In their constant quest to demonstrate that President Trump is The Most Evil Man In The Universe™, feminists have hit on a new tactic: he wants to steal your birth control pills! It’s just like The Handmaid’s Tale! He wants to kidnap Emily Watson and call her of Ofdonald!
The latest missive in this series of stupidities comes courtesy of Michelle Goldberg, author of The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World. Goldberg had an op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times making the case that Trump is “the American president most hostile to reproductive rights and measures to promote sexual health.” Really? What, pray tell, has Trump done to roll back abortion, other than defunding Planned Parenthood abroad? But according to Goldberg, “American women are being stripped of their sexual and reproductive autonomy not by a moralizing puritan but by an erotically incontinent libertine.” Goldberg calls Trumpcare “a particularly bald expression of contempt for women,” since it would allow insurance companies to charge women more than men for insurance plans — which makes sense, since they cost more — and would allow men to purchase coverage without birth control pills and breast pumps.
But most of the article is just the updated version of the infamous joke about The New York Times headline: “WORLD TO END: WOMEN AND MINORITIES HIT HARDEST.” According to Goldberg, cuts to future growth of Medicaid would cut funding for births, hitting women the hardest. Tax penalties would attach to certain plans, hitting women the hardest. No-cost birth control regulations would disappear, allowing some insurance companies to offer differing plans, hitting women the hardest.
The greatest irony here is that feminists seem completely complacent about being dependent on the men who make policy. After all, it’s not Nancy Pelosi alone who created Obamacare. It was an overwhelmingly male Democratic Party infrastructure that promoted a scheme to “give” women benefits through the power of the government. And now Goldberg believes that if women have to pay for their own birth control, or negotiate with their employers for a particular type of coverage, that means that they’re somehow victims of Republican evil.
Trump, in Goldberg’s view, is even more evil than his predecessors, however. That’s because while some pro-life advocates are actually pro-life on principle, Trump is merely a “lubricious playboy … [who] doesn’t bother pretending he’s acting in women’s best interests.”
The Democratic attempt to paint Trump as some sort of outlier is ridiculous. It’s also another sign of desperation. When they’re relegated to trotting out the same playbook they used for George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, Democrats are running out of political ammunition.