Washington, D.C., October 30, 2012 (LifeSiteNews) – Pro-contraception activist Sandra Fluke, on a speaking tour for Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, continues to parrot the Obama administration’s party line that children are one of the biggest roadblocks to women’s success.
“Equality,” Fluke said in an October 15 interview with the Cornell Daily Sun, means “the ability to control your reproduction so that that a career is a realistic goal and something that can be achieved and not derailed” by a baby.
Fluke, the Georgetown law school student who stepped into the limelight earlier this year after she was blocked from testifying at a hearing on religious freedom and the Obama administration’s HHS mandate, also said she does not believe she is “entitled” to contraception.
Instead, she said, “I think the case is much more about what kind of society do we want to live in.”
“If we think about what contraception means for people, it’s not only about having access to the health care that you need, and the human rights aspects of having access to health care, but it’s also about what being able to control your own reproduction does for women specifically, but for men as well.”
Fluke has been an ardent supporter of the Obama administration’s plan to force all employers, including many religious employers, to pay for their employees’ birth control. She was widely ridiculed in the conservative press after testifying at a Democrat press conference that contraception costs thousands of dollars and poses a financial burden to law students such as herself. She later admitted that she didn’t realize that contraceptives were available for $9 a month at Target, including the Target down the street from Georgetown.
The idea of babies as barriers to achievement is not a new one for the Obama team. Obama himself famously said during his 2008 campaign that if his daughters, then 9 and 6, “made a mistake,” he wouldn’t want them “punished with a baby.”
Other administration officials have argued in court that contraception is vital to “improving the health of women … so that women who choose to do so can be part of the workforce on an equal playing field with men.”
But according to conservative commentator George Will, the educated, career-oriented women Obama’s campaign is targeting with his “War on Women” rhetoric are the ones most offended by it. Will said on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” that the Obama campaign’s fixation on abortion and contraceptive access has provoked a backlash from educated women because it implies they only care about personal, sexual issues, not critical national issues like the struggling economy and complicated foreign relations.
“There has been a big change — it’s not a particular state,” said Will. “It’s the change in Romney’s gain among women, and that I think represents a huge recoil by professional women with college degrees against the condensation of the Obama campaign … which says, essentially, don’t you trouble your pretty little heads about these men’s issues and all the rest. Worry about contraception, which has been a constitutional right for 47 years.”
“It’s a distraction,” Will added, “the entire ‘war on women’ trope, and I think professional educated women find it offensive.”