Ladies deemed second-class residents. Ladies pressured to undergo males. Ladies current solely to make infants. Ladies with out the precise to vote. It appears like a nightmare. It appears like lots of of years in the past. It is 2025. It appeared apparent we would by no means return to that. Proper?
However this month, Secretary of Protection Pete Hegseth, one of the vital highly effective males in America, publicly shared his assist for this imaginative and prescient. He uplifted a bunch who proudly believes girls should not vote, ought to undergo their husbands, and “are the form of folks that folks come out of.”
Courtesy of the Democratic Ladies’s Caucus Workplace
This could scare people, and it did. However seven months into the Trump administration, it is also not stunning. The insurance policies and actions pushed by Donald Trump and Republicans make the longer term appear to be a backward nightmare, a far cry from the American Dream.
Final month, congressional Republicans handed Trump’s unpopular finances into legislation with the biggest cuts to Medicaid and SNAP ever—it is notably laborious on girls, who depend on Medicaid from childbirth to nursing residence care. Home Republicans handed a voting invoice that will make it laborious for ladies who modified their title in marriage or in any other case to register and vote.
Due to Trump’s Supreme Court, states are denying girls prenatal care and important abortion care—even after death. Congressional Republicans are slicing federal funding for primary girls’s well being care and stopping girls troopers from touring to entry abortion care in states the place it is authorized.
Donald Trump himself is overlaying up recordsdata on his buddy, Jeffrey Epstein—a infamous pedophile who harmed numerous girls and youngsters. Trump reduce funding for survivors of sexual assault and home violence.
Who is that this all for? Whose lives does it enhance?
Not the households who’ve begged Trump to decrease prices.
Not the ladies who will not have well being care throughout being pregnant with out Medicaid.
Not the seniors and dealing People who fear Social Safety will not exist for them.
Mr. Trump, your administration would not profit anybody, aside from your billionaire donors.
You have betrayed your voters, and ladies cannot afford your insurance policies or your backward-looking agenda.
Ladies and households throughout the nation have to know a distinct, better future is feasible.
The Democratic Ladies’s Caucus has a imaginative and prescient for that higher future, the place each girl is secure, wholesome, and financially steady. It appears like the next:
We are able to afford wholesome meals, physician visits, baby take care of our youngsters, and elder take care of our mother and father and grandparents.
We every determine whether or not to have youngsters—and might entry reproductive well being care both means and wherever we reside.
We have now a secure and reasonably priced place to sleep at night time, the place we dream about our future and get up to work for it.
The Democratic girls in Congress have a plan that makes all of this attainable. We’re not simply combating again in opposition to Trump. We all know America’s promise is a future that makes the nice life attainable for ourselves, our kids, and our communities.
Trump, Secretary Hegseth, and Republicans’ imaginative and prescient is the alternative of our plan—and it is a setback. By questioning girls’s proper to vote, slicing primary wants applications, and putting entry to fashionable well being care, they’re making an attempt to take us again to 1900.
Life at the moment was objectively worse for ladies and for all hardworking People.
In 1900, girls’s life expectancy was solely 58 years previous.
Authorized safety from home violence was a long time away.
Moms, a lot of whom did not have well being care, have been 100 times more likely to die in childbirth.
Staff confronted low pay and lethal working circumstances.
We did not have the precise to vote and have been jailed for demanding it.
We won’t and we can’t return to that.
Secretary Hegseth can maintain his sick imaginative and prescient of America to himself. We’re dreaming of a greater future for People—and combating on daily basis to make it actuality.
Teresa Leger Fernández represents New Mexico’s third Congressional District and is chair of the Democratic Ladies’s Caucus with 96 Democratic congresswomen—a historic excessive.
The views expressed on this article are the author’s personal.
