|
The Dallas Morning News
March 19, 2010
It's a relief that many share shame over State Board of Education's toils
JACQUIELYNN FLOYD
It is a comfort to know I have company here in the doghouse, that there are others who share my prickly chagrin over the State Board of Education's painfully well-publicized hatchet attack on accepted scholarship.
Their busy toils have successfully made Texans look like fools, but it's a relief to know a lot of people besides me are mad about it.
Since writing Tuesday about the SBOE's meticulous efforts to doctor public school history textbooks with political rhetoric lifted directly from the religious-right playbook, I have heard from dozens of people.
A few, of course, want to see my head on a stick. They disagree with my premise that classroom texts should not be co-opted into our shallow-but-shrill, cliché-riddled "culture wars."
Their premise is that the classroom is exactly the place where the war should be waged – and I'm on the wrong side.
"I find you one of the most uninformed, liberal, biased, dumb broads in North Texas," snarls one correspondent, adding that I snagged my (admitted desirable) job "based on your marriage to a minority."
I responded politely that the minority to whom I am married probably shares the writer's political views more than he shares mine. Happily, he has enough sense not to call me a "dumb broad" around the house.
Another guy, angry at my criticism of the board's determination not to allow specific mention of the Alamo's Tejano defenders, called me out:
"They talk about [how] they've got to be taught about the eight Mexicans [among the Alamo defenders]," he wrote. "Tell me how many of the whites can you name after you get past the 3 leaders."
Dude, I am so glad you asked! I love an excuse to wheeze on about Alamo martyr Dolphin Ward Floyd, a distant uncle of mine who was among the "immortal 32" volunteers from Gonzales who answered William Travis' summons for reinforcements.
Like all the other white guys present, he was born out of state – six of those "eight Mexicans" were the only native-born heroes of the Alamo.
Enough of that, though. The main point here is that there are plenty of sensible people in these parts who are thoroughly appalled at the SBOE's proudly defiant politicization of classroom texts.
"Texas has a lot going for it," sighs one correspondent. "But education is obviously not one of them."
One sweet, soft-spoken woman left me a voice mail: "They have their heads you-know-where, and that's coming from a 72-year-old lady," she said.
These responses were by no means all sent by liberal left-wingers and smarty-pants college perfessers (although those subsets were ably represented).
If the board has embarrassed Texas, said one writer, it has doubly embarrassed plenty of self-identified conservatives and/or Christians.
"It is so disheartening that we have such little faith in our young people that we think they can't handle the real truth about our history," he said.
"Listen, there are all manner of things wrong with education," said another writer.
"We don't teach enough of the basics, we are afraid to fail anyone, we worry too much about 'self-esteem' while forgetting that self-esteem is earned by doing something well. Let's not make the situation worse by politically sanitizing our textbooks."
"This episode has been a total embarrassment," said another. "Friends from elsewhere have been sending 'say what?' e-mails, and I am weary of replying."
Well, cheer up, y'all.
True, those zany ideology enforcers down at the state board have indeed colored the whole state with the taint of obstinate and deliberate backwardness, but it's not the first time.
And it's such a relief to have you to share my shame.
Texas Monthly magazine
FEBRUARY, 2010
Letter from Bryan
The Convert
Former Bryan Planned Parenthood director Abby Johnson’s abrupt change from pro-choice activist to pro-life spokesperson turned her into a talk show sensation. But is her story true?
BY NATE BLAKESLEE
At lunchtime on October 5, in the East Texas town of Bryan, a woman walked through the rear door of the Brazos Valley Coalition for Life office, which is one block west of a Planned Parenthood clinic. She was crying. It was the thirteenth day of the Coalition’s annual 40 Days for Life event, in which anti-abortion activists maintain a 24-hour vigil outside the front gate of the clinic, one of the few places in East Texas where a woman can obtain an abortion. The three staffers on duty immediately recognized the woman. It was the clinic’s 29-year-old director, Abby Johnson. “I want out,” she told them. “I don’t want to do this anymore. I know it’s not right.”
Stunned by Johnson’s sudden appearance and concerned about how distraught she seemed, the staffers sat with her, in a room ordinarily used to counsel pregnant women in crisis, until Shawn Carney, the Coalition’s director, arrived. Carney knew Johnson by sight—he had spent a lot of time on the sidewalk in front of the Planned Parenthood clinic—but he had never had a lengthy conversation with her. Carney, who is 27, had begun working at the Coalition as a volunteer, just as Johnson had at Planned Parenthood. Like Johnson, he had quickly been promoted to a position of leadership. Nothing like this had ever happened to him in his short career as an activist, and he could barely contain his excitement.
Johnson told Carney that she had been harboring doubts about her work at the clinic for some time. She felt she was being pressured by her supervisor at the regional affiliate to increase the number of abortions her clinic performed, to make up for declining revenues from the clinic’s family planning and women’s health services. “I could tell her mind was racing,” Carney recalled later. “She was giving a litany of reasons why she wanted out, and it was just almost verbatim of what you think someone who wants to leave the abortion industry would say: Her conscience had gotten to her, the abortion industry is about money, abortion is horrific.”
Then, as Carney sat rapt, Johnson told him about the incident that had forced her to finally listen to her conscience. Nine days earlier, on September 26, she’d assisted a doctor who was performing an abortion for a woman who was thirteen weeks pregnant, she said. The doctor asked Johnson to hold an ultrasound transducer to the woman’s stomach as he performed the operation. Johnson told Carney she had never seen this done before, since ultrasound machines are not commonly used for first-trimester abortions, which make up the vast majority of abortions done at most clinics. What she witnessed on the ultrasound monitor, she said, horrified her. The fetus seemed to be moving away from the doctor’s probe, which was clearly visible on the screen as it entered the patient’s uterus. Johnson thought of all the patients whom she had told that their fetuses wouldn’t feel anything during the procedure. Then, as Johnson watched, the doctor turned on the suction.
Before she left the Coalition offices that day, Johnson offered to volunteer for the group, and Carney, in turn, promised to help Johnson find another job. It was a standing offer that the Coalition extended to all clinic employees, one often shouted to workers as they arrived in the morning or left in the evening. No staffers at the clinic had ever taken the Coalition up on the offer. Carney never dreamed the first would be the person in charge. “I knew immediately that this would be huge,” he said. Johnson quit her job the next day.
Johnson’s story broke at a time when abortion had once again taken center stage in national politics. For months Congress had been locked in debate over the so-called Stupak amendment, the anti-abortion measure that threatened to derail health care reform. Mike Huckabee flew Johnson to New York to tape a segment for his talk show on November 7, and she became an overnight star in the conservative-media world. Bill O’Reilly spoke to her and Carney a few days later, and producers for the Christian talk show The 700 Club traveled to Bryan to interview her. Johnson began receiving dozens of calls a day, mostly from talk radio producers seeking interviews, and she obliged every request she could. Her story went viral in the Christian conservative blogosphere.
Carney’s efforts to find Johnson a new job were unsuccessful, but after her story went nationwide, Johnson didn’t need one. Carney helped her sign on with Ambassador Speakers Bureau, a Christian publicity agency, and the company began booking paid engagements for her. Her job became, in essence, being Abby Johnson. For her first booking, Johnson flew to New York to talk at a fundraiser for the pro-life group Expectant Mother Care. She had done a lot of public speaking for Planned Parenthood over the years, she told me, but had always chafed at the group’s insistence on strict adherence to officially sanctioned talking points. Addressing anti-abortion activists, Johnson quickly found that she enjoyed public speaking much more than she had when she was on the other side. “I was laughing when I was up there giving my talk,” she said, “because I was thinking, you know, when you’re telling the truth, you don’t have to have talking points.”
But was she telling the truth? The rollout of Abby Johnson as a culture-war celebrity got off to a rocky start. In early November, the online magazine Salon reported that on September 27, the day after Johnson says she witnessed the ultrasound-guided abortion and had her epiphany, she appeared as a guest on the Bryan public radio program Fair and Feminist to discuss her work at the clinic. In the hour-long interview, Johnson gives an enthusiastic defense of the clinic and ridicules the 40 Days for Life protest. She doesn’t sound like someone who’d had a life-changing experience the previous day or who had soured on her employer’s mission.
One of the show’s hosts, Shelly Blair, volunteered regularly at the clinic and considered Johnson to be a friend and mentor. The hardest thing to accept, Blair said later, was not Johnson’s announcement that she was now pro-life but her decision to join the Coalition. Johnson, Blair said, had long complained that the Coalition harassed patients and clinic workers and spread misinformation about Planned Parenthood. Blair recalled a party in the parking lot of Planned Parenthood, held just two weeks before Johnson quit, to boost morale on the opening day of the 40 Days vigil. “Abby was so mad that she was screaming through the fence at them,” she recalled. “It’s just so strange, because now she’s saying all the things that they’ve always said. It’s like, how can you unlearn everything you know?”
Johnson’s departure from Planned Parenthood turned out to be a more complex story than it first appeared. At a court hearing for an injunction sought by Planned Parenthood to prevent Johnson from divulging confidential information to her new allies, two of Johnson’s former co-workers testified that she told them in the days before she resigned that she was afraid she was about to be fired. At one time, Johnson, who was named the regional Planned Parenthood affiliate’s employee of the year in 2008, seemed to have a promising future with the organization. By mid-2009, however, her relationship with her employer had begun to deteriorate. Salon reported that on October 2, Johnson was summoned to Houston to meet with her supervisors to discuss problems with her job performance. She was placed on what Planned Parenthood calls a “performance improvement plan.” It was just three days later, on Monday, that Johnson made her tearful appearance at the Coalition for Life. The following day she faxed Planned Parenthood a resignation letter, which mentioned nothing about a crisis of conscience.
Johnson has said that she was disciplined by her employer because she objected to what she described as pressure to increase the number of abortions performed at the clinic. The number of abortions did increase over the past year, chiefly because the clinic, which performs surgical abortions every other Saturday, began offering the abortion pill to patients on a daily basis. That decision, Planned Parenthood told me, was driven by patient demand, not, as Johnson has claimed, by a desire to increase revenue. Citing company policy regarding confidential personnel information, Planned Parenthood declined to specify why Johnson was disciplined, other than to deny that it was due to any conflict over the number of abortions performed.
Postings on Johnson’s Facebook page, obtained by Texas Monthly, suggest an employee worn out by her job and feeling hurt, angry, and unappreciated—not one struggling with the morality of her profession. On September 24, two weeks before she resigned, she wrote, “So tired. Want a day off. Too busy. Blah.” Similar sentiments followed, along with expressions of dread over her coming disciplinary meeting in Houston. This is what she wrote on the night she quit:
Alright. Here’s the deal. I have been doing the work of two full time people for two years. Then, after I have been working my whole big butt off for them and prioritizing that company over my family, my friends and pretty much everything else in my life, they have the nerve to tell me that my job performance is “slipping.” WHAT???!!! That is crazy. Anyone that knows me knows how committed I was to that job. They obviously do not value me at all. So, I’m out and I feel really great about it!
