Obama-care’s Cynical Exploitation of Young Women

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGeSpWfOqIY

One of the many reasons why Mitt Romney lost the presidential election was because he alienated the women voters. He gave his constituents the impression that he would overturn Roe vs. Wade.  Romney’s resentment toward Obamacare  also offended female voters; as of August 1012, insurers must cover “woman visits, domestic-violence screening, and breast-feeding supplies at no additional charge.  Insurance plans must also cover birth control, though religious institutions are exempted . . .” Romney’s  political position against Planned Parenthood may have placated the Religious Right, but most American women felt he was invading their privacy.

Reflecting the Catholic and Evangelical views, Romney promised that he would end the funding for providing young women with birth-control contraceptives. He gave ladies the impression  that some forms of birth control would be unfunded, e.g., intra-uterine devices and morning-after pills – prevent implantation of a fertilized egg, some social conservatives asserted that they cause early miscarriages and should, therefore, be banned.

That is how Obama’s discrediting of Romney led people to think that he was conducting a “War against Women.” Although Romney paid his female workers better than Obama did with his staff, this did not seem to change any women’s minds.

Desperate to win support and friends after alienating the entire country with explicit promises that he would never change their health plans, Team Obama has imaginatively come up with some of the most sexist ads we have seen in years.  The latest marketing gimmick wishes to imply that young women would only be interested in Colorado’s government-run health care exchange if they get coverage for birth control pills to have sex with strange men.

Had Romney used such an ad to attract women, the country would have justifiably  have thrown the proverbial kitchen sink at him. The new ad portrays attractive woman in her early twenties named “Susie. The young “woman is holding a packet of birth control pills with an open-mouth, wide smile. She is wearing a flesh-colored, low-cut, sleeveless top, tight jeans and open-toed black heels. She is flirting with a guy named, “Nate,” who is wearing a partially exposed shirt with the top four buttons undone in order to show off his manly chest with his hand slightly toward his crutch.  Nate looks like the cat that is about to eat the canary. “OMG, he’s hot!,” Susie is shown saying. “Let’s hope he’s as easy to get as this birth control. My health insurance covers the pill, which means all I have to worry about is getting him between the covers.”

A number of women did not find Obama’s latest tactic amusing. Encouraging risky behavior to get young people to sign up seems very cynical, not to mention sexist. The ad implies the birth control is free, but is it really? Most young people I have spoken with resent the fact their insurance rates are going up through the roof. Somehow, I, for one, expected Obama to show more class than this cheap exploitation of America’s young women and men. I would imagine that young people would much rather pay for inexpensive birth-control than pay for an exorbitant cost for health insurance.

What does Jewish tradition have to say about all this?

In a word: Modesty.

Treating people like sex objects is not a kosher way of behaving toward any human being.

Isn’t it time women everywhere protest this rather degrading way of treating women?