Public Supports Women In Combat And Transgenders In The Military

 

The charts above are from the Gallup Poll -- done between January 21st and 27th of a nationwide sample of 1,001 adults, with a 4 point margin of error.

How The States Rank On Women's Health

 

From smile hub.org

Methodology

In order to determine the best states for women’s health, SmileHub compared the 50 states across three key dimensions: 1) Health & Living Standards, 2) Health Care Policies & Support Systems and 3) Safety Risk.

We evaluated those dimensions using 18 relevant metrics, which are listed below with their corresponding weights. Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the highest level of women’s health. For metrics marked with an asterisk (*), the square root of the population was used to calculate the population size in order to avoid overcompensating for population differences across states.

We then determined each state’s weighted average across all metrics to calculate its overall score and used the resulting scores to rank-order the states.

Health & Living Standards - Total Points: 45

• Women’s Life Expectancy at Birth: Full Weight (~4.50 Points)

• Female Uninsured Rate: Full Weight (~4.50 Points)
  Note: This metric accounts for females ages 16 and older.

• Share of Women with Good or Better Health: Double Weight (~9.00 Points)

• Women’s Preventive Health Care: Full Weight (~4.50 Points)
  Note: This metric measures the share of women who were up-to-date on cervical and breast-cancer screenings.

• Share of Physically Active Women: Full Weight (~4.50 Points)

• Share of Women Who are Obese: Full Weight (~4.50 Points)
  Note: This metric measures the percent of females aged 18 years and older who have obesity. Obesity is defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a body mass index greater than or equal to 30.0.

• Maternal Mortality Rate: Full Weight (~4.50 Points)

• Heart Disease Mortality Rate for Women: Full Weight (~4.50 Points)

• Female Smoker Rate: Full Weight (~4.50 Points)

Health Care Policies & Support Systems - Total Points: 35

• Health & Wellness Charities per Total Number of Women*: Full Weight (~4.38 Points)

• Quality of Women’s Hospitals: Full Weight (~4.38 Points)

• Share of Women Ages 18-44 Who Reported Having One or More People They Think of as Their Personal Doctor or Health Care Provider: Double Weight (~8.75 Points)

Note: Primary care providers are specialized in establishing a long-lasting relationship with their patients, and are their medical point of contact. They diagnose, treat and prevent a wide variety of conditions in a way that is tailored to each individual patient. Having a dedicated health care provider, or a provider considered to be one’s personal doctor, is associated with elements of successful health care, such as:Primary care providers are specialized in establishing a long-lasting relationship with their patients, and are their medical point of contact. They diagnose, treat and prevent a wide variety of conditions in a way that is tailored to each individual patient. Having a dedicated health care provider, or a provider considered to be one’s personal doctor, is associated with elements of successful health care, such as:

• Lower health care costs;
• Greater use of preventive services, such as flu shots or mammograms;
• Fewer emergency department visits for non-urgent or avoidable problems;
• Increased patient satisfaction;
• Improvements in chronic care management for chronic conditions such as hypertension and high cholesterol.

• Abortion Policies & Access: Full Weight (~4.38 Points)

Note: This binary metric is based on research conducted by the Guttmacher Institute and takes into account 20 types of abortion restrictions – including gestational age bans, waiting periods, insurance coverage bans and medication abortion restrictions – and approximately 10 protective policies – including state constitutional protections, abortion funding, insurance coverage for abortion, and protections for patients and clinic staff.

• 2 - Most or very protective: the state has most or all of the protective policies;
• 1.5 - Protective: the state has some protective policies;
• 1 - Some restrictions/protections: the state either has few restrictions or protections, or has a combination of restrictive and protective policies;
• 0.5 - Restrictive: the state has multiple restrictions and later gestational age ban;
• 0 - Most or very restrictive: the state either bans abortion completely or has multiple restrictions and early gestational age ban.