Johnson received condolences and encouragement from a number of Facebook friends, most of whom were shocked by her announcement. She never mentioned being pressured to increase abortions, having witnessed the ultrasound-guided procedure, or having suffered a moral crisis.
In mid-December I met with Johnson and Carney at the Coalition for Life office, where Johnson spends most days when she is not out of town for a speaking engagement. She has an open face, with big brown eyes and a confident smile. She had cut her hair since the story broke; it was now in a sophisticated bob, and her nails were freshly done in a French manicure. I asked Johnson about the questions that had arisen regarding her motivation for leaving Planned Parenthood. She acknowledged that she had been disciplined just before quitting but said she never worried that she would be fired. “I was employee of the year,” she said. “I had been promised by the higher-ups that one day I would be the COO of the affiliate.” Johnson insisted that the Facebook posting was merely a cover story, designed to buy her time to decide how and when she would reveal her real reasons for quitting. She was not ready to expose herself to attack at that point. Nor did she turn to the Coalition out of revenge, she said. “It’s not about being disgruntled. If I was disgruntled, I would have come over and said, ‘Shawn, let’s really stick it to Planned Parenthood.’ If I was angry about being written up, that’s what I would have done, because I have a ton of stuff that I could have disclosed to the media. But I’ve never done that, because that was never my intention.”
Carney said that none of the apparent discrepancies in Johnson’s story—the curious timing of the Fair and Feminist interview, the coincidence of the disciplinary action and Johnson’s resignation, and the incongruous Facebook posting—bothered him. “Her coming down here can only be explained by a genuine conversion experience,” he said. “Abby could have taken a right and driven off and gone to a fast-food restaurant, cried her eyes out, called her husband, quit the next day, and we’d have never known. But she didn’t do that. She decided to take a left and come into this house.” It was easier for skeptics to believe that Johnson was just a disgruntled employee, Carney said, than that a commonly performed procedure was in reality so awful that the director of an abortion clinic could not abide the sight of it. “I think for some people the reason for her leaving is almost too ugly to look at with honesty,” Carney said.
Other questions about Johnson’s credibility arose during our interview. She told me, for example, that there had never been any threats of violence against the Bryan clinic; however, Johnson herself received a series of threatening letters in 2007. “God will punish you for killing the innocent or we will,” read one. “You are not taking us seriously. You were at the clinic alone. Not very smart,” read another. In fact, the threats were taken so seriously that security cameras were installed at Johnson’s house, as she later acknowledged. Johnson also claimed that while most services at Planned Parenthood were provided by a nonprofit corporation, abortions were done by a for-profit corporation. Both she and Carney seemed to sincerely believe this was true, though all services at Planned Parenthood are, in fact, provided by a pair of separate nonprofit corporations.
As confounding as these inconsistencies are, there may be a much larger problem with Johnson’s story. Johnson has told the story of her journey from pro-choice activist to pro-life celebrity many times in many venues, and the crux of the tale is always the same: her moving description of what she saw on the ultrasound that September day in the Bryan clinic’s operating room. It is an undeniably compelling story. Mike Huckabee interrupted Johnson several times during her appearance on his show, marveling at every detail and embellishing here and there with his own comments. “You literally were holding your hand on top of her belly, at that point, and realized that what was underneath that hand, once, a moment ago, was life...it’s gone,” he said. “My gosh.”
Johnson’s account is so plausible and rich in detail that even Planned Parenthood seems not to have investigated whether this event ever took place. At my request, the staff at the Bryan clinic examined patient records from September 26, the day Johnson claims to have had her conversion experience, and spoke with the physician who performed abortions on that date. According to Planned Parenthood, there is no record of an ultrasound-guided abortion performed on September 26. The physician on duty told the organization that he did not use an ultrasound that day, nor did Johnson assist on any abortion procedure. “Planned Parenthood can assure you that no abortion patients underwent an ultrasound-guided abortion on September 26,” said a spokesperson. It’s difficult to imagine that Johnson simply got the date wrong; September 12 was the only other day that month that the clinic performed surgical abortions.
Could clinic staff and the physician be mistaken? The Texas Department of State Health Services requires abortion providers to fill out a form documenting basic information about each procedure performed at a clinic. This document is known as the Induced Abortion Report Form. The Bryan clinic reported performing fifteen surgical abortions on September 26. Johnson has consistently said that the patient in question was thirteen weeks pregnant, which is plausible, since thirteen weeks is right at the cusp of when physicians will consider using an ultrasound to assist with the procedure. Yet none of the patients listed on the report for that day were thirteen weeks pregnant; in fact, none were beyond ten weeks.
Johnson stands by her version of events. “What I described on the screen is something I’d never seen before, so I wouldn’t know what to describe if I hadn’t seen it,” she said. It seems unlikely, though, that an eight-year veteran of the abortion wars would be unfamiliar with the image of the “recoiling fetus,” which has been common coin among anti-abortion activists since the release of the controversial 1984 film The Silent Scream, which purported to show fetal pain. When I asked if she could provide any other details of what she saw that day to help firm up her story, Johnson volunteered that the patient in question was a black woman, a description that she has never previously included in her account. Only one patient from September 26 was black, according to the Induced Abortion Report Form, and she was in the sixth week of her pregnancy. There would be no medical reason for a doctor to use an ultrasound to guide an abortion performed on a woman at such an early stage. Even if one was used, it’s hard to imagine how Johnson, who said she has seen hundreds of ultrasound pictures in her career, could mistake a one-quarter-inch-long embryo for a three-inch, thirteen-week fetus.
Johnson told me she was unfamiliar with the Induced Abortion Report Form. When I explained what the forms for September 26 reflected, she suggested that Planned Parenthood could have doctored them. “Anything to discredit me is what they’re gonna do,” she said. “You know, I’m not really interested in defending my story anymore. I haven’t done this just for fun. I haven’t done it for my own benefit. So I don’t really care what they’re saying. They’re just trying to grasp at straws and come up with something,” she said. “And it’s just not true.”
If the story of Johnson’s conversion doesn’t bear up well under scrutiny, it may be because it was never meant to. Johnson has consistently said that she never planned to go public with her story. In fact, the media only learned of her defection a month after she quit, when Planned Parenthood took Johnson to court. According to testimony at that hearing, on the day she quit her job Johnson told two young co-workers that the Coalition for Life could find them jobs, just as it had offered to do for her. All they had to do, one of the young women testified, was say they could no longer work at Planned Parenthood because of a “moral conflict.” (Both are still employed at the clinic.) Johnson told me early in our interview that clinic workers sometimes felt trapped. “Where else would you work?” was a refrain she often heard around the Planned Parenthood office. “You’ve done abortions—who else would want you here in this town?”
Johnson, who has a young daughter and a husband who is a schoolteacher, told me her only goal in the weeks after leaving Planned Parenthood was to find a new job as quickly as possible. But she’d suddenly found herself with a camera in her face, telling her story to a much larger audience. “I had no idea I would be on Fox News. This was just totally unexpected,” she said. “Things just really took off in a different direction than what I had thought they would.”
# # #
We•News: Women’s eNews
JANUARY 3, 2010
2010 - Seven Who Invent a Better Future
Profiles of seven outstanding leaders dedicated to improving women's lives: Robin Abrams, Andrea Arroyo, Cecilia Boone, Vivian Castleberry, Salome Chasnoff, Kathy Cloninger and Martha Diaz.
BY WeNEWS CORRESPONDENTS
Robin Abrams, Messenger of Opportunity
Silicon Valley executive Robin Abrams aims to be the conduit between women and technology.
In 2008, Abrams joined the board of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, an organization whose mission is to increase the positive impact of technology on the world's women. She believes that disruptive technology, or innovation that drives market creation, is the area that women should focus on because, "when change happens, it creates opportunity."
Abrams recalls a defining moment in her career that demonstrated how technology could empower women. Stationed in Hong Kong as the managing director for Apple in 1995, she was approached by the United Nations to sponsor the Beijing Women's Conference. The event would eventually draw Hillary Clinton and more than 5,000 representatives from 2,100 nongovernmental organizations and nearly 30,000 individuals. New to the Chinese market, it was a no-brainer for Apple to sign on, thereby meeting its dual objectives of gaining visibility in the country and identifying the right partners with whom to conduct business.
"For the first time, there were Internet cafes set up that allowed the attendees to use technology to caucus in real time with their membership back in their native countries," Abrams says.
Abrams has spent the last 33 years in the technology business. The York, Neb., native started her career as an attorney with the U.S. National Bank of Omaha (now Wells Fargo Bank). After two years, she transferred to the commercial side of the industry. It wasn't long before she was exposed to the promise of technology.
"What inspires me is promise," Abrams says. "I think about it as a balance sheet: If there is an asset that is untapped--undervalued--(I start to think) how can I work with that female CEO, how can I work with that wireless technology, how can I work with that student. That, to me, is inspirational."
Over the years, Abrams has held numerous positions at corporations in addition to Apple: Unisys, VeriFone and Palm Computing. She also serves as an advisor to privately held companies--particularly those led by female executives.
Two such firms are Enhanced Medical Decisions, an online search engine that provides information to consumers and professionals, and GoGoVerde, a web tool that helps communities live a more earth-friendly lifestyle.
"I think technology allowed traditional functions to be done more quickly and in much greater access," Abrams says. "New technologies--and the application of those technologies--create for women an opportunity to work with a more level playing field as they go about solving health and safety issues, providing education and taking advantage of income-generating opportunities."
-- Shahnaz Mahmud
As an artist, Andrea Arroyo always found inspiration in women.
"When I was a professional dancer, I was fascinated by the female form," says Arroyo. "Soon after I became a visual artist, I began doing research on women's images. Since then, I have been intrigued not only by the female form, but also by female stories."
Not long after arriving in New York City as a dancer in 1983, Arroyo started experimenting with sculpture and drawings. She held her first solo exhibit, "Andrea Arroyo/Sculptures and Reliefs," five years later at On the Wall Gallery, which garnered a positive response from casual observers and art collectors. Her public art commissions, including "Harmony" (two relief murals) and "My City, My Planet, My Sun" (a series of large-faceted glass art panels), can be found at schools and subway stations in the Bronx.
Arroyo's latest project, "Flor de Tierra" ("Flower of the Earth"), looks to commemorate the women of Juarez, the border city in Mexico where more than 400 women have gone missing or been killed in the past 15 years. The phrase is also a Spanish expression that means something is buried or planted in a shallow place.
"I was appalled by the number of women who have been killed or missing and by the fact that the authorities have not taken proper measures to investigate or stop these crimes," says Arroyo.
Many of these victims were abandoned in the desert or buried in shallow graves, and Arroyo's project focuses on the vastness of their deaths. She's creating a pastel-on-paper drawing for each victim; to date, she's completed 230 of them.
"I feel privileged that I'm able to create art, so when I receive an award or acknowledgment I'm grateful and humbled," says Arroyo, who was named official artist for the 7th Annual Latin Grammy Awards by the Latin Recording Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006. She also received the Groundbreaking Latina in the Arts Award from "Catalina" magazine and the National Association of Latina Leaders in 2008.
