by Lil Tuttle
It’s puzzling that liberalism gets credited as being pro-women and pro-choice. In reality, liberalism touts only one choice for women: abortion. In all other areas of social and economic life, liberalism seems to do everything in its power to prevent women from having or exercising choice.
The Affordable Care Act is only the latest example. Did you get to keep your health care plan? Your favorite doctor? Your preferred hospital? If so, you were among the fortunate few. Most women didn’t. They lost the right to choose and today have their health insurance plans and providers dictated to them by nameless, faceless liberal/progressive government bureaucrats.
Independent-minded women who like making their own decisions might want to take a new look at some conservative policy ideas and solutions. They might be surprised at how truly liberating they are.
A little booklet
They can begin with CBLPI’s If There’s a War on Women, Women are Winning.
This little 15-page booklet shows how women have achieved parity with, or surpassed, men in many economic and social measures. It refutes the “gender wage-gap” myth claiming that women earn only 77 cents on a dollar earned by men. It also looks at a number of ways progressive government policies penalize women economically or pit them against each another.
A big report
Women ready to delve deeper into liberal-conservative policy discussion can turn to a new 52-page online report, Working For Women: A Modern Agenda for Improving Women’s Lives.
Published by the Independent Women’s Forum and endorsed by many conservative women leaders (including CBLPI president Michelle Easton), this report looks at 20 specific government policy reforms that would benefit women.
Life is complicated. Central government planners and rule-makers can’t possibly know what’s best for all women. Working for Women reforms – from tax code regulations to workplace rules to healthcare laws – would empower women, giving them the freedom and flexibility necessary to make life less complicated and more personally rewarding.
A future vision
For those looking for a broad long-view, read Yuval Levin’s Wall Street Journal essay, “The Next Conservative Movement.”
Levin explains why progressives’ century-old, centralized top-down government decision-making models are exhausted and bankrupt (education is one example he uses).
He argues it’s time to decentralize and diffuse power and control from central governments, and to empower individuals and localities to develop the next generation of solutions that will the nation forward.
More freedom. More choices. More bottom-up personal decision-making power and control. These are the concepts on which conservative policies are built. And that makes them far more “pro-women” and “pro-choice” than anything proposed by the left.