The newly passed Republican budget legislation aims "targeted cruelty" at women across the U.S. — and will be especially painful for those living in the South, according to an expert.
Cuts to Medicaid and Planned Parenthood will devastate health care in the South, where care networks are already stretched thin, rural clinics are shutting down and maternal mortality rates resemble those in developing nations, Carmen James Randolph, founding president and CEO of the Women’s Foundation of the South, wrote in a column for MSNBC explaining why the GOP bill is a "death sentence" for women and babies.
"Let’s call the Republicans’ so-called 'big beautiful bill' what it is: a legislative double-barreled shotgun aimed at the bodies of women, especially Southern women and women who are Black, brown and low-income," Randolph wrote. "One barrel blasts Medicaid access. The other guts Planned Parenthood. The result? A deliberate attempt to kill reproductive freedom, strip women of their basic dignity and destroy what progress this region has made in maternal health outcomes."
"This isn’t just policy," she added. "It’s punishment."
A staggering 64 percent of births in Louisiana were covered by Medicaid in 2023, with 57 percent in Mississippi, and Planned Parenthood is the only accessible provider for cancer screenings, contraception, prenatal maternal care and postpartum care in many rural ZIP codes.
"If you are a woman living in rural Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas or Alabama, this bill doesn’t just inconvenience your access to care. It incinerates it," Randolph wrote. "Imagine being six months pregnant, with no car and no public transit and with the closest provider two hours away — if it’s even taking Medicaid patients. That’s not health care. That’s sanctioned neglect."
Rural women, especially Black, Indigenous and Latina women, will be hit hardest by the GOP cuts, and Randolph said the Women’s Foundation of the South is already strategizing how to help them gain access to necessary health care and fight back against the Republican lawmakers who passed President Donald Trump's legislative agenda.
"Republicans Thursday passed their bill that cuts Medicaid and defunds Planned Parenthood, and Friday, President Trump signed it into law," Randolph wrote. "They should all be aware, though, of the rage they’ve unleashed in women — in the South and across the country — who don’t plan to sit around silently and die."