Politics

This 16 Year Old Just Set an Arizona Lawmaker Straight About Planned Parenthood

April 16th 2017

After Republicans scored a major victory in their long fight to defund Planned Parenthood, Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake held a town hall meeting to hear from constituents.

In an unlikely turn of events, he got an earful about white male privilege and the consequences of restricting women's health care from 16-year-old Deja Foxx, whose question for him has since gone viral.

“I’m a young woman. You’re a middle-aged man. I’m a person of color, and you’re white. I come from a background of poverty, and I didn’t always have parents to guide me through life. You come from privilege," Foxx said.

"I’m wondering, as a Planned Parenthood patient and someone who relies on Title X, who you are clearly not, why is it your right to take away my right to choose Planned Parenthood and to choose no-co-pay birth control, to access that?”

Foxx has enjoyed a wave of support from folks around the country and on social media for grilling the senator after Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona posted a video of her question on its Facebook page April 13 where its been viewed over 130,000 times.

Her question came April 13 at a town hall meeting in Meza, Arizona. Earlier that day, President Donald Trump signed a bill that allows states to withhold federal funds from Planned Parenthood and other organizations that offer women's health care services, including contraception, birth control, STI tests and abortions.

Flake is one of the Republican senators who voted to pass the bill, which mostly impacts reproductive rights organizations like Planned Parenthood that rely on federal Title X funds to cover costs of providing health care to millions of low-income women in the United States.

“I’m glad to hear of my privileged childhood,” Flake said in response to Foxx's question before adding that he paid for his college education and was one of 11 children. “Privilege comes in many forms," he said. “I’ve had a lot of advantages that others haven’t. What I want is to make sure that everyone can realize the American Dream.”

Arizona's teen pregnancy rate would increase by 22 percent if services supported by Title X were taken away, and the rate of unintended pregnancy and abortion would increase by 27 percent, according to the Arizona Family Health program.

At a Planned Parenthood roundtable before Flake's forum, Foxx said she wants to run for political office one day, because "someone has got to stop these political attacks on our reproductive rights."

Watch Foxx's complete question in the video below:

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