In the attempt to smooth things with the Republicans, Dems dropped funding for family planning and women's health from the stimulus bill. At least they didn't do the equivalent of insurance companies covering Viagra and not birth control pills: they didn't bend over and give the R's all the tax cuts they wanted at the same time they dropped funding for women's health.
Some commentators questioned the idea that funding women's health could qualify as an economic stimulus, but it's quite clear that such funding would save jobs now. Because women's health care has been starved of government funding for so long, private organizations like Planned Parenthood have had to fill the gap. Now the sour economy is hurting Planned Parenthood's donations and clinics are looking at layoffs.
In the Republican world view, demand can only be stimulated from the top with tax cuts. The stimulated, newly virile economy then provides the bottom with a trickle down of goods (ie - the Man must be on top). For extra good measure it helps to start a war or two because there is nothing like mindless destruction to stimulate endless demand for companies like Halliburton (ie, rape is even more profitable).
Providing reproductive health care to women would be completely counter productive. That would support the idea that women should have control over reproduction. If women controlled reproduction, they might choose to have fewer children overall (not withstanding a few misguided souls like the octo-mom). Without overpopulation and surplus labor, the predator class would lose all control over wages and economic equality might break out.
The Republicans are the last vanguard of a pathological political economy that goes back to the Roman Empire at least. For hundreds of years, the Romans were religiously tolerant pagans, yet toward the end of the Empire, the state began to outlaw contraception and abortion. As the Imperial economy slowed, subjects refused to continue birthing large families. The custom was to sell unwanted infants as slaves, but fewer families were willing to do that. At its height, about twenty percent of the Empire's subjects were slaves.
Empires need slaves. They need armies. They need growth. Inevitably, when women have the power to control their reproduction, they tend to match the size of their families to the resources available. Unless they are under the sway of religious crazies or Angelina Jolie, they do not breed with conquest in mind.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn said it best. She was an American labor radical and an early proponent of family planning back before 1920. She said: "The large family system rivets the chains of slavery upon labor more securely. It crushes the parents, starves the children, and provides cheap fodder for machines and cannons."
Republicans hate the stimulus bill because it threatens to stimulate not just spending, but ultimately, a new social order.
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