This is not the advocate you’re looking for.
Ivanka Trump wants the world to know that she’s a feminist. Under the hashtag #womenwhowork (also the title of her new book on women in business, which was released on Tuesday), she’s spent the past few years building a brand based on how to be a woman who “has it all” — the adorable children, the high-powered job, and the tasteful Ivanka Trump™️ sheath dress, too, of course.
Now, as the first daughter and as an official White House aide, Ivanka has said she plans to be a “moderating” force on her brash father, and wants to turn her focus on women’s empowerment from selling pumps to crafting policy.
The problem? Ivanka’s advocacy is often all style and no substance, and she has repeatedly revealed fundamental misunderstandings about the actual barriers facing many women and gender non-conforming people who don’t benefit from the privileges afforded to men.
Last week, she championed economic empowerment for women around the globe in an op-ed, without mentioning that the Trump administration is actually gutting funding for aid programs focused on women, girls, and entrepreneurship. During the campaign, she offered a parental leave policythat would primarily benefit wealthy women like herself.
And on Tuesday, a line in a New York Times profile on Tuesday highlighted yet another area of ignorance: reproductive rights.
Here is the relevant section, from near the end of the article (emphasis mine).
“with congressional Republicans threatening to cut all funding to Planned Parenthood (even though the women’s health organization says it receives no federal funding for abortions), Ms. Trump approached its president, Cecile Richards, to start a broader dialogue. She also had a proposal: Planned Parenthood should split in two, Ms. Trump suggested, with a smaller arm to provide abortions and a larger one devoted to women’s health services.”
Firstly, Planned Parenthood doesn’t just say it doesn’t receive federal funding for abortions — it doesn’t, full stop. That’s because it’s currently illegal under the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits taxpayer funds from paying for abortion.
In reality, most of Planned Parenthood’s federal funding comes from Medicaid payments for basic health care services. That means that congressional Republicans’ current crusade to defund Planned Parenthood is actually a push to prevent low-income people on Medicaid from going to the organization’s clinics for care such as cancer screenings, birth control consultations, prenatal care, and STD tests. Stripping federal funding from the group will mean preventing many low-income people from being able to access this care at all.
But Ivanka’s solution — to segregate Planned Parenthood’s abortion care from its other health care services — also betrays a deep misunderstanding of the interconnected nature of reproductive health.
Abortion care is health care. It cannot be neatly separated from other medical decisions; for many people, having control over when and if to have a child is fundamental to their health and economic well being. And though abortion care may represent a small percentage of Planned Parenthood’s overall services, it is central to the group’s mission of providing reproductive care.
Source: Think Progress
Abortion - Abortion Clinics, Abortion Pill, Abortion Information 
May 4, 2017 at 12:58 pm
Of course she understands how it works! It works like this: She gets pregnant and doesn’t want to be, she goes to the doctor. She stops being pregnant.
What is there to not understand?
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May 5, 2017 at 3:18 am
What it comes down to is you guys think “Abortion care is health care.” We think it’s the opposite, that it’s killing people rather than helping them.
And what Trump proposed was reasonable — you stop killing people and we won’t defund you.
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May 5, 2017 at 8:47 am
It’s important to the so-called “pro-lifers” that they consider something with the cognitive abilities of a tapeworm to be human.
Who could possibly be considered a “hero” if they’re vociferously fighting to protect the life of a tapeworm?
But if they’re focusing on a human, now that’s different. So, this is why they always, always, always insist that fetal life is human.
As soon as one of them decides a tapeworm is human, I will stand with them to defend its life.
Meanwhile, what they ought to be doing is caring for the real children, one out of every four of whom (if female) and out of six of whom (if male) will be sexually abused in childhood.
But that’s too much woooooooork for them! Their record for actually caring for real children is worse than that of the population as a whole.
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May 5, 2017 at 10:54 am
Chuck thinks that if you’re not like him, you’re not human, ya know, like if you’re too dark, or too small, or too Muslim, or too Jewish, or too fat, or too old, or too young. Trouble is, there are lots like him.
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May 5, 2017 at 1:49 pm
“Chuck thinks that if you’re not like him, you’re not human, ya know, like if you’re too dark, or too small, or too Muslim, or too Jewish, or too fat, or too old, or too young. Trouble is, there are lots like him.”
Says the man who did not spend 8% of his gross annual income, 600 hours annually of his unpaid time and three decades of his life caring one-on-one for children whose parents could not or would not care for them as much as was needed.
Which just happens to be the criteria by which I measure myself against any so-called “pro-lifer.”
They are criteria I met. I hope there are “lots like him.” The trouble is, probably none of them are self-proclaimed (and so-called) “pro-lifers.”
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May 5, 2017 at 3:51 pm
Proves my point: “If you’re not like me, you’re nothing.”
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May 6, 2017 at 7:10 am
Sadly, in the case of so-called “pro-lifers,” it’s true. But rather than giving of themselves to rescue real human beings, they still try to be heroes on the cheap.
It doesn’t work.
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