Mitt Romney's Record On Women's Health
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There has been a lot of discussion about where Mitt Romney stands on women’s health issues, especially now that he’s emerged as the presumptive Republican nominee.
If you take a look at his record, the answer is clear. Check out his updated Chump page below:
When it comes to women’s health, Mitt Romney simply doesn’t get it.
In his second run for the Republican presidential nomination, voters have encountered a candidate who is nothing short of dangerous on women’s health issues.
Romney made this point crystal clear when discussing which programs he would eliminate, his answer was simple: “Planned Parenthood, we’re going to get rid of that.”
But he went even further. When asked where he would tell the millions of women to go if he eliminated federal funding for Planned Parenthood, Romney said: “Well they can go wherever they’d like to go. This is a free society.” Seems to us, Romney’s saying women can go wherever they’d like, as long as it’s not Planned Parenthood.
Time and again, Romney has shown that he’s willing to throw women’s health under the bus in order to get elected. This past February, he announced his support for the Blunt amendment, a bill that was introduced to restrict access to birth control by allowing any employer the right to deny health insurance coverage for any benefit based on a “moral” conviction. The fact that this policy was vastly unpopular (67 percent of Americans opposed this measure) didn’t stop Mitt Romney. People don’t want their employers cherry-picking what is and isn’t covered on their health insurance plans, but that’s the type of policy Romney supports.
If elected, Romney has pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act “on day one” of his presidency, meaning one of his first acts would be to deny millions of women and families access to affordable preventive care by returning to the days where you could be discriminated against for pre-existing conditions and overturning the no-cost birth control benefit. He has aggressively supported this stance, even launching a petition against the Health and Human Services ruling to include birth control as basic preventive care.
But none of these positions should come as a surprise when you consider where he stands on extreme and sweeping measures like the “personhood” amendment to define life at conception (which could ban common forms of birth control and in some cases, in-vitro fertilization) or his belief that states should have the right to ban contraception. Romney once commented that the landmark case of Griswold v. Connecticut— which overruled the state’s right to ban contraception nearly 50 years ago — was wrong, proving just how dangerous he is on women’s health issues.
His advisors have supported these claims, believing that as president, Romney would support a “raft of pro-life legislation— from pain-capable unborn child protection legislation (like that recently passed in Nebraska) to the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act.”
But at the end of the day, it’s his own words and actions that count and Romney has made his position more than clear: protecting access to basic preventive care is “not what I’m about.”
But he must be held accountable, and must know that women are watching.
