Leigh Moyer is an organizer with the #Fight4HER. The Tucson Weekly welcomes guest commentaries. Send yours to jimn@tucsonlocalmedia.com.
On Donald Trump’s first day in office he signed his Global Gag Rule, an executive order that restricts international health care providers that receives U.S. aid from simply mentioning abortion services. We’re several years and a pandemic away from Trump’s first day in office, so why does this matter right now?
Because people don’t stop needing reproductive health care services amidst a pandemic, and Trump’s Global Gag Rule has already made these services, amongst others, near-impossible to access in communities around the world. As reproductive health services are scaled back to focus on responding to COVID-19, people around the world are forced to forgo health care.
The World Health Organization lists abortion as an essential service; the last time I checked, you can’t pause a pregnancy until a pandemic passes.
Trump’s Global Gag Rule doesn’t just impact reproductive health care services, but all health services. This is because programs and clinics in countries around the world have lost millions of dollars in USAID, leading to staffing cutbacks and clinic closures. These clinics are often the only trusted health care providers in the communities they serve. By forcing these clinics to close, Trump’s Global Gag Rule limits interventions to stop the spread of coronavirus in vulnerable communities around the world. During a health care crisis, do we want leaders who are cutting funding and access to health care?
No. I am ashamed that Sen. Martha McSally (R-AZ) has failed to co-sponsor the Global Health, Empowerment and Rights (HER) Act to permanently repeal the Global Gag Rule and safeguard the right to reproductive health access around the world.
I’m a young woman with a woman senator who doesn’t respect or stand up for my health care rights.
Sen. McSally: Reproductive health care benefits everyone. Losing access disproportionately impacts women like me. I’m in this fight because reproductive rights are human rights, but also because it’s personal.
Just because the country is social distancing doesn’t mean that the attacks against essential health services have stopped. It is our job as activists to remind the essential workers on Capitol Hill to take care of their constituents. If we don’t keep fighting now, we might not like what the world looks like when we get to go back outside.
Knowing that the attacks won’t stop while I’m sheltering in place is horrifying. While social distancing is the opposite of on-the-ground activism, at least we have the internet. In a matter of weeks, my colleagues and I have transitioned from meeting in person to gathering on Zoom. We’ve gone digital. Meetings have moved online. Turns out lawmakers have shuffled into Zoom rooms just like the rest of us. Activists from around the nation showed up for 23 lobby meetings online, asking senators and congress people, face-to-face, to support the HER Act and protect reproductive rights here and abroad. Tucson activists met with staff from Congressman Grijalva’s office and from Senator McSally’s office. Perhaps it should be expected that Grijalva’s staffer was more engaged and excited, but I was surprised at just how completely unprepared Sen. McSally’s Young Women’s and Federal Grants Outreach Coordinator was for our meeting. A cursory google search before the call would have gone a long way and would have allowed us to actually push the issue rather than explain the basics to an uniformed and frankly uninterested staffer. If Sen. McSally refuses to understand the issues she is voting on, what is she doing in office?
Despite the challenges we face from COVID-19, we can still demand that Sen. McSally support the repeal of deadly anti-choice policies like Trump’s Global Gag Rule. We can still make calls, send emails, and tweet like the future depends on it.
Because it does.
This article appears in May 7-13, 2020.
Political abortionist hack. Save the babied.
I find it strange and perturbing that Appointed-Senator Martha McSally, a former valedictorian who went on to receive excellent professional education at several levels, has so unquestionably joined a group of the most know-nothing, boot licking, power mongers that is the current Republican Party in Washington, D.C. Leave your brains in that bucket over there by the door while you so transparently give political cover to all the shady, shaky actions of this current president: NO-MATTER-WHAT.
Pass that bleach bottle, please.
Maybe we will see , if she loses again, that Appointed-Senator McSally will just move on to another state like former District 2 repeat candidate Jesse Kelly (i.e., NOT Mark Kelly, the Astronaut).
Martha McSally will NEVER put her female constituents reproductive rights before her own Catholic/Evangelical beliefs. Ms Martha NEVER puts her constituents interests before her own. There always has to be something in it for her. Go away, Martha, just go away.
Everyone should oppose the global gag rule. It’s fundamentally un-American because its sole purpose is to restrict speech.
I am ashamed that the lie “Abortion is essential because abortion is heath care” is still being spoken and believed. Abortion is neither essential nor is it health care. It is murder masquerading as health care! What is the thing in the womb that you demand the right to abort. It is a genetically unique human being from the moment of fertilization. It needs the mother to protect it while the child is developing, not to be killed because it is seen as unwanted, while it is defenseless and voiceless. What about the rights of unborn women babies? What about all the unborn descendants of those aborted women? Democrats want more taxes, yet they blindly murder future American tax payers that they claim to care about! Thank you to President Trump, Senator McSally, and all who stand up for the unborn and against the evil of abortion on demand.
“Leigh Moyer is an organizer with the #Fight4HER. T”
Why don’t you fight for unborn women being murdered daily in the womb., since you claim to fight for women? Abortion is not a right just because the Supreme Court wrongly says it is.I The embryo is unique from the mother and father at conception. That is a medical and scientific fact. The only difference is its need for protection during early development. Justice Blackmun said in Roe v. Wade majority opinion that if it could be proven that the unborn is human, then the right to abortion on deman goes away because the child has a right to life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness, the right to due process under the 14th Amendment.
You were protected by your mother. Why not grant the same protection to preborn women and men? Promote the private organizations that actually provide health care and social services to women and their babies with the tax money current being given to Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers to kill the child in the womb and now even after birth. Thank you to Prescient Trump and Senator McSally for doing what their consciences impel them to do to fight the evil of abortion on demand. They are doing exactly what I elected them to do.
“The Supreme Court is wrong to have allowed and upheld Roe V. Wade, just as they were wrong in the Dred Scott case which claimed that Negroes, slave or free, had no right to be citizens of the United States, which led led to the Civil War, but which eventually led to the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution. These in efect overturned the Dred Scott decision.
“In March of 1857, the United States Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, declared that all blacks — slaves as well as free — were not and could never become citizens of the United States. The court also declared the 1820 Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, thus permiting slavery in all of the country’s territories.
“The case before the court was that of Dred Scott v. Sanford. Dred Scott, a slave who had lived in the free state of Illinois and the free territory of Wisconsin before moving back to the slave state of Missouri, had appealed to the Supreme Court in hopes of being granted his freedom.
“Taney — a staunch supporter of slavery and intent on protecting southerners from northern aggression — wrote in the Court’s majority opinion that, because Scott was black, he was not a citizen and therefore had no right to sue. The framers of the Constitution, he wrote, believed that blacks “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it.”
“Referring to the language in the Declaration of Independence that includes the phrase, “all men are created equal,” Taney reasoned that “it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration. . . .”
“Abolitionists were incensed. Although disappointed, Frederick Douglass, found a bright side to the decision and announced, “my hopes were never brighter than now.” For Douglass, the decision would bring slavery to the attention of the nation and was a step toward slavery’s ultimate destruction.”