The Bush campaign recently launched a “W Stands for Women” crusade, complete with a Web site touting the administration’s record on women’s issues. “The president’s priorities,” it informs us, “are shared by women from coast to coast and have dramatically improved the lives of women at home and around the world.” A closer look, however, reveals just how little ground W has to stand on where women are concerned.

The Bush Web site boasts that the “ratio of female-to-male earnings hit an all-time high in 2002,” and that is true.

However, that “all-time high” translates to 76 cents for every dollar earned by men, and the gap actually widened in 2003, marking the first decline in real median earnings for women since 1995.

This pay disparity is nothing new. In fact, it’s always existed, which is why the federal government created the Equal Pay Initiative.

The Bush Administration eliminated the Equal Pay Initiative. Ironically, it might have forced them to address the disparity in their own payroll. As The Washington Post reported in July, men in the Bush White House earn an average of $76,624 a year, while women earn an average $59,917.

Bragging about Bush’s commitment to “investing in women’s health,” the Web site seems at odds with Bush’s 2002 proposed budget that sought to cut the Maternal and Child Health Block Grants providing health care to women before, during and after pregnancy.

It also seems at odds with the health care crisis that has dominated the headlines and all political campaigns this season.

Health Care Premiums have increased by 49 percent since Bush took office.

These costs have contributed tremendously to an additional 14.4 percent of American women delaying or losing insurance benefits.

Currently, more than one in five women of child-bearing age are without health care.

Bush’s solution is a Medical Savings Plan, where employees can divert a portion of their earnings to pay for premium care, and the Association Health Plan, under which small businesses can acquire group policies.

If Bush successfully launches his AHP program, insurers would be free to drop women-specific coverage and would be exempt from most state regulations, allowing them to offer plans without benefits like maternity and pediatric care currently required by law.

In a hardly subtle proclamation likening abortion to terrorism, Bush declared Jan. 22, the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, “National Sanctity of Human Life Day.”

The proclamation stated, “On Sept. 11, we saw clearly that evil exists in this world, and that it does not value life ... Now we are engaged in a fight against evil and tyranny to preserve and protect life.”

In this effort to rid the world of evil and tyranny, the Bush Administration has signed into law the erroneously titled “partial-birth” abortion ban, already declared unconstitutional by three state courts and now headed for the Supreme Court.

Bush also supports a policy that prohibits women in the Armed Services from obtaining safe medical abortions at military hospitals, even in cases of rape and even when they pay with personal funds.

Women in the military, serving in the United States and abroad, must leave their bases in order to have an abortion. Not a safe or wise choice for those serving in places like Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti. They must also obtain permission from their commander in order to take leave for the procedure.

Bush’s attack on women’s reproductive rights is not limited to his stance against legal abortion. In the 2002 budget, he proposed eliminating required insurance contraceptive coverage for female federal employees. He also passed legislation restricting Medicaid funding of RU-486, the “morning after pill,” to cases of rape, incest or to preserve the pregnant woman’s life.

This legislation had the support of the FDA’s Reproductive Health Drug Advisory Committee, including Bush appointee Dr. W. David Hager, known for prescribing prayer as a treatment for premenstrual syndrome and refusing to prescribe birth control pills to unmarried women.

The president has said he does not consider discrimination against women to be a legitimate form of discrimination, and throughout his term he has sought to diminish the role of women and their legal rights.

Immediately upon assumption of office, Bush disbanded the White House Office for Women and the President’s Interagency Council on Women.

The administration offered no explanation for closing offices charged with policy development and public outreach for women’s issues throughout the world, simply stating that they had “expired” at the end of the Clinton presidency.

Bush also pushed to close the Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau, an agency founded in 1920 and charged by Congress with providing information on women’s economic status and rights.

Additionally, his budget proposals have consistently cut funding for emergency shelters, rape crisis hotlines and domestic violence services.

Women make up the majority of the population and the majority of voters.

Bush knows this and is working hard to convince them that “his compassionate conservative philosophy” extends to women’s issues.

In reality, the policies and practices of this administration have discriminated against women in nearly every way imaginable.

W doesn’t stand for women, unless he’s showing them the door.

Laura McPhee is an Indianapolis-based freelance writer and women’s rights activist who also teaches literature at IUPUI.