With Extremist Tom Price at Helm, the 'War on Women Has Reached HHS'

President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be the nation’s top health official has an abysmal record on women’s issues and LGBTQ rights, advocates are warning on Tuesday.

U.S. Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), an orthopedic surgeon and an original House Tea Party caucus member, “has been at the center of congressional efforts to repeal Obamacare as chairman of the House Budget Committee,” reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

“With the selection of Tom Price as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Donald Trump is sending a clear signal that he intends to punish women who seek abortion care.”
—Sasha Bruce, NARAL Pro-Choice America

As head of the Department of Health and Human Services, he’d oversee an agency “with an annual budget of more than $1 trillion, health programs that insure more than 100 million Americans, and agencies that regulate food and drugs and sponsor much of the nation’s biomedical research,” as the New York Times pointed out.

Beyond his clear intention to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, Price’s nomination falls in line with warnings that women’s right to choose is threatened under a Trump-Pence administration.

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Price “poses a grave threat to women’s health,” said Planned Parenthood Federation of America president Cecile Richards. “Our nation’s HHS Secretary should aim to break down barriers to healthcare. Instead, Tom Price wants to build more.”

He’s voted repeatedly to defund Planned Parenthood while supporting and co-sponsoring a number of anti-abortion bills in Congress. Indeed, Bustle notes, “he’s voted against abortion rights six times in 2016 alone.”

Citing these votes, NARAL Pro-Choice America senior vice president Sasha Bruce declared:

“Perhaps even more telling than Price’s disgusting but not altogether unsurprising views on abortion was his vote against the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act,” the outlet continued. “Although the bill passed handily in the House in 2013, Price was among a number of House Republicans who voted against it. Despite never giving any quotes on the subject, a number of Price’s Republican colleagues in the House reportedly voted against it because they were dissatisfied with the protections the VAWA gives to LGBT people—an incredibly gross cherry on top of this discriminatory milkshake.”

In 2012, he claimed there was “not one” woman who struggled to afford birth control in the absence of insurance coverage.

“In fact,” ThinkProgress wrote at the time, “there are tens of millions of women in the United States who have struggled to afford or don’t have access to contraception. A recent Hart Research survey found that one in three women voters have struggled to afford prescription birth control, including 55 percent of young women aged 18 to 34.”

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In 2009, Price was at the center of a debacle that involved House Republicans shouting over members of the Democratic Women’s Caucus as they attempted to offer arguments on a healthcare bill.

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