• Unaffordability of Doctor’s Visit: Double Weight (~8.75 Points)
  Note: This metric measures the percentage of women who could not afford to see a doctor in the past year due to costs.

• Domestic Violence Support Services per Total Number of Women: Full Weight (~4.38 Points)

Safety - Total Points: 20

• Suicide Rate for Women: Full Weight (~5.00 Points)

• Depression Rate for Women: Full Weight (~5.00 Points)

• Prevalence of Rape Victimization Among Females: Double Weight (~10.00 Points)
  Note: This metric measures instances of rape. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 91 percent of rape victims are female, and 9 percent are male.

What Pregnant Texas Women Can Do To protect Themselves

The following is part of an article in CourierTexas.com:

“It’s like a knife straight to your stomach,” Dr. Todd Ivey, a Houston-based OB-GYN at an academic hospital, told Courier Texas about a third woman dying in the state during a miscarriage.

“It’s just like, we’ve got to stop this. We’ve got to do something to stop this. Pregnancy is high-risk enough without putting all these complications on top of it.”

The “complications” that Ivey is warning Texas women about are the state’s two abortion bans, which outlaw abortions in Texas from the moment of conception.

The laws impose such harsh penalties on doctors that they are “terrified that they’re going to be criminalized,” said Dr. Austin Dennard, a Dallas-based OB-GYN.

And why wouldn’t they be terrified when they face a sentence of up to 99 years in jail if they perform an abortion that’s considered illegal? They’ll also be stripped of their medical licence, have to pay a $100,000 fine, and can also be sued civilly by anyone who wants to claim a bounty of $10,000 if they can prove a doctor provided an abortion. . . .

Young women who are having complications miscarrying can appear healthy before getting “sick very quickly,” Ivey explained.

How women can protect themselves

“If you are experiencing serious symptoms while miscarrying, you have to move very quickly to prevent (your) organs from failing,” Ivey said. 

And while only three Texas women have been documented to have died from miscarriages since the state’s abortion ban has been in place, the number of Texas women who died from pregnancy or labor complications soared 56% from 2019 to 2022, according to a study by the Gender Equity Policy Institute.

Kaplan said he advises pregnant mothers in Texas to pack a “to go bag” so that “if you need to get out of this state to get the care you need, you’ll be ready to go. Always be thinking — if something were to go wrong, where am I headed outside of Texas.”

But what can a pregnant woman who can’t quickly leave Texas do if local hospitals or urgent care centers don’t appear to be taking the risk to their lives seriously?

“Go to the biggest city near you and go to the downtown-ist hospital and don’t care what it looks like,” Binford said. ”They have the most volumes of deliveries and with volume come pregnancy complications and that means experience in handling them.”

Binford also advised that hospitals affiliated with medical schools will have established ethics committees that will include a lawyer and that committee members will be reachable quickly if a doctor is unsure about whether they can go ahead with a procedure to remove a fetus from a woman’s body.

Texas health lawyer Leah Stewart, who advises doctors and hospitals about the abortion laws, agreed that if a woman thinks she is having a severe miscarriage or another dangerous complication like an ectopic pregnancy or if her water breaks long before viability, then she should go to a large urban hospital.

They see “every single thing that goes wrong … and are better equipped to connect the right provider and give the woman standard care.”

And if you aren’t getting the attention you need quickly, she added, “You have to keep ramping up your fit throwing.”

“You don’t think it’s going to happen to you,” said Ryan Hamilton, a Dallas-area father whose wife nearly died when she miscarried with what would have been their second child at 13 weeks pregnant.

After multiple visits to medical centers over three days and three rounds of treatment with misoprostol, Hamilton’s wife passed out unconscious on the bathroom floor in a pool of blood.

She only survived because Hamilton raced her to a hospital ER for treatment.

“”Women are dying… under the circumstances we went through.. If I wouldn’t have been home to find my wife, she would have been one of those women… I could have lost her….it’s like, ‘oh my God, I really could have.’ That’s reality and that’s hard,” Hamilton added.