In addition to "Flor de Tierra," Arroyo is working on "Flor de Vida" ("Flower of Life"). This project consists of brightly colored acrylic paintings based on historical and mythological women, such as Lilith, Athena, Cleopatra, Xochiquetzal and Frida Kahlo.
"In my work, female forms connect all women--linking the past with the present, the vulnerable with the indestructible."
--Kayla Hutzler
Cecilia Boone's first feminist role model was her mother, Marie Keene Guthrie, a widow who raised three children while working as a Circuit Court clerk in Kentucky from 1959 to 1981.
"She was a woman of a lot of ability and a lot of pride," Boone says. "It was clear to me as a child that she didn't have the same kind of breaks that a lot of men did."
Boone says that the second-class treatment her mother received on the job left her feeling pressured to do everything perfectly to avoid being berated by her male colleagues, who were lawyers and judges.
"She was treated more like the county secretary than an elected official," Boone says. "It was just the way men viewed women at that time."
Guthrie's obstacles inspired Boone to dip her toes in the nonprofit world in the 1980s by volunteering and fundraising for her children's schools. A longtime pro-choice advocate, Boone expanded her activism and joined the board of her local Planned Parenthood in Texas in 1995, eventually becoming its chair in 2000. It was while working at the reproductive health care organization that she became fascinated with the intersection of politics and social justice.
"I realized that no matter how many people believe in a social issue, they can't begin to approach the power of government," Boone says.
That revelation formed the cornerstone of Boone's commitment to using philanthropy to impact both public policy and women's lives. As chair of the National Planned Parenthood Action Fund, she's been pivotal in keeping women's needs paramount in the fight for health care reform. As chair of the Dallas Women's Foundation, she's helped raise more than $18 million for women's causes that range from supporting domestic violence shelters to supporting agencies that offer job training and language classes. And as a member of Women Moving Millions, she's been a pioneer in--and champion of--women-centric philanthropy.
"I don't know that women are any more generous than they've ever been. Before, when we were doing fundraising for women's issues, we were afraid to ask for big gifts," Boone says. "It's been a totally liberating experience on both sides, giving and receiving."
--Sarah Seltzer
Vivian Anderson Castleberry has served as a godmother of the women's movement in Dallas since the mid-20th century, when she was editor of the student newspaper at Southern Methodist University.
Now 87, Castleberry mentored many female journalists and won several awards while working at the Dallas Times Herald from 1956 to 1984. As a reporter and editor, she was responsible for some of the newspaper's first stories on issues like child abuse, birth control and prostitution. She often clashed with her bosses over covering these subjects, but she refused to shy away from controversy.
After she retired in 1984, Castleberry was inducted into the Texas Women's Hall of Fame, but she wasn't content with resting on her laurels. She took the passion for justice that informed her work as a journalist and channeled it toward peace, launching Peacemakers Incorporated in 1987. The nonprofit organization sponsors international women's conferences on peace. Its most recent gathering in 2007 inspired participants to create "Women Stand With Iraq," and a peace institute bearing her name was started the following year. (It's now affiliated with the University of North Texas.)
Castleberry is just as keen on helping women at home as she is abroad. She co-founded the Family Place, the first women's shelter in Dallas, with attorney and longtime women's rights advocate Louise Raggio. It provides emergency shelter, crisis counseling and intervention for all victims--women, children and men--of domestic violence and sexual abuse, as well as transitional housing.
Castleberry achieved many firsts in her journalism career, including being one of the first women to sit on a newspaper's editorial board. The Press Club of Dallas honored her with its Buck Marryat Award for a lifetime of outstanding contributions, and she received an honorary degree from Southern Methodist University in 1999. In addition, she's been profiled in a documentary, "Trailblazing Texas Women," and by the Oral History Project on Women Journalists.
-- Gayle Reaves
Ida B. Wells for Bravery in Journalism Award Winner
Documentary filmmaker Salome Chasnoff has not only been transformed by her women's rights work, her work now offers transformative experiences to women and girls.
Chasnoff knew from firsthand experience that giving the tools to women to equip them to tell their stories could make those voices heard on a wider scale. While pursuing her doctorate in performance studies at Northwestern University in 1990, she worked with a group of pregnant teenagers who were sent to an alternative education program in their last trimester. According to the program director, teachers and families viewed the teens as "renegades and losers" for becoming mothers at such an early age.
"We did research and audio interviews about teen motherhood," Chasnoff says. "We read plays and did a lot of writing."
That project resulted in the movie "Looking at Teen Motherhood: The Fantastic Moms Video," which the girls felt presented a more sensitive, caring image than other films about teenage mothers.
"We made this movie and the girls came alive. They found their voices. Their stories moved people and, in turn, gave them a tremendous sense of the value of their lived experience," Chasnoff says. "All these girls who were once seen as renegades and losers became experts in the eyes of their viewers. In the process, they became community leaders."
When Chasnoff attended the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, everything she saw and heard clarified her idea for an organization that would amplify the voices of underrepresented women and girls worldwide through their own media productions.
"What was clear to me was women and girls were completely left out of the information revolution," Chasnoff says. "Women had a marginalized role in the news media and even in alternative media."
Chasnoff made a documentary about the conference, which drew about 40,000 women from around the world. That effort led to the creation of Beyondmedia in 1996 to support distribution of the documentary. In 2000, it expanded to become a nonprofit organization to provide free services to women and girls in the highest-need communities: young women with disabilities, girls in foster care, girls in low-income neighborhoods, girls at high risk of incarceration, immigrants and refugees. Beyondmedia now encompasses four programs: "Girls! Action! Media!," in which young women discuss issues of concern while learning media, arts and technology skills; "Q'd In Media," which supports lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth in organizing and educating communities; "Women and Prison," which helps incarcerated women and girls, former prisoners and their families use media arts to tell their stories; and "Teach Beyondmedia," which offers media-making skills and curricula ideas to teachers and students in public schools throughout Chicago.
"All the work we do is for social justice," Chasnoff says. "It's not just about teaching skills, but creating a more humane world."
--Vivian Lindgard
For Kathy Cloninger, the Girl Scouts aren't about selling cookies or earning merit badges. The chief executive officer of Girl Scouts of the USA sees her mission as one that expands the number and diversity of girls in the leadership pipeline throughout the country, ultimately transforming the Girl Scouts into a movement.
Cloninger's tenure at the organization--with its three million participants and nearly one million adult volunteers--has focused on developing strategies of leadership development, which is rooted in her own experience.
"I was a Girl Scout in Dallas and my mother was a troop leader," Cloninger says. "It was not a community of college grads and we couldn't afford much in way of after-school activities, so scouting is the place where I got that girl energy and learned to connect in a sisterhood. It really did change my life."
Watching her mom take charge, Cloninger says, demonstrated to her that Girl Scouts could inspire individuals to achieve beyond their comfort zones. Other causes she has been involved with over the years include working with police to assist rape survivors and helping Sissy Farenthold with her unsuccessful bids for governor of Texas in 1972 and 1974.
Cloninger has been connected with the Girl Scouts for more than 25 years, serving as CEO with Girl Scouts councils in Tennessee, Texas and Colorado.
"When I had the opportunity to come to a national leadership role, I thought, 'I've known the impact it has on girls on a community level, but I don't know if the world knows that'," Cloninger says. "I want us to have a sense, as an organization, of how big an impact we already have and unify girl scouting into one large movement."
Since becoming its CEO in 2003, Cloninger has rolled out several new initiatives to accomplish that goal, including a new national program that reflects the organization's renewed leadership focus. She has also unveiled programs that specialize in health, environmental awareness, and financial literacy.
Cloninger has also worked to expand the reach of Girl Scouting into low-income neighborhoods, both urban and rural. Under her leadership, the Girl Scouts has consolidated many of its smaller regional offices so that resources will be distributed equitably to participants and has continued to make diversity a central part of the organization's mission.
"When we improve the quality of life for girls, the whole nation is lifted up."
--Sarah Seltzer
As a young girl, Martha Diaz found feminism in hip-hop through artists like Queen Latfiah, Salt-n-Pepa, MC Lyte, Roxanne Shante and Mary J. Blige. More than a quarter-century later, she's dedicated herself to pushing its shared values because it bridges the gender, religious, race and generation gaps.
The founder of at least four major organizations dedicated to promoting the principles of hip-hop culture, Diaz is also the creator of the Womanhood Learning Project, a network of women around the world who promote women's leadership roles within hip-hop and the community. As part of that project, she created the Ladies First Fund, a grant of $2,500 that seeks to create opportunities for women of color in Newark, N.J.
"We want to provide funding and technical assistance to women who have ideas to solve problems in their community" and empower other women through social entrepreneurship, she says.
Diaz is also due to release, "Fresh, Bold, and So Def: Women In Hip-Hop Changing the Game," an educational resource book that profiles 365 international female artists, activists and entrepreneurs who are, in her words, "taking matters into their own hands and making a difference in society."
"As a first-generation Colombian American, I didn't have any of my mother's family members living in America and my father wasn't in the picture. The community became my extended family," Diaz says. "Hip-hop was the culture that helped cultivate my voice; it nurtured all of the arts during my years growing up in Paterson, N.J., in the early 1980s."
She adds that she was inspired by strong female artists and pioneers like the "Godfather" of hip-hop culture Afrika Bambaataa, a disc jockey from the Bronx, N.Y., whose Zulu Nation organization showed her the way.
"We had to cultivate the individual and the community," she says.
While working in the entertainment industry, Diaz became disillusioned with how the media degraded women and glorified the gang lifestyle through the exploitation of hip-hop music and lyrics. She began to organize the community to counteract the negative stereotypical images.
She launched the first Hip-Hop Odyssey International Film Festival in 2002 as a platform for conscientious filmmakers, artists and educators to depict another side of hip-hop culture that sends a message through "edutainment" (education and entertainment) and social justice. What started out as a showcase of just 45 movies has expanded to include more than 100 and has paved the way for Diaz to develop the Hip-Hop Association, H2ONewsreel and the Hip-Hop Education Center.
In 2008, Diaz received the NYU Reynolds Graduate Fellowship in Social Entrepreneurship to study an individualized interdisciplinary master's degree on using hip-hop culture as a tool for human rights and social change. But of all her accomplishments, she says she feels most proud that her 13- and 14-year-old daughters recognize her efforts.
"It's been hard for me to explain to them what I'm doing, but they now know I'm trying to uplift the people."
--Lauren Trapanatto
# # #
Salon.com
DECEMBER 16, 2009
The erstwhile Democrat throws yet another monkey wrench into healthcare reform plans. Can progressives recover?
BY MIKE MADDEN
WASHINGTON – The surgery complete, the great doctor finally stepped back from the operating table and paused for a moment of self-congratulation.
