Women's Voices Media

Tag: "#legislators"

CALL YOUR SENATORS: TELL THEM TO VOTE “NO!”

Posted by on Jun 30, 2025 in Newsworthy, Intersectional Issues

The Issue

The U.S. Senate is due to vote on the House-passed tax and spending bill Donald Trump calls “beautiful,” but in truth it’s ugly and dangerous. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated the legislation will cut taxes by $3.7 trillion, add $2.4 trillion to the federal deficit and lead to at least 13.7 million people losing their health insurance by 2034.

NOW needs your active participation—NOW! Because it will only take four senators to make this vote the one when they stand up to Trump. They’ll do it if you remind them how horrible, dangerous, and destructive this bill is!

It will eliminate over 800,000 good-paying jobs and force Americans to pay up to $170 billion more on electric bills, ending the investments past presidents of both parties have made in clean energy. The U.S. will be forced to depend more on China as about $80 billion in solar and manufacturing jobs will go overseas.

The tax changes will, on average, take $700 a year away from households making less than $51,000 and $1,000 from those making less than $17,000. Meanwhile, the top 0.1% of households (making $4.3 million or more) will gain $389,000. 

At least $800 billion will be cut from healthcare programs, forcing 10 million people to lose Medicaid coverage as new barriers to coverage are put in place, and allows the tax credits that help low-and meddle-income families and small business owners afford health coverage to expire.

The bill includes the most devastating attacks on the Affordable Care Act since Trump’s allies tried to largely repeal President Barack Obama’s signature accomplishment in 2017. But instead of calling to “end Obamacare,” now they’re pointing to examples of “waste, fraud and abuse” in Medicaid and other government health programs that don’t hold up to scrutiny.

And Planned Parenthood will be defunded under this bill, as it blocks reimbursement for any clinic that provides abortion.

What’s more, the bill includes massive increases in funding for ICE raids, detention, deportations and border militarization, and eliminates the longstanding requirement that protects immigrant children in U.S. custody by permitting indefinite family detention. The bill also includes an approximately $80 billion increase in funding for border wall construction and further militarization of border communities.

TAKE ACTION

WHAT CAN I DO? Please immediately call your senators and urge them to vote against the bill. President Trump wants a vote this week—he needs to hear from us! And so does the Senate.

HOW DO I DO IT? Every Senator can be reached at the U.S. Capitol switchboard at 202–224–3121 and a directory of their contact information can also be found here.

WHAT DO I SAY? My name is (insert name) and as your constituent from (City/Town) I urge you to vote NO on the budget reconciliation bill. Approving this bill puts real people at serious risk, and Sen.. (LAST NAME) needs to stand with (his/her) constituents and vote this big, ugly bill down.

THANKS FOR ALL THAT YOU DO FOR WOMEN’S RIGHTS.

Marge Piercy's poem "Right to Life"

Posted by on Apr 27, 2025 in Reproductive Rights, Newsworthy, Social Justice, Background

Marge Piercy's poem "Right to Life," remains painfully relevant, touching on themes of reproductive justice and women's bodily autonomy.

Marge Piercy wrote this poem in 1980; it matters even more today than it did forty-five years ago.

Marge Piercy: Right To Life

A woman is not a basket you place

your buns in to keep them warm. Not a brood

hen you can slip duck eggs under.

Not the purse holding the coins of your

descendants till you spend them in wars.

Not a bank where your genes gather interest

and interesting mutations in the tainted

rain, any more than you are.

You plant corn and you harvest

it to eat or sell. You put the lamb

in the pasture to fatten and haul it in to

butcher for chops. You slice the mountain

in two for a road and gouge the high plains

for coal and the waters run muddy for

miles and years. Fish die but you do not

call them yours unless you wished to eat them.

Now you legislate mineral rights in a woman.

You lay claim to her pastures for grazing,

fields for growing babies like iceberg

lettuce. You value children so dearly

that none ever go hungry, none weep

with no one to tend them when mothers

work, none lack fresh fruit,

none chew lead or cough to death and your

orphanages are empty. Every noon the best

restaurants serve poor children steaks.

At this moment at nine o’clock a partera

is performing a table top abortion on an

unwed mother in Texas who can’t get

Medicaid any longer. In five days she will die

of tetanus and her little daughter will cry

and be taken away. Next door a husband

and wife are sticking pins in the son

they did not want. They will explain

for hours how wicked he is,

how he wants discipline.

We are all born of woman, in the rose

of the womb we suckled our mother’s blood

and every baby born has a right to love

like a seedling to sun. Every baby born

unloved, unwanted, is a bill that will come

due in twenty years with interest, an anger

that must find a target, a pain that will

beget pain. A decade downstream a child

screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched,

a firing squad is summoned, a button

is pushed and the world burns.

I will choose what enters me, what becomes

of my flesh. Without choice, no politics,

no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield,

not your uranium mine, not your calf

for fattening, not your cow for milking.

You may not use me as your factory.

Priests and legislators do not hold shares

in my womb or my mind.

This is my body. If I give it to you

I want it back. My life

is a non-negotiable demand.

Tag: "#legislators"

CALL YOUR SENATORS: TELL THEM TO VOTE “NO!” ON THE BIG BUDGET BILL THAT’S GOOD FOR BILLIONAIRES–AND BAD FOR THE REST OF US