Agenda for Iowa Women

The Culver-Judge Agenda for Iowa’s Women details a number of top priorities for a Culver-Judge Administration:

Health Care

• Guarantee Iowans’ access to quality, affordable health insurance coverage through the “Healthy Opportunities Plan for Everyone” (available at chetculver.com)
  
• Expand HAWK-I to cover parents of eligible children up to 200% of the poverty level, recognizing that too many working women and single mothers go without sufficient health care coverage
  
• Overturn Iowa’s restrictive ban on embryonic stem cell research, and making state funds at our public universities available for new research into cures and treatments
  
• Protect a woman’s right to make her own health care decisions, and vetoing any attempt to infringe upon that right.
  
• Ensure Iowa women’s access to emergency contraceptives and other family planning through their pharmacists and insurance coverage.
  
• Provide more Iowa women with complete pre- and post-natal care, as well as preventive screenings for breast cancer, osteoporosis, heart disease and other diseases that disproportionately affect women by maximizing our share of federal Medicare and Medicaid dollars.

Education

• Grow early childhood education by building on Gov. Vilsack’s commitment to making early childhood education universal in Iowa.
  
• Ensure an accredited pre-K program in every school district.
  
• Increase the state’s child care tax credit, to get more assistance to families struggling with the high cost child care.
  
• Raise teacher pay and directing more dollars to the classroom for teachers who are strapped to pay for supplies.
  
• Promote after-school programs, through public-private partnerships, that help Iowa’s working parents know their children have a safe, educational place to go in the hours between the end of the school day and the work day.
  

Jobs & Economic Development

• Expand the state’s Small Business Development Centers in order to grow programs that help women start and operate small businesses in Iowa, including the state’s Women’s Business Center.
  
• Increase the minimum wage to at least $7.00 an hour, recognizing that a disproportionate number of women are paid the minimum wage in Iowa.
  
• Expand the state Earned Income Tax Credit to help Iowa’s low-income working families, too often headed by single mothers, as well as developing a public/private volunteer program that will help families claim the tax credits they’ve earned, but sometimes don’t know about.
  
• Fight for equal pay legislation in Iowa.
  

Safety & Security

• Protect students by passing anti-bullying legislation with statewide standards.
  
• Grow the number of domestic violence shelters in Iowa by maximizing federal and state dollars available for support.
  
• Improve domestic violence and child abuse prevention and identification by increasing training and coordination among the state Departments of Public Safety, Public Health, and Human Services, as well as local law enforcement and social service agencies.
  
• Restore budget cuts to domestic violence and child abuse programs.