"We've got a great health insurance reform bill here," Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., told reporters solemnly Tuesday morning, after he had forced Democrats to jerk the bill to the right yet again to buy his vote on President Obama's top domestic policy priority. "And the danger was that some of my colleagues, I think, were just trying to load it up with too much. And what happens then is that you run the risk of losing everything." Lieberman doesn't use a scalpel when he's operating on legislation, of course; he goes for brute force instead. So what if he'd bludgeoned the patient half to death in the course of the procedure?
By the time Lieberman was done with his intervention into the healthcare reform process Tuesday, two things were clear. One, it only looked like the Democrats controlled the Senate by a filibuster-proof margin. The party that's actually running the show is an obscure, regional outfit known as the Connecticut for Lieberman Party. And the guy who was elected on its ticket -- a hack who worked his way up the ranks by showing undying devotion to the party's cause, i.e., advancing the political career of its founder -- isn't really on board for all the hope and change of 2008.
And two, the end stages of the debate over healthcare reform will essentially be a mad scramble by progressives to mitigate the damage Lieberman and conservative Democrats can do to the legislation before it passes -- and to try to convince their wavering allies that the bill is still worth supporting. What started out as a sweeping effort to change the entire healthcare system looks likely to wind up as a moderately ambitious attempt to regulate the insurance market (in exchange for a promise of millions of new customers).
"We're not going to get all that we want," said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., a leading advocate for the now-defunct public option. "But we're going to get so much more than we have." Rockefeller and most of his colleagues were singing from the same rueful hymnal. "Look at 31 million Americans who will have health insurance as a result of this bill," said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the second-ranking Senate Democrat. "How do you say to them, 'Sorry, you can't have health insurance, we think this bill could be better'? ... I'm not happy with it, I don't like the way this has happened. But at this point in time, look at where we are."
If that sounds a little like rationalization, it probably is: Chances are progressives won't be able to shift the bill back to the left much, even in a conference between the House and Senate. Keeping Lieberman on board is simply the price of doing business. Trying to pass parts of the legislation through budget reconciliation, which many liberals see as a magic bullet, might just be a fantasy. The rules of that process would mean most of the insurance reforms in the legislation get dropped. So that means Democrats need 60 votes -- and that puts Lieberman, and Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, another conservative who has refused to endorse the bill yet, in a position to exact a heavy price.
Which they've certainly done. They managed to kill not just the notion of a public health insurance option, but also the compromise Democrats had hatched just a week ago, which would have expanded Medicare a bit instead of launching a government-run insurance plan. That's not the end of the damage. To get the bill through the Senate, Democrats will probably have to fund its $900 billion price tag by taxing expensive health benefits packages, instead of with a new tax on the rich, as the House prefers. Some sort of language restricting access to abortion under the new, government-supervised insurance exchanges will be thrown in, as a sop to win Nelson's anti-choice favor. Access to Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor, won't be expanded as much as many progressives want. And yes, the bill would dole out $50 million to groups teaching abstinence-only sex education plans, which helped buy the support of Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark.
All that seems like too much to swallow for many liberals. "Honestly, the best thing to do right now is kill the Senate bill," former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean told Vermont Public Radio. "The Senate has somehow managed to turn the House's silk purse into a sow's ear," said Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., co-chairman of the House Progressive Caucus. "Without a public option and no hope of expanding Medicare coverage, this bill is not worth supporting," said Stephanie Taylor, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. Liberal blogs erupted with anger, and Taylor's group released a video targeting White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who many on the left think has manipulated the process in order to crush progressives' dreams.
But President Obama and Senate Democrats tried, even in the face of all that outrage, to remind their erstwhile allies of what else the bill does. "The final bill won't include everything that everybody wants," Obama said after meeting with Senate Democrats -- including Lieberman -- at the White House. "No bill can do that. But what I told my former colleagues today is that we simply cannot allow differences over individual elements of this plan to prevent us from meeting our responsibility to solve a long-standing and urgent problem for the American people. They are waiting for us to act."
The legislation would, after all, bar insurance companies from refusing coverage to people who are already sick. It would give federal subsidies to people who can't afford insurance coverage on their own. It would set up a regulated marketplace to shop for policies. It would set up some experiments in changing the way medical care is paid for, to reward outcomes instead of procedures, which could save the country billions of dollars down the line. It would at least alleviate, if not completely fix, the status quo, which left untouched would lead to continuing, rapid increases in premium costs for the middle class -- and continue the insurance industry's capricious practice of denying care just when it's most needed. Yes, the insurance companies would get millions of new customers, thanks to a new federal requirement that all individuals buy insurance. But is the point of reform to punish the insurers, or is it to expand access to what every other industrialized nation considers a basic human right?
It wasn't hard to see where the White House came down on that question. "These aren't small changes," Obama said. "These are big changes. They represent the most significant reform of our healthcare system since the passage of Medicare. They will save money. They will save families money; they will save businesses money; and they will save government money. And they're going to save lives." Joe Lieberman may have won the battle Tuesday. But the White House is determined to win the war.
# # #
CNN.com
December 15, 2009
Gaps found in young people's sex knowledge
By Elizabeth Landau
(CNN) -- Most sexually active unmarried young adults believe pregnancy should be planned, but about half do not use contraception regularly, according to a study published Tuesday.
The survey of 1,800 people age 18 to 29 was conducted by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.
"What is surprising is just how wide the gap is between single young adults' intentions and behavior on this very important issue," said Bill Albert, chief program officer at the organization.
Also, 29 percent of women and 42 percent of men said it is at least slightly likely they will have unprotected sex in the next three months -- and it's quite likely or extremely likely for 17 percent of women and 19 percent of men.
The discrepancy between both wanting to plan pregnancy and having unprotected sex may have something to do with a focus in recent years on abstinence-only education, said Laura Lindberg, senior research associate at the nonprofit Guttmacher Institute.
"Abstinence-only curriculums have gone explicitly out of their way to teach misconceptions about contraception," she said. "This generation of 20-somethings have missed many opportunities to get medically accurate and correct information."
Many of the people surveyed said they did not know much about contraception to begin with – 63 percent said they knew little or nothing about birth control pills, and 30 percent said they had scant knowledge about condoms.
The numbers may reflect that while most people have heard of the pill and condoms, they have never been taught how to use the pill or where to get it, or how to put on a condom, said Dr. Yolanda Wimberly, assistant professor of clinical pediatrics at the Morehouse School of Medicine and an adolescent medicine specialist with Grady Health Systems in Atlanta, Georgia.
Myths about pregnancy and sexual activity continue to permeate circles of young people. For instance, 28 percent of men incorrectly believe they will get extra protection from wearing two condoms at once, a practice that actually leads to condom breakage. At the same time, 18 percent of men wrongly believe that having sex standing up reduces the chance that they will get a female partner pregnant.
These are the kinds of myths often heard in Wimberly's office. Wimberly, who sees young people from age 12 to 30 about sexual health issues, commonly hears rumors like these that have spread among friends. Anecdotal evidence that a behavior is safe is sometimes more convincing for young adults than the recommendations of health professionals.
"If other people have been doing it, and nothing bad has happened, then they'll do it," she said. "We have definitely got to do a better job of dispelling myths."
Albert said it was shocking that about four in 10 respondents said it doesn't matter whether people use birth control, believing that people get pregnant when it's their "time."
But this was not surprising for Wimberly. She pointed out that some people are not opposed to having children in their 20s and are at a point in their lives at which they would be relatively comfortable going through with an unplanned pregnancy.
There are also exaggerated doubts and fears about birth control pills, the study said. Twenty-seven percent of women and 34 percent of men in the survey said serious health problems such as cancer are likely to result from using the pill or other hormonal contraceptives.
Experts say hormonal contraceptives are relatively safe, but according to the National Cancer Institute, oral contraceptives have been shown to increase the risk of cervical cancer, although human papillomavirus is the major risk factor for the disease.
But the known evidence does not suggest that cancer will result from the pill, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy said. The survey cites a recent Mayo Clinic study that suggested an additional 2 to 3 percent increase of developing breast cancer as a result of being on the pill.
Wimberly always goes through all the pros and cons of using the pill with her patients, including the noncontraceptive benefits. Each individual should discuss all the positives and negatives of the pill with a health care provider before deciding to use it, she said.
Nearly half the adults surveyed said they agreed that "drug companies don't care if birth control is safe; they just want people to use it so they can make money." Thirty-two percent said they agreed that "the government is trying to limit blacks and other minority populations by encouraging the use of birth control."
Still, according to a 2002 study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the leading contraceptive method among women ages 15 to 29 is the pill.
While the actual rate of infertility among people 18 to 29 years old is 8 percent, a great deal more think they may fall into that category – 59 percent of women and 49 percent of men said it is at least slightly likely they are infertile, and 75 percent of people who had concerns about fertility did not worry about it because of information from a doctor.
About half of all pregnancies in the United States are unplanned, according to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
The survey calls for more sex education for adults, given that about one in five participants said they had never had sex education in school. Colleges – both two-year and four-year – should educate students about pregnancy and contraception, and such programs should also be available in workplaces, job training sites and the military, the survey said.
Health care providers also have a role to play in ensuring that young people know all their options for family planning, and in providing patients with these methods, the report said.
Wimberly added that other community-based venues such as churches, community centers, hospitals and after-school programs could all disseminate information about contraception and family planning.
Parents can also play a big role in helping educate their children about these issues, Albert said.
The survey also touches on a distrust of the health care system more generally, Lindberg said. The challenge is to "create more positive attitudes and make health care providers and the health care system feel like a safe and trusting place," she said.
# # #
TIME Magazine
DECEMBER 7, 2009
Study: Parents' Sex Talks With Kids Happening Too Late
BY ALICE PARK
The sex talk is never easy. It's not comfortable for anyone involved - parents are afraid of it, children are mortified by it - which is probably why the Talk so often comes after the fact. In the latest study on parent-child talks about sex and sexuality, researchers found that more than 40% of adolescents had had intercourse before talking to their parents about safe sex, birth control or sexually transmitted diseases.
That trend is troublesome, say experts, since teens who talk to their parents about sex are more likely to delay their first sexual encounter and to practice safe sex when they do become sexually active. And, ironically, despite their apparent dread, kids really want to learn about sex from their parents, according to study after study on the topic.
"The results didn't surprise me," says Dr. Mark Schuster, one of the authors of the new study, published in Pediatrics, and chief of general pediatrics at Children's Hospital Boston. "But there's something about having actual data that serves as a wakeup call to parents who are not talking to their kids about very important issues until later than we think would be best."
The study involved 141 families enrolled in the Talking Parents, Healthy Teens program, organized by the University of California Los Angeles/Rand Center for Adolescent Health Promotion and overseen by Schuster. Parents and their children, aged 13 to 17, responded to questions about 24 issues regarding sex and sexuality, including how women become pregnant, body changes that occur during puberty, how to use condoms and birth control, as well as issues around homosexuality.
Researchers asked both parents and their children, separately, when they had first discussed each topic, and compared that information to teens' self-reports about their engagement in three specific categories of sexual behavior - hand-holding or kissing; genital touching or oral sex; and intercourse. Families were surveyed four times, once at the beginning of the study, then again at three, six and 12 months.
