Toni Van Pelt, 69, who has been active for decades in NOW’s Florida affiliates, was elected Saturday night at the organization’s national conference in Orlando, Florida. Elected as vice president was her running mate, Gilda Yazzie, a Navajo Indian from Durango, Colorado.
“I see no evidence, zero, that Donald Trump has anyone in his orbit to advocate for women and girls,” said O’Neill, who worked closely with the council to develop a provision in the Affordable Care Act that provides contraception to women without co-pay. “We need a real office that would really advocate.”
“This is yet another anti-women policy that kills women,” Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), told Healthline. “It is really awful and it is very, very dangerous.”
Feminists are fighting back from a place of strength. We stand in proud solidarity with communities of color, with immigrants, refugees and Muslims, with LGBTQIA people and those with disabilities.
Terry O’Neill has a warning at the end of her eight-year tenure heading the National Organization for Women: there is a connection between increasing maternal mortality in the United States and GOP policies under consideration in the U.S. Congress.