WASHINGTON: A bad first date with Mr. Obama

Loretta J. Ross, national coordinator of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective in Atlanta, joked that she was surprised “by the rapidity with which [President] Obama jettisoned the family planning” programs in his $819 billion economic-stimulus package.

“He’s the date I had last night who forgot my name this morning,” Ms. Ross said, noting how much support Mr. Obama received in the election from women, particularly women of color, who count on family-planning services such as contraception.

“If you worship at the altar of bipartisanship, you don’t get what you want and you [tick] your friends off,” Ms. Ross said. “The goal is to get people’s rights protected, get people services and get the economy started.”

Mr. Obama may have scored big with female voters when the first piece of legislation he signed last week was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, strengthening the rights of workers to challenge pay discrimination, which disproportionately affects female workers.

Women, who voted for Mr. Obama in huge numbers, also expressed their elation that another of the new president’s first official orders was to repeal the so-called “global gag rule,” which prevented foreign nongovernmental family-planning groups from receiving U.S. funds if they used any money, even their own, to lobby for or provide for abortions in their countries.

At the same time, however, Mr. Obama “disappointed” a number of women’s rights advocates, such as Ms. Ross, because they contend that he capitulated to the Republican leadership, which again “turned family planning into a political football,” by agreeing to drop the family-planning money from the economic rescue bill. No House Republicans voted for the bill despite the concession.

Ms. Ross said she was disappointed in Mr. Obama, in part because Americans voted for a new direction, and the president should leave lawmakers with Victorian-era attitudes “snapping at the heels of history and say we’re going forward anyway.”

Besides, she added, “calling family planning pork is illogical and belies conservative thinking.”

“To call it pork spending is insulting to the real pain that is going on in society,” she said.

In cyberspace and on talk shows such as PBS’ female-oriented “To the Contrary,” the fiery debate has focused on whether this much-anticipated female- and family-friendly president threw poor women under the bus to win Republican support that was never going to materialize.

The comments that hint at betrayal, such as those from Ms. Ross, are a far cry from the hopeful accolades I heard heaped on the new president during a packed Emily’s List luncheon at the Washington Hilton during the inaugural week activities.

Some of these same women’s advocates and fundraisers are now upset that the president offered little defense of the programs when he asked to remove the funds, and that few of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic colleagues rose to her defense. She was unmercifully ridiculed, primarily by men, for defending including the $87 million in Medicaid family-planning funds in the massive economic-recovery plan.

By the way, those state Medicaid funds would have required hiring additional health care workers, presumably women - unlike the funds for infrastructure and construction projects, presumably benefiting more male workers.

Wasteful spending? Remember the old folk saying, “pennywise and pound foolish.”

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