By Maya Dusenbery • @mayadusenbery • 8 years ago

Watch: Every time lawmakers interrupted the head of Planned Parenthood yesterday

Were you wise enough to spare your blood pressure and avoid watching any of the House committee hearing on Planned Parenthood yesterday? Good call, but I’m gonna suggest you at least get a taste of it by watching this video of all the times Cecile Richards was interrupted by her grandstanding, anti-choice interrogators.

Follow it up with six more audio clips from the 5-hour hearing in which lawmakers treated the president of one of the most widely used and respected providers of reproductive health care in the country as a hostile witness, repeatedly lied — to her face — about the facts and talked over her when she tried to correct the record, and at one point asked, “Surely you don’t expect us to be easier on you because you’re a woman?”

I don’t actually have the words to express my rage but I’m with Democratic Rep. Gerald Connolly, who noted that he at least hoped that every American woman was watching the hearing to see “the disrespect and misogyny rampant here today.”

Maya Dusenbery

St. Paul, MN

Maya Dusenbery is executive director in charge of editorial at Feministing. She is the author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick (HarperOne, March 2018). She has been a fellow at Mother Jones magazine and a columnist at Pacific Standard magazine. Her work has appeared in publications like Cosmopolitan.com, TheAtlantic.com, Bitch Magazine, as well as the anthology The Feminist Utopia Project. Before become a full-time journalist, she worked at the National Institute for Reproductive Health. A Minnesota native, she received her B.A. from Carleton College in 2008. After living in Brooklyn, Oakland, and Atlanta, she is currently based in the Twin Cities.

Maya Dusenbery is an executive director of Feministing and author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm on sexism in medicine.

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By Sejal Singh • @Sej_Singh • 6 years ago

Trump’s Budget Is Stunningly Cruel to Working-Class Women and Kids

The White House released Trump’s spending budget yesterday — and it calls for “unprecedented cuts to programs for poor and working-class families.”

Here are just a few of the stunningly cruel cuts Trump laid out:

$72.5 billion in cuts to programs for people with disabilities – most prominently, Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), which already gives people with disabilities the absolute bare minimum they need to live a decent standard of living. Trump’s massive cuts to SSDI break his campaign promise never to cut Social Security. $143 billion in cuts to federal student loan programs – and it would ...

The White House released Trump’s spending budget yesterday — and it calls for “unprecedented cuts to programs for poor and working-class families.”

Here are just a few of ...

By Sophia Kerby • 7 years ago

Texas’ SB25 Co-Opts Disability Rights to Restrict Autonomy, And I’m Not Buying It

This month, the Texas state legislature advanced an anti-abortion bill that co-opts disability rights to further restricts a patient’s right to choose. The law is awful, but the issue is complicated by the fact that it’s not just people from the conservative right who have used disability rights as a political football – the abortion rights movement has done this, too.

In a blatant attempt to further restrict patient’s access to reproductive care, Texas’ Senate Bill 25 would allow doctors to withhold information from parents about a fetus’s disability. If passed into law, this would make it impossible for Texans to sue a doctor for intentionally withholding such information. And while it’s meant to create chaos and confusion and drive a rift between disability ...