By the end of the study, more than half of the parents reported that they had not discussed 14 of the 24 sex-related topics by the time their adolescents had begun genital touching or oral sex with partners. Forty-two percent of girls reported that they had not discussed the effectiveness of birth control and 40% admitted they had not talked with their parents about how to refuse sex before engaging in genital touching. Nearly 70% of boys said they had not discussed how to use a condom or other birth control methods with their parents before having intercourse. Yet only half of the boys' parents, by contrast, said they had not discussed condom use or birth control with their sons.
That difference highlights a primary problem in the parent-child dialogue about sex. "A lot of parents think they had a conversation, and the kids don't remember it at all," says Dr. Karen Soren, director of adolescent medicine at New York Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital. "Parents sometimes say things more vaguely because they are uncomfortable and they think they've addressed something, but the kids don't hear the topic at all."
It's incredibly difficult to broach the topic of sex, admits Soren, who has three children of her own. "Your kids look at you like you're crazy, and you feel like you want to run," she says. "But it's important because we know good parent-child interaction gives kids better resiliency later on in life."
As the latest study shows, parental talks about sex and sexuality need to occur much earlier than they do, but that doesn't necessarily mean that parents have only one shot at getting it right. To make things easier, and to take some of the pressure off of the situation, say experts, parents should think about sex talks as an ongoing dialogue, rather than one uncomfortable discussion that they must cross off their list. And they should keep in mind that they've probably internalized the same discomfort and avoidance that their own parents displayed in talking about sex - but sex talks needn't be so fraught. Experts also say that parents should discuss certain issues with their children at age-appropriate times, and that the discussion should evolve as children mature. "A 12-year-old will look at sex very differently than a 15- or an 18-year-old," says Soren. "For kids between 10 and 13, the idea of sex grosses them out. So you're probably not going to tell a 13-year-old necessarily all about different methods of birth control."
Instead, the conversations should focus on what the child is capable of absorbing, and what the child asks about. Parents should also take advantage of every excuse to broach the difficult subject - a mention of sex or sexuality on a TV show, a pregnancy in the family, sex education classes in school, or a visit to the doctor around the time of puberty. "If you just get over the hurdle of starting, then once the conversation gets going, you often find it's easier than expected," says Schuster. "So use any excuse you want, but just get over the initial hurdle and start talking to your kids, because it's really important."
# # #
Salon.com
DECEMBER 2, 2009
Slap on a pink ribbon, call it a day
That little loop seems to have replaced real feminism, which is why women's health priorities are so screwed up
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Has feminism been replaced by the pink-ribbon breast cancer cult? When the House of Representatives passed the Stupak amendment, which would take abortion rights away even from women who have private insurance, the female response ranged from muted to inaudible.
A few weeks later, when the United States Preventive Services Task Force recommended that regular screening mammography not start until age 50, all hell broke loose. Sheryl Crow, Whoopi Goldberg, and Olivia Newton-John raised their voices in protest; a few dozen non-boldface women picketed the Department of Health and Human Services. If you didn’t look too closely, it almost seemed as if the women’s health movement of the 1970s and 1980s had returned in full force.
Never mind that Dr. Susan Love, author of what the New York Times dubbed "the bible for women with breast cancer," endorses the new guidelines along with leading women’s health groups like Breast Cancer Action, the National Breast Cancer Coalition, and the National Women’s Health Network (NWHN). For years, these groups have been warning about the excessive use of screening mammography in the U.S., which carries its own dangers and leads to no detectible lowering of breast cancer mortality relative to less mammogram-happy nations.
Nonetheless, on CNN last week, we had the unsettling spectacle of NWHN director and noted women’s health advocate Cindy Pearson speaking out for the new guidelines, while ordinary women lined up to attribute their survival from the disease to mammography. Once upon a time, grassroots women challenged the establishment by figuratively burning their bras. Now, in some masochistic perversion of feminism, they are raising their voices to yell, "Squeeze our tits!"
When the Stupak anti-choice amendment passed, and so entered the health reform bill, no congressional representative stood up on the floor of the House to recount how access to abortion had saved her life or her family’s well-being. And where were the tea-baggers when we needed them? If anything represents the true danger of "government involvement" in healthcare, it’s a health reform bill that -- if the Senate enacts something similar -- will snatch away all but the wealthiest women’s right to choose.
It’s not just that abortion is deemed a morally trickier issue than mammography. To some extent, pink-ribbon culture has replaced feminism as a focus of female identity and solidarity. When a corporation wants to signal that it’s "woman friendly," what does it do? It stamps a pink ribbon on its widget and proclaims that some miniscule portion of the profits will go to breast cancer research. I’ve even seen a bottle of Shiraz called "Hope" with a pink ribbon on its label, but no information, alas, on how much you have to drink to achieve the promised effect. When Laura Bush traveled to Saudi Arabia in 2007, what grave issue did she take up with the locals? Not women’s rights (to drive, to go outside without a man, etc.), but "breast cancer awareness." In the post-feminist United States, issues like rape, domestic violence, and unwanted pregnancy seem to be too edgy for much public discussion, but breast cancer is all apple pie.
So welcome to the Women’s Movement 2.0: Instead of the proud female symbol -- a circle on top of a cross -- we have a droopy ribbon. Instead of embracing the full spectrum of human colors -- black, brown, red, yellow, and white -- we stick to princess pink. While we used to march in protest against sexist laws and practices, now we race or walk "for the cure." And while we once sought full "consciousness" of all that oppresses us, now we’re content to achieve "awareness," which has come to mean one thing -- dutifully baring our breasts for the annual mammogram.
Look, the issue here isn’t healthcare costs. If the current levels of screening mammography demonstrably saved lives, I would say go for it, and damn the expense. But the numbers are increasingly insistent: Routine mammographic screening of women under 50 does not reduce breast cancer mortality in that group, nor do older women necessarily need an annual mammogram. In fact, the whole dogma about "early detection" is shaky, as Susan Love reminds us: the idea has been to catch cancers early, when they’re still small, but some tiny cancers are viciously aggressive, and some large ones aren’t going anywhere.
One response to the new guidelines has been that numbers don’t matter -- only individuals do -- and if just one life is saved, that’s good enough. So OK, let me cite my own individual experience. In 2000, at the age of 59, I was diagnosed with Stage II breast cancer on the basis of one dubious mammogram followed by a really bad one, followed by a biopsy. Maybe I should be grateful that the cancer was detected in time, but the truth is, I’m not sure whether these mammograms detected the tumor or, along with many earlier ones, contributed to it: One known environmental cause of breast cancer is radiation, in amounts easily accumulated through regular mammography.
And why was I bothering with this mammogram in the first place? I had long ago made the decision not to spend my golden years undergoing cancer surveillance, but I wanted to get my Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) prescription renewed, and the nurse practitioner wouldn’t do that without a fresh mammogram.
As for the HRT, I was taking it because I had been convinced, by the prevailing medical propaganda, that HRT helps prevent heart disease and Alzheimer’s. In 2002, we found out that HRT is itself a risk factor for breast cancer (as well as being ineffective at warding off heart disease and Alzheimer’s), but we didn’t know that in 2000. So did I get breast cancer because of the HRT -- and possibly because of the mammograms themselves -- or did HRT lead to the detection of a cancer I would have gotten anyway?
I don’t know, but I do know that that biopsy was followed by the worst six months of my life, spent bald and barfing my way through chemotherapy. This is what’s at stake here: Not only the possibility that some women may die because their cancers go undetected, but that many others will lose months or years of their lives to debilitating and possibly unnecessary treatments.
You don’t have to be suffering from "chemobrain" (chemotherapy-induced cognitive decline) to discern evil, iatrogenic, profit-driven forces at work here. In a recent column on the new guidelines, patient-advocate Naomi Freundlich raises the possibility that "entrenched interests -- in screening, surgery, chemotherapy and other treatments associated with diagnosing more and more cancers -- are impeding scientific evidence." I am particularly suspicious of the oncologists, who saw their incomes soar starting in the late 80s when they began administering and selling chemotherapy drugs themselves in their ghastly, pink-themed, "chemotherapy suites." Mammograms recruit women into chemotherapy, and of course, the pink-ribbon cult recruits women into mammography.
What we really need is a new women’s health movement, one that’s sharp and skeptical enough to ask all the hard questions: What are the environmental (or possibly life-style) causes of the breast cancer epidemic? Why are existing treatments like chemotherapy so toxic and heavy-handed? And, if the old narrative of cancer’s progression from "early" to "late" stages no longer holds, what is the course of this disease (or diseases)? What we don’t need, no matter how pretty and pink, is a ladies’ auxiliary to the cancer-industrial complex.
# # #
SLATE.com
NOVEMBER 25, 2009
Sign Them Up
Baltimore tells crisis pregnancy centers just to be themselves.
BY EMILY BAZELON
The Baltimore City Council went where no local government has gone before, it seems, in telling crisis pregnancy centers in the city this week that they have to put up signs saying they don't provide abortion or birth control.
At first glance, this seems suspect. Since when do governments go around demanding that particular groups put up any sort of signs, much less signs that specify what they don't do? Why should the city council single out these centers for distrust, compelled speech, and a form of punishment? And why would any woman walking into such a center expect to hear about abortion and birth control, anyway?
The answer to all these questions begins with the way in which the centers present themselves. They can be all about bait-and-switch. They hang their shingle out near a Planned Parenthood affiliate with a vague-sounding "pregnancy clinic" label. Some promise "all-options" pregnancy counseling or even, over the phone, information about abortion. They offer pregnancy tests and, with increasing frequency, ultrasounds to women who test positive. And then they lobby hard and exclusively for the mother to keep the baby or go the route of adoption. They give out diapers and baby clothes but no condoms. And if they talk about abortion, it's usually to falsely malign the procedure, claiming that it increases the risk of breast cancer or suicide or infertility (no good research supports any of those propositions).
We know these crisis pregnancy centers are trading in false information because of two separate investigations. In 2006, the office of Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., asked investigators to call 23 crisis pregnancy centers. (The two biggest networks are Care Net and Heartbeat International; there are solo operators out there as well, representing a total of between 2,500 and 4,000 in the United States.) The Waxman report found that 20 of the 23, or 87 percent, wrongly tied abortion to breast cancer or infertility or mental illness in the information provided. These amounted to rampant government-funded lies, since the Bush administration funneled $60 million to crisis pregnancy centers between 2001 and 2005.
The second investigation, from 2008, is by NARAL Pro-Choice Maryland. Its investigators visited 11 centers in that state. By its account, 90 percent of the centers would discuss only abstinence or "natural family planning" as means of birth control. And every single one offered up some piece of false information. Some of the centers issued the usual litany of unsupported threats about suicide and breast cancer and infertility. And some got creative. One investigator said she was a Latina immigrant and was told it would be "very, very difficult" for her to get an abortion without legal resident status (false). At another center, a male counselor locked the door and acted "controlling and intimidating," the NARAL report states (nice). Think ACORN of the right, but without the video.
