Gina Raimondo doesn't “know why any woman would want to live in a state that criminalizes full access to health care.” The assertion by the 40th U.S. Secretary of Commerce is especially relevant after the Supreme Court's 6-3 ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June that upheld a Mississippi law conceived to overturn two landmark decisions — Roe v. Wade in 1973 and Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992 — conferring the almost half century constitutional right to obtain an abortion. Already in 2022, twice as many abortion clinics closed, mostly in the South and Midwest, than in 2021 since the Supreme Court decision.
“Healthy workers are more productive,” Raimondo said during a Zoom interview after accompanying President Joe Biden to the building site in Phoenix last week for a new computer chip plant for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. “They show up every day, on time, ready to work - so I think states that provide better access to health care enable a more productive workforce.”
Raimondo is the former venture capitalist and first woman elected and re-elected governor of her native state of Rhode Island, where she mended a pension system on the brink of collapse, fixed a crumbling transportation infrastructure, forgave student-loan debt, tripled the number of pre-kindergarten classes and guaranteed that every child can attend all-day kindergarten. She recruited more than 30 companies to Rhode Island, where unemployment plummeted to 3.4%, or 3.1 percentage points below its 30-year average and almost half the rate when she took office in 2015.
