Kaitlin Welborn | Taking control of the issues

With all the insanity going on in the world right now, it's pretty easy to blame the president. Not much has been going right for him since the inauguration. He hasn't yet fulfilled many of his campaign promises (Where's the dog, Mr. President? You promised!), and it appears that the post-coital glow with our commander in chief is wearing off.

But there is one area where Obama has truly made change and inspired hope: women's issues. The media has had its hands full covering AIG bonuses and Bernie Madoff, and thus has neglected the truly progressive moves that the president has made to end the years of tyranny over women, even for those of us Penn students who are privileged enough to feel like we're not that affected by inequality.

He's certainly hit the ground running, especially on the issues most important to college women. On March 10, Obama signed the Affordable Birth Control Act, part of the Omnibus Appropriations Bill, which restored an incentive to pharmaceutical companies to provide low-cost birth control to college health clinics. In 2005, Congress signed the Deficit Reduction Act ending the incentive, resulting in unaffordable prices of up to $50 a month for many students who don't have insurance or choose not to put it on their parents' plan.

Penn's Women's Health Clinic has had to deal with the rising prices of birth control. On the Clinic's Web site, students are informed of their options, including going to a regular pharmacy or switching to a generic brand. However, women who have non-generic birth control, such as NuvaRing, must pay $40 a month. Though Women's Health has made individual contracts with pharmaceutical companies to try to keep costs down, Medical Chief of Women's Health Janice Asher says that without the contracts, "birth-control pills would have been much more expensive, approximately double the price." But with the act passed, students may have cheaper prices in the future, a boon to the approximately 5,000 undergraduate women at Penn. Asher says that having Obama in office "will absolutely be a significant change" for college-age women.

And on March 11, the White House created the White House Council on Women and Girls. Headed by two top Obama advisors, the Council will "provide a coordinated federal response to the challenges confronted by women and girls and to ensure that all cabinet and cabinet-level agencies consider how their policies and programs impact women and families." Since women are chronically underrepresented in the government, the Council should serve an important purpose in promoting the varied interests of all women. Funding streams will cover issues of particular concern to women - health care reform, stem-cell research on women's health, fighting poverty, investing in education, making college more affordable. 'Women's issues' cross almost every barrier - race, class and even gender - because most of them deal with the root of morality in our society. And Obama's more-progressive route is one that most college students will be more comfortable with.

As an added measure, Obama impressed many women's rights advocates on his very first day by signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, showing that he considers women's issues to be one of his main concerns. While you might think that you're immune to pay discrimination, in reality, this Act does more for your average female Penn student than for her less educated counterpart: The wage gap is largest among highly educated professions like physicians, where females earn only 58 cents for every dollar a man makes. Though every president says that he supports pay equity, rarely has one done something about it. And to sign the act on his first day in office is an important symbolic gesture to 52 percent of the population that so often feels left out of the political process.

President Obama has done some incredibly progressive things over his first few months in office. That's not to say that he can't improve in some areas, such as appointing more women to cabinet-level positions, especially women of color. However, he's certainly on the right track. It's nice to know that even with the doom and gloom of the economy surrounding us, we women at Penn have more freedom to look forward to, at least for four more years.

Kaitlin Welborn is a College senior from Tampa, Fla. Not Your Mother's Daughter appears on alternating Wednesday. Her email address is welborn@dailypennsylvanian.com.

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