George W. Bush, the infamously anti-gay and neoconservative former U.S. president who invaded Iraq on a lie, has criticized congressional Republicans for threatening to defund the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a largely successful African HIV-prevention program that he launched back in 2003. “There is no program more pro-life” than PEPFAR, he wrote.

Though PEPFAR is estimated to have saved over 25 million lives, its funding is set to expire on September 30. Congressional Republicans are falsely claiming that the program promotes abortion and using its re-funding as a bargaining chip in budget negotiations. Republicans have threatened to defund the entire federal government at the end of the month unless they’re allowed to slash military diversity programs and military aid to Ukraine and to increase anti-immigration measures at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“We are on the verge of ending the HIV/AIDS epidemic. To abandon our commitment now would forfeit two decades of unimaginable progress and raise further questions about the worth of America’s word,” Bush wrote in an a Wednesday opinion article in The Washington Post.

  • @underisk@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Universal healthcare would also give women access to birth control.

    They want women to have babies for some combination of a various number of reasons. There are some who view it as a means of breeding a cheap compliant labor force, some who think it’ll reinforce a more traditional family role on them and diminish their influence on society, and those who see it as a way to punish women for sleeping around. It’s about more than just their bodies, it’s about controlling society and women’s place in it.