The NARAL report says that one center in Bowie, Md., states in its newsletter that 69 percent of the women who come in are under the age of 24. So you could argue that all the made-up misconceptions about abortion are also being poured into the ears of a population of women who are more vulnerable because they're younger and relatively inexperienced.
In the end, the Baltimore city council's vote protects consumers from false and misleading advertising. That's a position governments often take, and there's a whole branch of law, commercial speech, to explain why false advertising gets less First Amendment protection. The council decided to treat the crisis pregnancy centers differently than other groups because they're pretending to be something they're not (and then lying about the risks of abortion once they've gotten clients in the door). Eliot Spitzer similarly went after the centers for false advertising when he was New York attorney general. He investigated 24 of them and issued subpoenas to 11, saying they were violating a 1995 consent decree in which they'd promised not to misrepresent the services they offered.
The fight over how crisis pregnancy centers identify themselves is an old one that courts ruled on and Congress debated in the 1990s. And, of course, as with all things abortion, we remain deeply divided about them. A bill like the one that passed in Baltimore didn't get out of committee in the Maryland Legislature two years ago, says Planned Parenthood President and CEO John Nugent. A similar bill proposed in Congress in 2006 didn't go anywhere, either. There's also a battle over government money: A bunch of states fund the centers directly or through Choose Life license plates (which the courts are also divided about). But pro-choice groups got the Obama administration to kill the federal funding for the centers in the 2010 budget, when the White House cut off federal money for abstinence-only education.
All of which is to say that it's not clear who, if anyone, might follow the precedent Baltimore set this week. If, in fact, the measure becomes law—the mayor, who has troubles of her own, has three weeks to sign it or veto; if she does nothing, Nugent says, the new law stands. Assuming Baltimore goes forward with this bill, it will clear up some confusion and also cause some bitterness. The crisis pregnancy centers complain they're being singled out unfairly. An opponent of the bill on the city council said Planned Parenthood should be ordered to post signs, too.
Saying what, though—what does Planned Parenthood say it provides that it doesn't actually offer? "We have an obligation to do nondirective counseling," Nugent says. "For anyone who comes in and has a positive pregnancy test, we have to go through the options. That includes referring women for prenatal care, talking about keeping the baby, providing referrals to adoption agencies, and then also providing information about terminating the pregnancy. The only difference between us and any other ob-gyn is that we don't do deliveries."
My colleague Rachael Larimore draws a parallel between the Baltimore ordinance and moves by Oklahoma and South Dakota to force doctors to recite a certain script to women who are having abortions. Rachael's point is that if libertarians are willing to abide the scripts for the abortion providers, they have to accept the signs outside the crisis pregnancy centers, too. I see this in spirit, but I don't buy the parallel. The script ordered up by the South Dakota Legislature isn't designed to clear up confusion or ensure that women give informed consent. More like misinformed consent, since the South Dakota script repeats the untruth that abortion is linked to an increased risk of suicide, never mind that there's no good research to support this. It's easier to style the Oklahoma law that mandates an ultrasound before an abortion as a source of accurate information, since that's what ultrasounds provide. But Oklahoma doesn't tell doctors to make ultrasounds available to women who want them. It instructs abortion providers to provide the ultrasound or else. It's the extra dose of paternalism that's hard to swallow.
Baltimore, on the other hand, isn't telling the crisis pregnancy centers what to say after a woman walks in the door (despite all the made-up trashing of abortion that ensues). The city council just wants women to know what they're getting. The proposed signs would make clear what the crisis pregnancy centers are and what they're not. If they're playing it straight and owning their identity, in the end what's the problem?
# # #
The Boston Globe
NOVEMBER 19, 2009
Taking a hit on health care? Why, that's women's work
BY Joan Vennochi | EDITORIAL OPINION
WOMEN MUST always fight to make sure they are not thrown under the political bus.
The latest example is health care reform.
First, women were on the losing end of the Stupak-Pitts Amendment, adopted by the House of Representatives, just before it passed its health reform bill. The amendment prohibits any taxpayer-subsidized health care plan from covering abortions.
Every pro-choice lawmaker who voted for it - including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful woman in Washington - argues it was more important to advance the overall reform agenda than to let abortion rights trip it up.
The abortion language that majority leader Harry Reid included in the Senate bill unveiled last night is less restrictive than the House version. But the fight isn't over. The Stupak amendment empowered the antiabortion movement, especially the Catholic Church. They will press hard, knowing how much Democrats want a health care bill.
Democrats, including President Obama, could be forced to accept the same argument as Pelosi: The perfect is the enemy of the possible, when women's rights represent the perfect.
Now, a government panel is telling women in their 40s that they don't need routine mammograms. According to the US Preventive Services Task Force, the benefits of screening are supposedly outweighed by the potential for unnecessary tests and procedures and the anxiety they might cause.
You want anxious women? Take away health insurance coverage for routine mammograms.
Yes, these are simply guidelines; they are not yet part of any legislative proposal. The panel said it did not consider costs in the analysis.
On their face, they don't stop any woman who wants a mammogram from getting one at any age.
But the panel's guidelines can help health insurance companies position themselves down the road for this high anxiety-inducing outcome - the denial of coverage for routine mammograms for women between the ages of 40 and 49.
That, in turn, creates a two-tier health care system: Those who can afford to pay for screening on their own, and those who can't. Those who can't afford it are left to ponder the somber words of Dr. Daniel Kopans, a radiologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center.
Kopans told The Globe that the panel's recommendations ``will condemn women ages 40 to 49 to unnecessary deaths from breast cancer.'' Maybe Sarah Palin's ``death panel'' warning isn't hyperbole after all.
Health care reform requires trade-offs. It's built on the principle of ``shared responsibility.'' Individuals must have coverage. Employers must provide coverage. The government will help those who can't afford it. In the end, millions of Americans who don't have coverage now will be covered. It's a noble goal, embraced by Obama and promoted by the Democratic leadership.
And somehow, health care costs will be reduced. But, at whose expense will those reductions come?
As women are finding out, every aspect of health care reform won't be win-win for everyone. Cost control is a necessary part of the reform equation. But no one has yet cut treatment for erectile dysfunction. Why are women the first losers out of the reform box?
It's disappointing, especially given Pelosi's position. Her defense of what happened regarding the Stupak amendment provides coverto every man in Congress, not to mention the one in the White House. Pelosi may believe, as she has said, that the greater good was served by advancing a bill and relying on the Senate to remove the abortion restriction. But if it turns out the restriction remains, how ironic will it be that a major setback on abortion rights advanced on the watch of the first female, pro-choice speaker of the House?
If that happens, it is more evidence that women are the first to be sacrificed in the name of political compromise.
As for those recommendations regarding mammograms, that is more evidence that when you need to cut corners, women are at the head of the line.
It's all about the greater good, the argument goes. The first headlines out of Washington show that women should pay close attention to what they are being asked to give up in the name of health care reform.
# # #
The Dallas Morning News | Letters to the Editor
Fri, Nov 13, 2009
An approach to sex education
My church says: Let's talk about sex. We teach our children and youth about sex, their bodies and their choices about becoming sexual beings.
Thirty years ago, at age 14, I sat in my Unitarian Universalist classroom looking at tastefully drawn pictures of body parts and sex positions.
Today, the class is called Our Whole Lives. What we learned then, and teach now, is that abstinence is not the answer. The answer is knowledge, self-respect, self-love, appropriate friendships and boundaries, and that sex is natural and wonderful.
As Texas school systems struggle with questions about how to help sexually active, hormonally driven teens avoid pregnancy, I say that we have the answer.
It's time to get real about our children's health and well-being. Maybe then we can stop abstinence-only educational policies and actually reduce the number of teen pregnancies.
We don't deny youth the reality of natural drives within their bodies or just tell them, "Don't do it."
For the sake of our kids, let’s talk about sex.
The Rev. Daniel Kanter, Dallas
# # #
The Oregonian
November 10, 2009
Feds accuse Eugene man of threatening to blow up Planned Parenthood
BY BRYAN DENSON
Eugene, Ore., Nov. 11 (UPI) – I Federal authorities have accused a Eugene man of threatening to bomb a Planned Parenthood clinic after a series of phone threats last year to then-University of Oregon president David Frohnmayer, a Masonic Lodge and a local doctor.
Gregory Paul Freeman, 56, was charged Monday by criminal information with threatening to damage or destroy the Planned Parenthood clinic on Eugene's Danebo Avenue last Dec. 30.
Eugene police began looking into a series of strange phone threats on Oct. 1, 2008, when an officer stopped by the home of David and Lynn Frohnmayer to listen to an anti-Semitic threat left on their phone.
David Frohnmayer, 69, is a familiar figure in Oregon politics and public service. He served three terms in the state House of Representatives and was attorney general from 1981 to 1991. He also served as the dean of the University of Oregon School of Law before taking over as the university's 15th president in July 1994. He announced his retirement last spring.
Police checked phone records and found that the Oct. 1 threat left on the Frohnmayers' answering machine -- along with three similar threats -- were placed with a prepaid wireless card.
In late November, Eugene police responded to another report of anti-Semitic phone harassment at Eugene's Masonic Lodge 11. The anonymous caller's voice said, "I'm going to burn your house down. Because you suck. You understand that? You and your (expletive) Jews. You get the (expletive) out of town."
Police believed calls to the Frohnmayer residence and the Masonic Lodge were placed by the same man. They traced the calls to a local phone number. Officer Dallas Hall placed a call to the number on Dec. 2, 2008. Her voicemail picked up a response the next day telling her not to call back again.
"And in the meantime, you go down and blow up an abortion clinic," the caller said. "You get that? ... You go to church and you go to blow up an abortion clinic."
A day later, a man called to say Hall had phoned his number by mistake and that he was calling her from Liberty Bank, where he uses their phone sometimes. So Hall drove over to Liberty Bank, reviewed surveillance footage and talked with the operations manager, who helped identify Freeman as possibly being the man who called her. Bank records identified Freeman's home address and a phone number matching the one behind the earlier threats.
The call to the Planned Parenthood came on Dec. 30, 2008: "Uh, please go ahead and dial the, uh, United States of America, because I'm going to burn your abortion clinic down because you are a baby killer and you hate babies. ... You go and get sick and you go back to Portland and get sick there, and get sick there or I'm going to blow your (expletive) abortion clinic up."
According to the FBI affidavit, police eventually learned that Freeman had made threatening calls to Dr. Howard R. Sampley, a physician at a local hospital. Freeman has not been charged with making those calls and those placed to the Masonic Lodge or Frohnmayer.
# # #
Slate Magazine
November 9, 2009
Semi-Private Womb
BY WILLIAM SALETAN
Abortion rights have been sold out for health care reform.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi couldn't round up enough votes for her party's health care bill without pro-life Democrats. So on Friday night, she agreed to let the House vote on an amendment to restrict abortion coverage under subsidized insurance plans. Everybody knew the amendment would pass. To get the bill through, Pelosi traded away abortion.
Naral Pro-Choice America is furious. It points out that more than 85 percent of private health insurance plans cover abortion. By forbidding such plans from competing in the new, lucrative federally supervised insurance exchanges, the bill would force them to drop abortion coverage. This would eliminate such coverage even for policyholders who pay their own way-"a radical departure from the status quo," the group complains.
