Katha Pollitt: Stalling over birth control

It is bewildering that Barack Obama sacrificed women's rights and health in a vain attempt to woo Republican ideologues

Katha Pollitt
guardian.co.uk, Friday 30 January 2009 15.00 GMT

To the outrage of many feminists and family planners, the Democrats heeded President Obama and dropped from the stimulus bill a provision that would have made it easier for states to offer contraception through Medicaid to low-income women not now covered by Medicaid. This followed several days in which Republicans mocked the item as frivolous pork – like Las Vegas's proposed Mob Museum or the reseeding of the national mall. And how dare Nancy Pelosi suggest that women should be helped to avoid unwanted pregnancies in the midst of an economic crisis? It's eugenics and China's one-child policy rolled into one.

You may wonder how it is that giving women more freedom to plan their kids equals forcing them not to have any? Ask Chris Matthews – that noted expert on women – who on his cable TV show, Hardball, seemed to think the United States had narrowly escaped becoming a reproductive gulag: "It turns out the idea of getting people to have fewer children didn't sell as national policy. Maybe people don't like Washington, which has done such a bang-up job regulating the sharpies on Wall Street, to decide it's now time to regulate the number of kids people might be in the mood for."