Photo credit: Copper Rose Zambia
Just in time for Women’s History Month, the United States government has made history by declaring war on all that women treasure and stand for — human empathy, thriving, decency, and care.
Since re-entering the White House on January 20, the president and his minions have orchestrated a lightning assault on America’s lifesaving and cost-effective foreign assistance, on funding for vital health research and care, on educational access, our refugee and resettlement programs, our national parks, fire, forestry, and weather services, on our most precious and longstanding transnational alliances, our national security, our press freedoms, and the rule of law.
As an American citizen, as a woman, I am deeply ashamed.
I am ashamed of how cruel we have become, of how my own government has gone full ruthless-macho, with a vengeance for all who don’t look like them, who hold different values, who might stand in the way of their unfeeling megalomaniacal control.
The casual sadism on display is breathtaking in the staggeringly dangerous breadth of the harm inflicted – on our health and wellbeing, on that of our planet, on international justice, human dignity, on the rule of law.
The gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development alone is already costing lives, our international standing, and has destroyed the careers and life plans of tens of thousands of public servants – among them, experts in the administration of lifesaving drugs and nutritional supplements, infectious disease treatment and monitoring, land mine removal in conflict and post-conflict zones, and in those post-conflict zones, technical support for building democratic institutions, including an impartial judiciary and a free press. Included in these cuts, made final on March 10, is nearly all the good work on preventing violence against women and girls, reducing child marriage and pregnancy, providing reproductive health information and care, keeping girls in school, and preparing them for fulfilling, economically secure lives.
Seven overseas grantee partners of my own nonprofit, WomenStrong International, have been deeply affected: Copper Rose Zambia, which provides reproductive health education and care to young women in multiple provinces across that country, was hit with a nearly 90 percent cut in its funding, compelling its founder and CEO, Dr. Natasha Salifyanji Kaoma, to lay off 90 percent of her expert staff and to worry for the hundreds of thousands of Zambians who will lose their H.I.V/AIDS medications as soon as the current inventory runs out. GENET-Malawi, another WomenStrong partner serving young women and girls in southern Africa, had just hired and trained staff for a new U.S.A.I.D.-funded program and had to dismiss them all. In Asia, two programs implemented by our partner Bangladesh Centre for Workers Solidarity were cut, forcing staff layoffs and restricting the organization’s work on gender-based violence and labor rights, and renewed funding for the widely lauded community health programs of our Philippine partner Roots of Health was summarily denied.
This new government’s heartless “diss” to the rest of the world extends to others in dire need, even to those to whom we owe our profound gratitude. The president’s Day 1 categorical denial of safe harbor and family reunification for already vetted asylum seekers fleeing persecution and oppression at home, and for those like the tens of thousands of Afghans who had helped protect and defend our armed forces during the long war in Afghanistan, is a cruel, shameful betrayal of America’s word.
Indeed, it seems as though the American welcome mat is only rolled out these days for characters such as alleged rapist and human trafficker Andrew Tate, the supposedly oppressed White South Africans, and fatcats ready to cough up $5 million for a “gold card visa” that will fast track them toward permanent U.S. residency.
At home, the threats to our social safety net and to our scientific leadership have also been ravaging.
To enable tax cuts for billionaires, Republicans are entertaining $880 million in cuts to Medicaid, the lifesaving government health insurance program for low-income Americans and those with disabilities that provides coverage for nearly 60 percent of children, more than 40 percent of newborn deliveries, nearly 40 percent of those with opioid use disorders, and the vast majority of nursing homes and community health centers.
In other harms to our youngest Americans, the billions in proposed cuts to the federal school breakfast and lunchprograms risk depriving at least 23 million school-aged children of solid nutrition each day, while the planned shuttering of the entire Department of Education will jeopardize children’s rights and their access to learning.
Draconian cuts to our federal workforce, 3o percent of whom are veterans, half of those living with disabilities, are already affecting veteran care, according to health practitioners at the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is tasked by Congress with providing lifesaving health and social services to those who have bravely served our country.
The removal of trans persons from the military, the refusal of gender-affirming care to military personnel and minors, and the punishment of medical practitioners who offer such care, accompanied by the suddenly mandated suppression — across government, the private sector, the nonprofit sector, academia, and the arts — of any mention of the words, “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” “ability,” “gender,” and dozens more, all strike Orwellian death blows against any notion of the U.S. as an inclusive, compassionate nation.
The refusal to care is also revealed in the crippling cuts to medical and other scientific research, forcing the halt of potentially groundbreaking clinical trials and the unjustified firing and rescindment of PhD students, postdoctoral fellows, and other scientists, thereby hollowing out the next generation of researchers in countless fields.
The daily barrage of assaults on press freedoms, on our freedom of association, and on the independence of our judiciary, met by the deafening silence by our elected officials, simply dramatizes the sense of total impunity asserted by this president and his acolytes in taking these actions.
Finally, going back to first principles, there’s the sickening betrayal of Ukraine and the Western alliance and the call for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, all of which arguably lead to open U.S. complicity in war crimes. And the flagrant abuse of power in doubling down on fossil fuel production while spurning all efforts to reduce global warming and environmental injustice will endanger the lives and futures of our children and their children, for generations to come.
This Women’s History Month, I think we can safely say that America today is behaving in ways that run counter to everything that decent women stand for, believe in, and to the lives women have lived, since time immemorial.
As a community constituting more than half the planet’s population, we must come together, across oceans and borders and fabricated divisions, and insist on our shared obligation to build a caring, generous world – one where people’s humanity is honored, and where we elevate and fight for our bottom-line priorities, as women do every day, in their daily lives — as they care and fight for their families and communities, for their rights at home, in the workplace, and in all layers of government, and for the preservation of the natural beauty that still shades and protects us, across the globe.
About the Author: Dr. Susan M. Blaustein is Founder and Board Chair of WomenStrong International.