The Planned Parenthood Federation of America seems even angrier. On Saturday, it announced its opposition to the House bill. According to PPFA President Cecile Richards, the bill strips women of abortion coverage even "in the private health insurance market" and leaves them "worse off after health care reform than they are today, violating President Obama's promise to the American people that no one would be forced to lose her or his present coverage under health reform."
Welcome to socialism.
I don't mean to exaggerate the House and Senate bills. They don't nationalize medicine or set up a single-payer system. As socialism goes, they're modest. But they do mandate, standardize, and subsidize health insurance. They mix public with private. And when you do that, you invite public-sector problems into matters that used to be nobody's business.
One of these problems is that people don't like their tax money being used for procedures that offend them. You may think that's stupid. You may point out that your tax money is used for wars you don't like. But you don't have two or three dozen swing votes in the House. Pro-life Democrats do. They don't have the clout to ban abortion, but they have the clout to keep tax money from paying for it.
Until health care reform came along, this wasn't your problem. It was a problem for women who depended on public programs like Medicaid. But you wanted a better world. You wanted health insurance for everyone, and you wanted the government to help pay for it. Congratulations. You've brought the tax moralists into your life.
Pro-lifers say the health insurance abortion restriction, known as the Stupak amendment, is just an extension of the Medicaid abortion restriction, known as the Hyde amendment. Pro-choicers say the Stupak amendment is much more invasive. The pro-choicers are right. But pro-lifers didn't create that difference. Democrats did. By mixing public and private health care, they complicated the separation of taxation from abortion. If pro-lifers can't keep their money out of the insurance exchanges, they'll fight to keep the insurance exchanges out of abortion.
Granted, there are less onerous ways to interpret the no-taxes-for-abortion principle. Pelosi tried to sell these alternatives to the pro-life Democrats. They weren't buying.
There's something poignant about the last-minute outrage of the pro-choice groups. The complaints they're leveling-that people had more choices in the private market, that the House bill radically upsets this market, and that it violates Obama's promise not to deprive anyone of their existing coverage-are hardly novel. Republicans have issued such warnings all year. But liberals didn't pay attention until the coverage in jeopardy was abortion.
I'm not saying we shouldn't socialize health insurance. I'm pretty comfortable with the House and Senate bills. But let's give up the two lies we tell ourselves about such legislation. One is that it won't cost us much money. The other is that it won't cost us much choice. When you throw in your lot with other people and agree to play by the same rules, you surrender some of your freedom and risk losing some of your options. Sometimes it's coverage of an MRI or a hip replacement. Sometimes it's coverage of abortion. If that's the price of health care reform, are you willing to pay it?
# # #
The Dallas Morning News
November 9, 2009
Texas sex educators take tentative steps beyond abstinence
BY JESSICA MEYERS
Parents at the McKinney school district's curriculum information night were talking condoms. And some were frustrated that district officials weren't.
"Where would I find it?" McKinney mother Melissa Willardson asked as she searched for "condoms" in the glossary of a state-approved health textbook. "Where's the word?"
Her response – consternation rather than headstrong support for the district's approach – is becoming increasingly prevalent in North Texas schools traditionally known for their staunch abstinence-only approach.
Districts are rethinking what they can and should be teaching because of cuts in federal funding, a new state law that requires more parental involvement in sex-education decisions, and increasing reports about Texas' high teenage pregnancy rate. Some districts are considering compromises along the lines of "abstinence-plus," a curriculum that warns of the perils of early sexual activity while also discussing more comprehensive methods of prevention.
"Lots of districts" are looking into alternatives, said Renee Putter, the director of athletics and the P.E. and health coordinator for the Carrollton-Farmers Branch school district. Her inbox is full of e-mails from other North Texas administrators asking about curriculum options.
"When you see the alarming percentage and numbers of kids pregnant vs. the national average, you start to wonder what everyone is doing that they are so high," she said.
That's motivated the district, which uses an abstinence-based program that refrains from more detailed discussion of contraception, to "see what else is out there," she said.
The Denton school district, which has professionals speak to students one day a year, is also seeking to expand its human sexuality curriculum. The Irving district has raised the idea of using Big Decisions, a curriculum that discusses birth control options. And abstinence-plus is on the agenda for the Dallas district's next school health advisory council meeting.
Sad statistics
Texas is regularly singled out for its clashing statistics. More government money is spent on abstinence education here than any other state, but Texas leads the country in the percentage of teen mothers who've given birth more than once. It has the country's third-highest teen birth rate.
Tracey Bark, a Frisco High junior, said sex ed got about a chapter's worth in her freshman health class. The district uses several abstinence-centered programs starting in sixth grade.
"They just kind of say, 'Don't do it,' " Bark said. "And then before prom, they say, 'Don't go to Motel 6.' "
Districts aren't the only ones reassessing.
The Obama administration has sought to eliminate $145 million in funding for abstinence education programs and instead spend $164 million on teen pregnancy prevention programs that could include talk about contraception. The Senate Finance Committee approved the restoration of $50 million of that abstinence funding in its health care overhaul bill, although the measure has yet to pass Congress.
"Because of available funds, many states were teaching abstinence-only programs," said Bill Albert, spokesman for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.
Without those public dollars, Albert predicts there would be little, if any, focus on abstinence-only programs going forward.
The Texas Legislature also may have renewed sex-ed talk locally – albeit less directly. A newly amended law requires that districts spell out their human sexuality curriculum to parents. It also stipulates that school health advisory councils meet four times a year and consist of at least five members, a majority of whom are parents.
Pressure on districts
"We've found that most parents think their local districts are teaching more," said Dan Quinn of the Texas Freedom Network, an Austin-based nonprofit that advocates comprehensive sex education. "With more parents knowing what is going on, there is pressure on districts to do the right thing."
Sex education is not mandatory in Texas, but if taught, it must emphasize abstinence and "teach contraception and condom use in terms of human use reality rates instead of theoretical laboratory rates," according to the Texas Education Code.
Such ambiguous language leaves districts barely touching on birth control or teaching nothing at all, Quinn said. "It's a political hot potato, but we need responsible, medically accurate information, and students are just not getting that now."
The Texas Freedom Network Education Fund, a branch of the Austin-based group, released a report this year stating that 94 percent of Texas districts rely on abstinence-only education. Less than 4 percent teach inaccurate information about contraception, the report said, and a little more than 2 percent teach nothing at all.
The Plano district is one of a handful in Texas that actively teach abstinence-plus.
"It's not like I had to fight for it," said Melinda Smith, Plano's coordinator of health for secondary schools. "This is a place where we want students to be informed of all the facts."
But abstinence proponents say the new tone could misfire.
"Kids need to know about contraceptives and that they're not foolproof," said Marilyn Morris, who runs Plano-based Aim for Success, the country's largest provider of sexual abstinence programs. "They need to realize if they use ... [contraception], they could still get pregnant and diseases."
A majority of districts appear to respect that philosophy. Aim for Success, which functions on private funding, is seeing no district pull out.
The sexual education terrain is treacherous. With little guidance from the state, districts must determine the boundary between instructor and advocate. And labels don't always fit programs or courses that vary with each district's needs.
This variation surprised Joy Williams, the McKinney district's P.E. and health specialist, who led the recent curriculum night for parents. When she arrived two years ago, no human sexuality information was taught at the middle school level. For the first time this year, seventh- and eighth-graders will learn about personal health, including sex, in P.E. classes.
For now, at least, the shift stops there.
"Condoms? We say there's absolutely such a thing," Williams said, looking out at an auditorium of mothers with their hands raised. "But we push abstinence, so if you want more information, go talk to your parents."
# # #
Jezebel.com
Nov. 5, 2009
Three Feminists On Dirty Words, Pop Culture, And The Language Of Choice
On November 4, the Planned Parenthood NYC Action Fund brought together Jessica Valenti of Feministing, Lynn Harris of Broadsheet, and longtime reproductive rights activist and writer Gloria Feldt to discuss everything from feminist pop culture to whether "feminism" is a dirty word.
The evening seemed to focus on how we talk about feminism, perhaps because it's what all three panelists (that's not them in the pic) do in their jobs, but also because issues of language and rhetoric are a really important part of being a feminist in the larger world. The conversation touched on blog comments ” which all three agreed were like a more public version of 1970s consciousness-raising groups ” before zeroing in on the word "feminist" itself. Valenti said she embraced the word, and that there was no point in picking another, less loaded term because "I think any word you use to talk about women's rights is going to become a dirty word." Feldt concurred: "the first thing people do to you when they want to diminish you is they diminish you with language."
Unfortunately, the panelists seemed to feel that a successful diminution had occurred in the linguistic fight between words "pro-choice" and "pro-life." Harris said she had stopped using the term "pro-choice" in writing because "we lost that rhetorical war" ” because anti-abortion advocates had successfully cast "life" as representing the moral high ground, and "choice" as somehow frivolous. I get what she was saying ” I, in fact, stopped using "pro-life" in writing a while ago, in response to a consciousness-raising comment on this blog, no less. But I still use "pro-choice," because even though the opposition tries to frame the term as superficial ” like choosing between different flavors of gum ” I think it still stands powerfully for a woman's right to self-determination and autonomy. And I think that any substitute term ” Harris mentioned "pro-abortion rights" and "pro-reproductive rights" ” will be demonized just as "pro-choice" has been. To paraphrase Valenti, any word you use to talk about a woman's control over her own body is going to become, for some people, a dirty word.
In some ways, the highlight of the evening for me was when a college student asked how she could explain her views to her non-feminist friends without "coming off as a caricature of myself." I'm a lot older than her, and this is something I still struggle with. It's also something I feel a little bit guilty about ” now that I'm a professional feminist, maybe I shouldn't be worrying about how I come off. But Valenti took her question seriously, saying it was actually one she was asked all the time. She told the young woman that "pop culture is a great entry point for these conversations," and she's right ” as a shared language, movies and TV and even gossip can be a way not only for feminists to start a conversation with not-yet-feminists, but for young people still experimenting with feminism to hone their views. When I first started blogging, I wrote a lot about Kate Moss and the Olsen twins, and although most of what I wrote looks sophomoric now (and sometimes, unfortunately, mean), it was a way for me to get comfortable having opinions and making them public. I still don't like making a harsh distinction between "fluffy" and "serious" subjects, and I think Valenti's right that an ostensibly superficial conversation about some celebrity or movie can actually lead into a real discussion of values.
