During the last Republican primary debate, the focus took a strange turn when Senator Ted Cruz was asked about his position that the Democrats’ efforts to equalize wages between men and women are just “political show votes.” Senator Cruz responded first with describing his mother, sister, and aunts—all of whom were single mothers—to show his sympathy for working women. Then, he said that although all of the Democratic candidates talk about addressing the plight of working women, “not a one of them mentioned the fact that under Barack Obama, 3.7 million women have entered poverty … [or] the fact that under Barack Obama and the big government economy, the median wage for women has dropped $733.”
Carly Fiorina quickly took advantage of this situation, and accused Hillary Clinton of hypocrisy because she talks about becoming the first female President even though the policies she endorses have been “demonstrably bad for women.”
Cruz and Fiorina’s focus on taking stabs at Clinton and the Obama administration only highlighted their own disingenuousness. If they were truly concerned about women’s issues, they would have at least outlined a plan to address the “plight of single mothers.” Instead, they seemed to only bring up women in attempts to depict the Democratic Party as duplicitous in order to win “political show votes” that Senator Cruz himself had criticized.
Further, Cruz and Fiorina tried to shape the conversation so that they seemed to be the champions for women, and that the Democrats were the ones who were really worsening the situation for single, working mothers. However, Cruz and Fiorina’s strong stances against reproductive rights for women, and their call for defunding Planned Parenthood are completely contradictory to their actions preior to the debate. Both Senator Cruz and Carly Fiorina have focused on the Planned Parenthood video scandal as the reason for defunding the entire organization, despite the fact that the producer behind the video admitted that the footage of Cecile Richards was doctored. Cruz’s campaign page still has a petition that demands Congress to fully pull funding from Planned Parenthood because of the possibility that the organization is selling aborted fetus’ body parts. And, Fiorina dared Clinton and Obama in the CNN Reagan Library Debate to watch the footage of “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain,” even though no such video exists.
Cruz and Fiorina completely ignore that reproductive rights are key for women’s empowerment and gender equality, and that Planned Parenthood’s services are not limited to just providing abortion for women. Control over one’s own body and health is crucial for autonomy, and not providing women safe abortion clinics would violate this fundamental human right. Furthermore, Planned Parenthood’s core services are, according to their website, providing “STD testing and treatment, contraception, and accompanying health care, education, and information,” indicating that abortion is just one of many of the organization’s functions.
Thus, both of these Republican candidates’ position against Planned Parenthood and reproductive rights for women demonstrate that they actually do not support working women. After all, defunding Planned Parenthood and getting rid of safe access for abortion along with general health care for women would only exacerbate gender inequality and increase the number of single mothers.