How Do You Spell Misogynist? R-Y-A-N

My colleagues Jeff and Meg pointed out the ways that Paul Ryan has utter disdain for women. (Meg actually did it twice.)

Now there is a comprehensive list of the misogynistic laws support and/or sponsored by Ryan. The list was compiled by Sandra Fluke, the woman who Rush Limbaugh called a slut and only apologized after enough companies pulled out their advertising money from his show. The list reads thus:

Maybe that’s not surprising: Ryan’s record on women’s issues is so far outside the mainstream that many find it unbelievable.  Here are just a few of the anti-women votes Ryan has cast: 

 • Ryan voted for a bill referred to as the “Let Women Die Bill” because it proposed to allow hospitals to refuse a woman emergency abortion care, even if her life was in immediate danger. Currently, a federally funded hospital is required to provide at least enough care for a patient to be stabilized so that she doesn’t die and can be transferred to another hospital. The bill Ryan voted for meant that hospitals wouldn’t even have had to do that.  

• Ryan co-sponsored a federal personhood bill. That bill declared a fertilized egg that hasn’t even resulted in a pregnancy to be the equivalent of a living person, with all of the rights of federal law. As a result, aspects of in vitro fertilization procedures and some forms of contraception would be criminalized, as would operations to save a woman’s life in the case of dangerous ectopic pregnancies that cannot be carried to term.

• Ryan repeatedly over several years voted against bills to ensure women equal pay for equal work, even voting against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.  

• Ryan voted to cut off Title X family planning programs that ensure impoverished and low-wage women affordable access to contraception as well as mammograms and cancer-screenings. 

• Ryan’s budget attacks on Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and a broad range of social services (including child care, Head Start, job training, Pell Grants, housing and energy assistance) would disproportionately harm women’s economic wellbeing. That’s because the majority of beneficiaries of these programs are women, due to their longer life spans and greater likelihood of being impoverished. 

• Ryan repeatedly voted over several years to end all funding for Planned Parenthood’s non-abortion services. Like Susan G. Komen’s defunding, voting to cut off funding of Planned Parenthood would rob women of access to breast cancer screenings, cervical cancer screenings, and the other life-saving services Planned Parenthood provides.  By law, federal funding of Planned Parenthood already excludes all abortions except in cases of rape, incest, or when a woman’s life is in danger. 

• Ryan co-sponsored a bill that would deny many rape victims on Medicaid access to abortion. That bill proposed to cut off access through federally-funded programs for victims who were drugged or threatened, some victims of incest, and victims of statutory rape. 

• Ryan voted repeatedly to prevent our female military service-members from using their own private money to pay for abortion at a military hospital. He also voted for legislation to allow bans on abortion coverage in the new state health-insurance exchanges, even for women paying with their own money.

It's no wonder that he and Todd Akin are such close friends.