Disdain Of Women Is Deeply Imbedded In Trumpism

 

The following post is by Robert Reich. He Is RIGHT!

Connect these dots:

• Trump initially nominated Matt Gaetz for attorney general despite charges that Gaetz paid for drug-filled orgies with underage girls.

  
  

• Former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, Trump’s choice for secretary of defense, is alleged to have raped a woman. In a newly released police report, the woman said Hegseth took her phone, blocked his hotel room door when she tried to leave, and sexually assaulted her. Hegseth has admitted paying the woman hush money because, he says, he was afraid he’d lose his job at Fox News if the allegation became public.

  
  

• Hegseth’s nomination had already generated concern because of his opposition to women serving in combat. 

  
  

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services, is alleged to have groped a family babysitter. She went public with her allegation in July. 

• Kennedy allegedly had an affair with reporter Olivia Nuzzi, whose former fiance said in a court filing that she told him Kennedy wanted to “possess,” “control,” and “impregnate” her. 

  
  

• Elon Musk is being sued by several former employees for “treating women as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size,” “bombarding the workplace with lewd sexual banter,” and creating a sexually charged workplace that treats women as objects.

  
  

• Trump himself was found in civil trial to have sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll, and she won two civil court judgments against him for $83.3 million. 

  
  

• Trump says that the more than two dozen other women who have accused him of sexual misconduct were lying. 

  
  

• And, of course, Trump is heard on the “Access Hollywood” tape saying, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.” 

  
  

• Trump’s Republican National Convention was an exercise in hyper-masculinity, including Hulk Hogan roaring and ripping off his shirt.

   

• During the 2024 election, Trump surrogates mocked Democrats for not being able to define a “woman.” 

  
  

• In the election, more than 40 percent of the advertisements aired by Trump's campaign and pro-Trump groups focused on Harris’s support for transgender people: The ads claimed Harris “supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners” and “even supports letting biological men compete against our girls in their sports.”

  
  

• Trump said he would protect women “whether the women like it or not.”

  
  

• During the campaign, JD Vance said that declining rates of birth in the U.S. constituted a “civilizational crisis” and proposed that adults without children should pay higher taxes and have fewer voting rights. 

  
  

• In a 2021 interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, then-Senate-candidate Vance complained that the U.S. was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” Vance continued: “It’s just a basic fact — you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”

  
  

• Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade.

• Among them was Brett Kavanaugh, whose confirmation was dominated by allegations that he sexually assaulted a young woman. 

• In recent court filings, the attorneys general of Idaho, Kansas, and Missouri claim that expanded access to abortion pills is “causing a loss in potential population or potential population increase” and that “decreased births” were inflicting “a sovereign injury to the state itself.” 

What’s the connection?

 

Disdain of women, a belief that they exist for male pleasure and reproduction, and fear of non-standard forms of gender identity and sexual orientation. 

All are deeply embedded in Trumpism. 

Zoom out and we can see that neofascism (as exemplified by Trump, Viktor Orbán, and Vladimir Putin) is organized around male dominance. Women are relegated to subservient roles.

Under neofascism, anything that challenges the traditional heroic male roles of protector, provider, and controller of the family is considered a threat to the social order. Anything that challenges the traditional female role as reproducer of the male bloodline is viewed as a danger to society. 

Neofascism targets gay and transgender people because they are thought to challenge or weaken the heroic male warrior.

Seen through this prism, Trump’s appointment of many men charged with sexual harassment, men who believe women should not be in combat and should be mothers, and men who oppose abortion and believe women should be forced to have babies even if they don’t want them, forms a coherent neofascist belief system.

 

The basic tenet is male dominance and female subservience.

These Are The Words Of An Abuser - Not A Protector!

This cartoon image is by Ed Wexler at Cagle.com.

