Women Tend To Be Democrats - Young Women Overwhelmingly So

 

The charts above are from the National Public Opinion Reference Survey (conducted annually by the Pew Research Center).

Trump Is Waging War On Women's Health

The following is part of a posting by Dan Rather:

We have made so many advances in my lifetime, especially as they relate to gender equality, and that includes women’s health. It may not always seem true, but as someone who has witnessed it firsthand, I can promise that we are worlds away from where we were back in the 1950s, when health care for women was an afterthought.

But all that progress is quickly being undone by our current political leadership, helmed by Donald Trump. It is beyond maddening to see women’s health initiatives eradicated. If you’re not angered by this, perhaps you are unaware of what is happening. It is a sad and frightening state of affairs.

Trump has overseen a relentless and holistic campaign against women’s autonomy and health. His anti-woman fixation fits nicely into the MAGA agenda, harkening back to the 1950s and ’60s when women had few rights and fewer opportunities. They couldn’t own property or serve on a jury. Access to education and most professions beyond teacher or nurse was restricted. Oral contraception was just becoming available, but only married women could get it. And unlike today, few women were doctors.

Today many of those doctors are taking action. The largest organization of women’s health providers, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), has announced it will no longer accept federal funding. It is the only American medical organization to reject federal dollars, so far.

ACOG said in a statement that “Recent changes in federal funding laws and regulations significantly impact ACOG's program goals, policy positions, and ability to provide timely and evidence-based guidance and recommendations for care.”

Those “recent changes” include the slashing of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives that by definition comprise most of the work provided by ACOG doctors, since the Trump administration considers any programs that assist only women to be DEI. In other words, efforts aimed not at the general public but rather for a specific demographic group are now labeled DEI and are verboten.

ACOG pointed to several changes instituted by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that hurt women and run counter to years of scientific research. For example, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rescinded the recommendation that pregnant women receive the Covid-19 vaccine but provided no science-based evidence for the policy change. And the FDA has recently expressed skepticism about antidepressant use during pregnancy, despite significant medical evidence that such treatments are safe. . . .

American women’s health care was at a crisis point even before the Trump administration stomped in and imposed its regressive policies.

Historically, women’s health care has been severely underfunded and under-researched. While women live an average of 4.5 years longer than men, they spend 25% more time in ill health, according to a study by the World Economic Forum and McKinsey. The study points to a disparity in the effectiveness of treatment for women versus men.

While spending on U.S. health care has more than doubled in 20 years, the share allocated to women’s health specifically has declined. The 2005 National Institutes of Health budget allocated 13.5% for research related to women’s health. In 2025 that declined to just over 10%. Overall, only 1% of health care research money is spent on female-specific conditions beyond oncology, according to a 2021 analysis by McKinsey.

The U.S. maternal mortality rate is the highest among high-income countries. American mothers are 10 times more likely to die due to pregnancy-related complications than mothers in Australia, Israel, Japan, or Spain, according to the CDC.

Women make up 41% of clinical trial participants. For heart disease trials, only 33% are women, according to NIH. Heart disease is the leading cause of death among women, killing more women than all cancers combined.

Of the 37 drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2022, just two were for female-specific illnesses or conditions, according to Deloitte. Low approvals for drugs for women’s health issues are not an outlier but a trend.

Trump may think he is winning the battle against women, but the 2026 midterms offer an opportunity to let him know that most Americans in general, and women in particular, won’t allow this assault on their health care without a fight.

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.