Katha Pollitt: Obamacare(s) for Women

These days the only progressives who aren’t declaring Obama a huge disappointment are the ones who insist they never believed him in the first place. I wish I had a dollar for every woman who blames Obama for giving lip service to women’s rights while throwing them under the proverbial bus whenever convenient. (I shared some of that outrage in numerous columns here, so I guess I’d be paying one of those dollars to myself.) He made noted sexist Larry Summers director of the National Economic Council and invited the even more sexist Rick Warren to preachify at his inauguration. He compromised abortion care right out of healthcare reform. When HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius rejected her medical committee’s recommendation that Plan B (emergency contraception) be sold over the counter, the reaction from feminists (including me) was instant and ferocious. It didn’t help that Obama called it a “common-sense” law that he supported “as the father of two daughters.” If he’d been the father of two sons, would he have wanted condoms available to those 16 and under only by prescription?

It’s right that we hold the president accountable—any president, because by now Hillary Clinton, to say nothing of John Edwards (!), would surely have let us down. But ladies, let’s give the guy some credit. This president took on the combined power of the Catholic, evangelical and fundamentalist churches only a few weeks after the Plan B fiasco by insisting that religious institutions get only a narrow exemption from birth control coverage requirements in the Affordable Care Act. That was a bit of a surprise, wasn’t it, coming from a man widely castigated as weak, timid, temporizing and eager to make deals with conservatives? Obama took a huge political risk for women’s health and rights—and in an election year. It’s not at all clear how this will play out in November, either, now that opponents are reframing the issue as “religious freedom.” I’d say the president deserves a hearty round of applause.