Recently, Donald Trump said he would protect women - whether they like it or not. Evidently, he seems to think that would make him sound like a supporter of women. It doesn't. 

Those are the words of someone who doesn't respect women. Someone who thinks women women need a male protector - a man to tell them what they should think and do. Someone who thinks men should have more rights than women and should rule over them. Someone who is more of an abuser than a protector.

And that's exactly what Trump is - an abuser. He has a long history of abusing women. He attended many of Epstein's parties, where underage girls were abused. At least 27 women have accused him of inappropriate sexual conduct. And a New York court has found he was guilty of sexual abuse.

He has made it very clear that he doesn't believe women should be equal to men. In the 2016 election campaign, he promised to take away the right of women to control their own bodies. And he followed through on that - appointing Supreme Court justices that were instrumental in overturning Roe vs. Wade. Now women are dying because they can't get care because doctors are afraid of running afoul of super-strict abortion laws.

The idea that women need a protector is a throwback to the time when men ruled the world, but the patriarchy is dying and the sooner that happens, the better.

Women don't need a protector. They need equal rights and opportunities. But they won't get that from Trump, who is locked in to a vision of the past. 

Michelle Obama Makes The Case For Women's Health And Reproductive Rights

 No one has made the case for women's health and reproductive rights better than Michelle Obama.

The following is excerpted from Mrs. Obama’s speech on Saturday at a Kamala Harris rally in Kalamazoo, Mich.

I want you to think about which presidential candidate could possibly care more about our reproductive health.

I just want to take a moment with this particular question, because there is so much that gets lost in the conversation about women’s reproductive rights. I want the men in the arena to bear with me on this. Because there’s more at stake than just protecting a woman’s choice to give birth.

Sadly, we as women and girls have not been socialized to talk openly about our reproductive health. We’ve been taught instead to feel shame and to hide how our bodies work. Some young girls enter puberty not knowing what to expect. Too many of us suffer with severe cramps and nausea for several days every single month.

Then on the other end of the reproductive timeline, too many women my age have no idea what’s going on with our bodies as we battle through menopause and debilitating hot flashes and depression.

See, fellas, most of us women, we suck up our pain and deal with it alone. We don’t share our experiences with anyone, not with our partners, our friends or even our doctors.

Look, a woman’s body is complicated business, y’all. Yes, it brings life, and that’s a beautiful thing, but even when we are not bearing children, there is so much that can go wrong at any moment.

Every woman here knows what I’m talking about: an unexpected lump, an abnormal pap smear or mammogram, an infection, a blockage, all of which could be early signs of a variety of life-threatening cancers.

In those terrifying moments when something goes wrong, y’all, which will happen at some point to the vast majority of women in this country, let me tell you, it feels like the floor falls out from under us.

Look, I don’t expect any man to fully grasp how vulnerable this makes us feel, to understand the complexities of our reproductive health experiences. In all honesty, most of us as women don’t fully understand the breadth and depth of our own reproductive lives.

That’s because our experiences are often neglected by science. There’s a huge disparity in research funding for women’s health. If you happen to look like me and report pain, you’re more likely to be ignored, even by your own doctors, studies show.

So let me take a minute to help folks, especially the men in our lives, get a better sense of what could happen if we keep dismantling parts of our reproductive care system piece by piece, as I fear Donald Trump will do. I want folks to understand the chilling effect, not just on critical abortion care, but on the entirety of women’s health, all of it.

There are good reasons why so many women and physicians are horrified by what’s happened since Donald Trump’s justices overturned Roe v. Wade. We’re seeing women scrambling across state lines to get the care they need. Just this week, a major medical journal reported that after Roe was overturned, infant mortality in this country rose. One woman spent 22 days in jail on murder charges after she miscarried in her own bathroom.

We are seeing doctors unsure if they can treat ectopic pregnancies, doctors being told that they can’t treat a woman until she becomes so close to death that only a “life of the mother” exception will allow them to act.

