Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tom Price is a nasty mix of equal parts misogyny, meanness, and outright corruption. Now he and Donald Trump are busy staffing the Department of Health and Human Services with minions who make a mockery of the terms “Health,” “Human,” AND “Services.”
Case in point: the selection of Charmaine Yoest, the former president and CEO of Americans United For Life as SPOKESPERSON for all things related to medicine and public health.
While running AUL,Yoest oversaw the creation of almost every piece of anti abortion legislation passed on a state level in the last decade, including HB2, the Texas law Wendy Davis filibustered and was ruled as unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court in 2016.
Yep, just when it seemed like we couldn’t get any more garbage heapy than Tom Price, his appointed mouthpiece is even worse! WHAT?!
Watch as Rachel Maddow brilliantly breaks down some of the science-free things Charmaine Yoest has claimed about abortion, birth control, LGBTQ issues, and also some extra rancho cucamonga musings about how she thinks life works. Yikes! Yoest is literally the TRAP LAW QUEEN and in the world of repro, this woman has peddled more myths than Bullfinch.
As Maddow pointed out, one myth Charmaine loves to peddle is that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer. She likes to cite her experience as a breast cancer survivor–which just makes lying about it even more disturbing. In fact, 53 studies that included 83,000 women found no link at all between abortion and breast cancer. It’s a lie that’s been debunked by the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
Folks- SHE WILL BE THE NUMBER ONE POINT PERSON ON AMERICAN MEDICINE. #RIPScientificEstablishment
And Maddow’s discoveries are just the tip of the condom.
My team at Lady Parts Justice League dug up some of her other terrifying false facts, citing this gaggle of quacks as her “experts”.
She mind-blowingly refuses to accept that birth control reduces the number of abortions! When asked about a study that showed a 60 to 80 percent drop in the abortion rate among women who received free birth control, Yoest insisted, “It’s really a red herring that the abortion lobby likes to bring up by conflating abortion and birth control.” She later said she hadn’t “seen anything” that showed contraception reduces the number of abortions. I can’t.
My favorite is that Yoest claims IUDs have “life-ending properties.” Ok. You got me. An IUD is a “Life-ending property.”
So is a Venus razor or a pair of nail clippers if you wanna be technical about it.
What an IUD isn’t, is an abortion, another lie she loves rattling off.
ACTUALLY- What an IUD does is prevent a fertilized egg from becoming a pregnancy in the first place. #FUNFACT- You can’t have an abortion if you’re not pregnant- but how excellent that this kind of scientific brainpower will be used to speak on behalf of our nation’s health policy.
In this new job, Charmaine Yoest will be in charge of messaging. (It’s probably not a great sign that she’s been deleting her old batshit blog posts). As an anti-abortion activist, she’s made several, unchallenged appearances on national television spewing falsehoods about reproductive health care, and now she’s the lying mouthpiece for our nation’s Department of Health and Human Services.
We at LPJL decided we could not sit by and let dangerous lies like these go unchallenged, so we got ourselves an actual doctor, took some inspiration from everyone’s favorite myth busting show, and made a video that smacks down many of the Yoest falsehoods using some facts cosigned by actual science.
Through our videos, we at LPJL have been exposing the shenanigans of Charmaine Yoest and her cronies for years. But we’re SO fed up with anti-choice extremists lying to people, harassing clinics, and passing anti-choice legislation, that we are dedicating our entire summer fighting back and correcting the record with with our Vagical Mystery Tour, a star-studded 16-city, comedy and music tour. We’re traveling all through the south and the midwest bringing pop culture into the repro space and repro into pop culture, all the while giving local communities opportunities to connect with their clinics and keep the fight going. It's meaningful fun of the highest order. Support LPJL, and grab tickets today!
