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Health & Fitness

A Letter to Our Daughters About the Election

What every young woman needs to know before voting this year.

 

There’s something going on right now I need to talk to you about.  For even though I respect your ability to make decisions, there are politicians out there, who don’t.  And you need to know about them.

Don’t be fooled by their last minute switching to moderate positions on women’s rights with the election only days away.  It’s not what they’ve been running on.  It’s not their party’s platform. And it’s not how they’ll legislate once in office.

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These candidates assign labels.   Turn complex personal issues like the right to choose into an either/or matter equating prochoice with pro abortion.  It’s not.   It’s about you, not them, having the right to make your own personal decisions. 

Don’t think what you now have can’t be taken away.   For years the anti-choice movement has quietly been whittling away at women’s health and reproductive rights through State laws.  The scope and number of these provisions are on the rise.   In the first six months of 2011 alone, nineteen States enacted 162 new provisions related to reproductive health and rights -- half of them were to further restrictions on abortion rights – triple the number passed in all of 2010.

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These candidates don’t see women as equals.   They voted against the Lilly Ledbetter Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Their roadblocks to birth control and family planning marginalize women’s role in the work force making it just as much an economic issue as a personal preference.

They would support the Blunt Amendment, allowing employers to refuse covering birth control in employee health care plans.  And they would deny Federal funding for abortions and emergency birth control in the case of rape and incest.

They want to repeal Obamacare, denying women the mandate that insurance companies can no longer charge more for the same health insurance as men -- as well as –- denying benefits such as access to birth control, well care visits, mammograms, domestic violence counseling  - all without co-pays or deductibles

There‘s a lot at stake for you in this election.  How you vote this November will affect your generation as well as the next to come.   In the next term, it’s expected the President will appoint at least two and likely four new Supreme Court justices.  Their political leanings will dramatically affect the already fragile balance of power.   You will live with their decisions for the next twenty years or more.

So don’t wait until it’s too late.  Now is the time to be informed, talk with your friends and be sure you vote for the candidates who’ll work to further not limit women’s equality, personal decision making and access to affordable health care.         

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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