Just imagine the profound effects for all of us if Donald Trump wins the election.

In states that are already putting abortion bans into effect, his F.D.A. could further outlaw patchwork systems of telehealth appointments and mail-order pills, thereby eliminating the last remaining protections for women in those states.

He could take actions that effectively ban abortion nationwide, which would put all of us in danger, no matter what state we live in.

We will see more doctors hesitating or shying away from providing lifesaving treatments because they are worried about being arrested; more medical students reconsidering even pursuing women’s health at all; more clinics without enough doctors to meet demand, closing their doors, leaving untold numbers of women in communities throughout the country without a place to go for basic gynecological care, which in turn will leave millions of women at risk of undiagnosed medical issues like cervical and uterine cancers. This is real.

Do you think Donald Trump is thinking about the consequences for the millions of women who will be living in medical deserts? Does anyone think he has the emotional maturity and foresight to come up with a plan to protect us?

Y’all, we are teetering on the edge.

Even before these state bans, America was already lagging behind every other wealthy nation on measures like maternal mortality and paid leave.

We could be right back to the days before Roe, which many young people don’t even remember, the days when abortion wasn’t as safe as it is today, the days when the number of mothers of color dying in childbirth was higher.

So to the men who love us, let me just try to paint a picture of what it will feel like if America, the wealthiest nation on Earth, keeps revoking basic care from its women, and how it will affect every single woman in your life.

Your girlfriend could be the one in legal jeopardy if she needs a pill from out-of-state or overseas, or if she has to travel across state lines because the local clinic closed up.

Your wife and mother could be the ones at higher risk of dying from undiagnosed cervical cancer because they have no access to regular gynecological care.

Your daughter could be the one too terrified to call the doctor if she’s bleeding during an unexpected pregnancy.

Your niece could be the one miscarrying in her bathtub after the hospital turned her away.

This will not just affect women. It will affect you and your sons. The devastating consequences of teen pregnancies won’t just be borne by young girls, but also by the young men who are the fathers. They, too, will have their dreams of going to college, their entire futures totally upended by an unwanted pregnancy.

If you and your partner are expecting a child, you’ll be right by her side at the checkups, terrified if her blood pressure is too high, or if there’s an issue with the placenta, or if the ultrasound shows that an embryo has implanted in the wrong place, and the doctors aren’t sure that they can intervene to keep her safe.

If your wife is shivering and bleeding on the operating room table during a routine delivery gone bad, her pressure dropping as she loses more and more blood or some unforeseen infection spreads and her doctors aren’t sure if they can act, you will be the one praying that it’s not too late. You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something.

Then there is the tragic but very real possibility that in the worst-case scenario, you just might be the one holding flowers at the funeral. You might be the one left to raise your children alone.

See, these are just some of the ways women die during childbirth. I don’t want to be a downer, y’all, but in many cases, there is no warning, and things can go bad very quickly. When it happens, every second of hesitation or delay can lead to devastating outcomes.

I am asking you, from the core of my being, to take our lives seriously. Please do not put our lives in the hands of politicians, mostly men, who have no clue or do not care about what we as women are going through, who don’t fully grasp the broad-reaching health implications that their misguided policies will have on our health outcomes.

The only people who have standing to make these decisions are women with the advice of their doctors. We are the ones with the knowledge and experience to know what we need.

So please, please do not hand our fates over to the likes of Trump, who knows nothing about us, who has shown a deep contempt for us. Because a vote for him is a vote against us, against our health, against our worth.

Let me tell you all to think that the men that we love could be either unaware or indifferent to our plight is simply heartbreaking. It is a sad statement about our value as women in this world. It is both a setback in our quest for equity and a huge blow to our country’s standing as a world leader on issues of women’s health and gender equity.

So fellas, before you cast your vote, ask yourselves: What side of history do you want to be on?