pregnancies,” meaning “the number of births in the Medicaid program would increase by several thousand per year.”

Essentially, subsidizing birth control is far cheaper than subsidizing births, so the cost of funding Planned Parenthood would be passed on — and surpassed — by the increased cost of funding Medicaid. CBO found that the Planned Parenthood patients who would be most affected by the cuts “reside in areas without access to other health care clinics or medical practitioners who serve low-income populations.”

The fiscal argument for saving Planned Parenthood’s funding only carries so much weight these days, since Congress is also looking to drastically slash Medicare and the Children’s Health Insurance Program in order to make permanent Trump’s tax cuts, which are disproportionately skewed to benefit the wealthy.

To be clear, most of what Planned Parenthood does has nothing to do with abortion. But it doesn’t matter. This is not about “protecting the sanctity of life” or whatever drivel you will hear from its opponents. This is about punishing women, preventing them from accessing birth control and cancer and STI screenings. Abortion is just a small piece of what Planned Parenthood does and no taxpayer money goes to pay for it anyway. But that is all beside the point.

The men in Congress, the men on the Supreme Court and the man in the White House are all working in concert to harm women. This year, the Supreme Court will hear arguments about South Carolina stripping Planned Parenthood of Medicaid funding. We all know what these justices will decide. You can bet that later this year, other states will join South Carolina in slashing funding to Planned Parenthood. Women and girls, particularly in rural and poorer communities, will suffer with the lack of access to healthcare. Sexually-transmitted diseases, cancer and unwanted pregnancies will skyrocket and when they do, Medicaid may not be around to provide the medical coverage necessary to treat them.

You can also bet that Trump’s Food and Drug Administration will create obstacles for women to access abortion pills like mifepristone, which account for 63% of all abortions in the first trimester. If the courts eventually criminalize medical providers sending abortion pills through the mail to patients in states that have banned abortion, it will spell doom for millions of women who need reproductive care.

We are about to live in a country where women are going to die because they have no access to affordable healthcare. If they want to avoid getting pregnant, they will have nowhere to access birth control. If they want to stay healthy, they will have nowhere to access preventative screenings. If they want to terminate a pregnancy for any reason, they will have nowhere to do it.

This is not a political ad to scare people into voting a certain way. This is the reality in which we now find ourselves. This is what America voted for when it voted for Donald Trump.

One More Thing

Louisiana is not just waging war on women but on children too. Its surgeon general announced yesterday that the state will no longer promote mass vaccinations or instruct “individuals to receive any and all vaccines.” Instead, it would “encourage each patient to discuss the risks and benefits of vaccination with their provider.” The news came on the same day that the United States Senate voted to confirm vaccine denier and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

Nearly one-third of all non-senior adults in Louisiana are on Medicaid. Over 711,000 children are enrolled in both Medicaid and CHIP. Pretty soon, many of them will not have the ability to discuss “the risks and benefits of vaccinations” with their provider because their access to their provider will be severely curtailed, if not entirely cut off, in order to provide tax breaks to Elon Musk, Donald Trump and other billionaires.