Women and Politics

This post was submitted by Jean Qiao, WCF Communications Fellow

Although the country remains deeply divided about how to accomplish health care reform, there are few who would dispute the great need for it. However, it seems only a fraction of people have a true grasp on just how sexist our current system is. And with women holding only 17% of the seats in Congress, there’s certainly no guarantee that this disparity will be properly addressed.

Adding insult to injury, last week’s White House health care summit included only six women out of 42 attendees. Dan Rather knows this is ludicrous:

“If more women were in the room, might the debate have been different? If there were more women in Congress (which is around 17 percent female), might our politics be less rancorous and might our elected officials get more accomplished? There’s a school of thought that is emerging that suggests the answer is yes.”

Luckily one congresswoman spoke up for women’s health. Rep. Louise Slaughter (NY-28) made a dramatic call for healthcare, touching upon a wide array of issues that relate to our broken healthcare system and women. Calling the pre-existing conditions regulations cruel and capricious, she said:

“Eight states in this country right now have declared that domestic violence is a preexisting conditions on the ground, I assume, that if you’re been unlucky enough to get yourself beaten up once you might go around and do it again”.

Yes that is correct. If you live in Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Wyoming, or the District of Columbia and you’ve been abused by your husband or significant other, you will probably be denied health insurance.

Furthermore, Slaughter called upon the importance of having a higher percentage of women in government  in order for our voices to be heard:

“In 1991, women were not included in any of the trials at the NIH because we had hormones. It wasn’t until we had a critical mass of women here that said this will not do for more than half the population of the United States, who pay taxes, that we made certain that diseases like osteoporosis, mainly a woman’s disease, cervical cancer, only a woman’s disease, uterine cancer and others were really looked at”.

In time when crucial legislation is constantly being debated, most of which affects women directly, it is unacceptable that only 17% of Congress is women. Without increasing the number of women we have in elected office, we leave ourselves open to more legislation that restricts our reproductive choices and endangers our health.

A clip of Slaughter’s statement can be found here.

It took strong women such as Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Sen. Barbara Boxer to narrowly defeat the Nelson-Hatch Amendment last December.

Women know what’s best for women, but 90 out of 535 in our federal government not nearly enough. Perhaps fixing our lopsided government is the first step in fixing our broken health care system.

Ladies, you didn’t want an equal voice in health care reform, right? Good - because holding 17% of Congress won’t do it for you, and being only 10.5% of today’s special health summit certainly won’t either.

Yes, out of the 38 congressional leaders invited to today’s White House health summit, only four were women. That doesn’t even accurately reflect our sad 17% in Congress.

So, when given the chance to actually create a group with and equal number of men and women, both the White House and members of Congress chose not to? Awesome.

No wonder our government’s broken.