Gyasi Ross: Republicans play games with Native women's rights

Currently, Planned Parenthood gets roughly $450 million a year in federal funding and federal funds are prohibited by law from being used for abortion. Therefore, Planned Parenthood's federal funding (allegedly) only covers services such as cancer screenings and birth control.

How does this affect Native women? Well, two ways. One way affects Native women specifically and uniquely and the second, in the same way it affects all financially vulnerable women, of every color. Number one, as a matter of legislative fact the same privileged white men who love making financial decisions about ALL women’s wombs have an inordinate amount of control over Native women’s wombs. That is so because Indian Health Services funding and priorities are dictated by those same privileged white men who want to defund Planned Parenthood and feel they know what’s best for women generally.

Indian Health Services is the primary health care provider for most Native people—although the United States has a trust responsibility to provide health care for Native people, those privileged white men largely get to choose what type of health care they’ll provide. God forbid that their politics clash with the health care that those Native women need—there are specific examples of times when the reproductive rights (human rights!) of Native women clashed with the politics of these privileged white men before.

To wit, as recently as the 1960s and 1970s the Indian Health Service deceptively sterilized a large percentage of Native women who were between the ages of fifteen and forty-four. Those doctors failed to provide women with necessary information regarding sterilization; used coercion to get signatures on the consent forms; gave improper consent forms; and lacked the appropriate waiting period (at least seventy-two hours) between the signing of a consent form and the surgical procedure.