Following Thursday’s walkout of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on the Obama administration's birth-control mandate, which featured a panel made up entirely of men, Democratic Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) said the incident demonstrated a lack of perspective on the issue of contraception.
Birth control “is not a male issue, it’s a female issue. I’ve never met a man that had the need for birth control.”
Johnson criticized the Oversight chairman’s choice of witnesses as a group of people who “don’t have a need to even consider these kinds of issues,” saying that the all-male panel demonstrated a “reprehensible disregard for women.”
Johnson was not the first Democratic woman to attack House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) after lawmakers walked out of the hearing. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.)
told reporters earlier in the day, “Imagine they're having a panel on women's health, and they don't have any women on the panel — duh!"
A second panel in the same hearing included two women; many found the panel objectionable because it consisted entirely of male religious leaders and academics.
This post was updated at 4:05pm
