‘Mr. Romney wants to get rid of funding for Planned Parenthood,” President Obama said at a campaign event in Oregon. “I think that’s a bad idea. I’ve got two daughters. I want them to control their own health-care choices.” In the president’s view of the world — in which Planned Parenthood helps craft White House policy — fertility is a disease, contraception is at the core of both health care and freedom, and backward-minded people who don’t agree need to have their liberties curtailed.
But for Rebecca Kleefisch, the lieutenant governor of Wisconsin, “health care” is surviving cancer so that her two daughters could grow up with their mom, and politics calls for a healthier approach. It should not be a cynical business or experimental grounds for ideological radicals’ dream fulfillment. And she has certainly confronted the worst of ideological politics — she just became both the first lieutenant governor in the United States to face a recall and the first to survive one.
Recommended Stories
“I never really dug the ‘War on Women.’ It’s great branding — but I don’t buy that product,” explains Kleefisch, who has worked in media. “It doesn’t exist. The war is on unemployment, and that’s the one I’ll continue to fight because it is the only one that really matters to my children. If we don’t have jobs, then we can’t buy eggs. If we don’t have jobs, we can’t put gas in our minivans. If we don’t have jobs, then how are we going to pay for the cleats for soccer practice?”
She finds the insistence that contraception — and even abortion — is a health-care priority of the majority of American women “insulting” and “judgmental.” “They’re saying single women care more about their sex lives than they do about making ends meet, getting a good job, and being successful living their American dream. If I was single right now, and Barack Obama’s team was trying to tell me that my birth control was more important than my ability to live my dream in America, I would be really irritated.”
Read more at National Review Online