Harris, too, had a suggestion for the student ” "be yourself." She apologized for the cheesiness of her tip, but she had a good point ” teaching your friends about feminism can be as much about modeling behavior as it is about explicitly explaining your political views. Just by admitting that you're mad when you're mad, and not saying you agree when you don't, and refusing to body-snark on yourself and other women, and generally standing up for what you know is right, whether it involves women or not, you can show everyone you know that (to quote a T-shirt Valenti name-checks in Full Frontal Feminism) "this is what a feminist looks like" ” and you'll make feminism look pretty good. In fact, even though I still have it from time to time, I do think the worry about looking like "a caricature" comes from feminism's enemies, from people who think a woman criticizing anything is cartoonish and shrill. For these people, just as "feminism" and "pro-choice" are dirty words, speaking up may be a dirty act, no matter how you do it. But for, I hope, a larger number of people, women and men, speaking up is just something they aren't familiar with yet, something they haven't quite learned to do. I hope the college student who so handily voiced my worries last night keeps on showing them how.
# # #
Star-Telegram
Oct. 23, 2009
Opinion sought on dispensing abortion drug
By TIM MADIGAN
A state legislator has asked Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott to clarify whether medical facilities that routinely dispense an abortion-inducing drug should be licensed by the state.
The drug, mifepristone, or RU-486, was approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration in 2000 and has accounted for a growing percentage of early-term abortions ever since. Under Texas law, medical facilities that perform more than 50 abortions a year must be licensed. But Rep. Frank Corte Jr., R-San Antonio, said there is some question about whether the licensing law covers drug-induced abortions.
"It may be perceived by some as a gray area," said Corte, who sought the attorney general’s opinion in an Oct. 5 letter. "What they’re doing is the same thing as a surgical process, with the same end result. We need to have a clear understanding of what our law says.
"This is the question it goes back to," Corte said. "Who are these folks [dispensing the drug]? They may be very qualified to dispense the item, but they need to be licensed facilities so we know for sure."
A spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of North Texas said Friday that Corte’s request is part of an ongoing effort to discourage abortions.
"From our point of view, the anti-choice people are perpetually looking for creative ways to block women from having a legal abortion," said Holly Morgan of Planned Parenthood. "It sounds like he’s doing something to try and label and shame doctors from doing what is their legal right and obligation as physicians."
But even if Abbott agrees with Corte, the opinion might have little practical effect on physicians, Morgan said.
"Anyone who does offer RU-486 already has that distinction [as an abortion provider] in their practice," she said. "I’m not sure what the point is."
Because Corte is chairman of the House Committee on Defense and Veterans Affairs, Texas law requires Abbott to answer his request with a legal opinion. Abbott’s office has 180 days from the time the request was received.
"What he says will tell the Legislature if there needs to be legislation or not," Corte said. "I’m not trying to make providers stop doing what they’re doing if they believe that’s what they want to do. But I do think that as medical procedures change, those seeking medical treatment should have licensed folks doing that." It may be perceived by some as a gray area."
# # #
The Economist, print edition
Oct 8th 2009
Teenage pregnancies: Growing pains
After a long, steady fall, a troubling rise
AUSTIN – SOME blame demography, others the recession. It might have something to with gender roles, or the steady stream of mixed messages about being a teenage mum. Perhaps sexually transmitted infections are not the deterrent they once were. Or maybe everyone is suffering from a touch of “prevention fatigue”.
On one point, however, experts agree: when it comes to teenage births, the United States is backsliding. Between 1991 and 2005 the teenage birth rate declined by 34%, according to the National Centre for Health Statistics. Between 2005 and 2007, the last year for which statistics are available, it crept up 5%.
Teenage births are nothing new and in 1960, pre-Pill, the rate in America was more than double what it is today. It is still well below its early-1990s bubble, but experts are getting worried about the trend line.
Consider Texas. The state requires only that public schools emphasise abstinence, not that they forsake all other approaches. Any district could choose to be more comprehensive. But few do. Last year the Texas Freedom Network, a religious-freedom watchdog, gathered curricular materials from the state’s public-school districts. Their findings, published earlier this year, are disturbing. Fully 94% of the districts took the abstinence-only approach. Those pamphlets and brochures that bothered to discuss contraceptives were often full of errors, or deliberately misleading.
The materials also traded on shame and fear. Across the state teenagers were warned that premarital sex could lead to divorce, suicide, poverty and a disappointed God. One district staged a skit about a young couple on their honeymoon. The husband presented his bride with a beautiful wrapped present that he had been saving for years. Her gift for him was in tatters.
This approach does not seem to be working. Texas has the third-highest rate of teenage births, after Mississippi and New Mexico. Dallas has the highest rate of repeat teenage births in the country, 28%, according to a September report from Child Trends, and several other Texas cities are in the top ten. In a nice illustration of Texan conservatism, girls under 18 have to get parental consent for prescription contraceptives, even if they already have a child.
Abstinence-only education makes a convenient scapegoat. But attacking it is a bit of a distraction. Many states and school districts have already abandoned it in favour of a more comprehensive approach. More will, since federal funding for one abstinence-only programme was ended in June. Barack Obama apparently does not want to renew abstinence-only funding, though last month the Senate Finance Committee, hashing out its health-care bill, approved an amendment restoring such funds.
Abstinence aside, experts suggest a more holistic approach. Latina teenagers, for example, have a considerably higher birth rate than any other group, even though they have similar rates of sexual activity. Silvia Henriquez, the executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, reckons that access is the problem. Latina teenagers are less likely to have health-care coverage for contraceptives, and are more likely to lack transport to the free clinics in their cities.
# # #
The Dallas Voice
Oct 2, 2009
Record crowd expected at FW parade
By David Taffet | Staff Writer
Rainbow Lounge raid, fire at Stampede have drawn interest to Cowtown Pride celebrations
Organizers are expecting a record turnout this Sunday when the Tarrant County Gay Pride week gets underway on Oct. 4 with the 28th annual Tarrant County Gay Pride Parade. The parade predates the Alan Ross Texas Freedom Paradein Dallas by two years. The week concludes with Pride Picnic in Trinity Park the following Saturday, Oct. 10. The picnic has traditionally been a larger event than the parade.
Tarrant County Gay Pride Week Association stages both. Tony Coronado of TCGPWA said he expects record attendance as well as a record number of parade entries. A number of those are expected to come from Dallas this year. Resource Center Dallas will be represented in the parade. Rafael McDonnell, spokesman for the center, said it was the first time that he remembers the organization participating in Fort Worth.
“We’re marching in support of the LGBT community in Fort Worth. It’s been a challenging year over there and we’re turning out in solidarity for them,” said McDonnell, who lives in Fort Worth. He mentioned not only the Rainbow Lounge incident but also losing a bar in a fire several weeks ago.
Coronado said, “We know we have new political groups marching,” but he doesn’t think the focus of those groups will be on the Rainbow Lounge raid. “But we will be stronger because they are coming to support us,” he acknowledged. According to Coronado, other new groups expected in this week’s parade include American Airlines, Planned Parenthood of North Texas, DFW — What Would Jesus Do, Queer LiberAction, Equality March Texas, DFW BiNet and the Fort Worth Human Relations Commission.
This year’s parade also includes a record number of corporate sponsorships, including Coors Light and Miller Lite along with beer distributor Ben E. Keith. Clothing store Dean Kingston, Innova pet food, Aloha Environmental and Glaceau Smart Water are also primary sponsors.
To help accommodate the extra crowds expected, Coors increased its donation to TCGPWA on Wednesday, Sept. 30.
With a record amount of advertising support, this year’s printed Fort Worth parade guide had 64 pages, eight pages larger than the Dallas parade publication.
Daniel Cates of Equality March Texas said, “We will be marching on foot with members from DFW BiNet, students from the University of North Texas and tons of supporters and allies.
“In the past several months we have seen this otherwise quiet and reserved community stand up for itself and come back to life. As a Fort Worth native, that makes me extremely proud. As an individual, I am marching to show that pride. As an organization we are marching to show our love and support to the folks in Cowtown,” Cates said.
Activist Latisha McDaniel said, “The Rainbow Lounge incident has shined a negative and positive light on the city.”
But, she said, “Fort Worth marches in Dallas Pride. Why not march in theirs?”
Rick Vanderslice from Queer Liberaction said his group expects to field a larger contingent.
“We think the heat and excitement is still there,” he said.
Vanderslice said Queer LiberAction now has a Fort Worth branch and they will march together. Carol West, pastor of Celebration Community Church, said, “I think our parade is more about unity than anything. It points out that our community is extremely multifaceted and we celebrate all aspects of our community.”
The parade begins at 2 p.m. and follows a short route south on Jennings Street from the starting point at Jennings and Broadway. Following the parade, awards will be given to entries in a number of categories and Gayfest takes place at the Rainbow Lounge patio and parking lot.
One of the judges of the parade will be Sara Straten, the Fort Worth Police Department’s LGBT liaison, who was appointed as a result of the Rainbow Lounge raid.
Council members Joel Burns and Kathleen Hicks are the honorary grand marshals of the parade.
Coronado said, “The organization, at its August membership meeting, elected to vote Ms. Hicks and Mr. Burns honorary grand marshals, in the literal sense. With all that has gone on in our GLBTQ community pertaining to the Rainbow Lounge, TCGPWA wished to honor both Ms. Hicks and Mr. Burns with honorary grand marshal titles.”
He said that TCGPWA did not assume their attendance and noted that this is the first time they had bestowed the title.
Kristi Wiseman, councilmember Burns’ assistant, said that he is in Washington, D.C. in meetings and has had that on his calendar for quite some time. Council member Kathleen Hicks’ assistant, Will Trevino, said Hicks would be in Austin for the weekend but that she considered the title an honor. Rainbow Lounge is in Hicks’ district and she, along with Burns, was the first to call for a full investigation of the bar raid.
Hicks is also a board member of the AIDS Outreach Center and helped found the African-Americans Against AIDS Taskforce. Logo’s Jonny McGovern, “the gay pimp,” will appear at the parade. He will perform at noon at the Rainbow Lounge and again at Gayfest. Gayfest features Whitney Paige and the Best of Texas performing. The event runs until 9 p.m. at Rainbow Lounge. Best Friends will host family-friendly activities from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.
The following week, TCGPWA holds the Pride Picnic, traditionally a larger event in Fort Worth than the parade. Coronado said the Dallas Bears, who staff the beer garden, have regularly provided the biggest group of picnic volunteers from Dallas. The picnic takes place at the arts pavilion in Trinity Park from noon to 6 p.m. on Oct. 10.
# # #
The New York Times
October 6, 2009
A Texas-Sized Health Care Failure
By CAPPY McGARR, Op-Ed Contributor
DALLAS—The Senate Finance Committee has for the moment rejected the idea of creating a public health insurance plan. It’s difficult to see how Americans will be able to find good, affordable health insurance without one. But if we are to go forward without a public option, it is more important than ever to make sure that we get another part of health reform right: the exchanges, where it is envisioned that small businesses and people without employer-sponsored insurance could shop for policies of their own.
Back in the 1990s, I was the founding chairman of Texas’ state-run purchasing alliance — an exchange, essentially — which ultimately failed. There are lessons to be learned from that experience, as well as the similar failures of other states to create useful exchanges.
The Texas Insurance Purchasing Alliance, created by the Texas Legislature in 1993, was meant to help small businesses, which often cannot afford coverage for their employees. (More than half of all uninsured Americans work for small businesses.) Small businesses are charged higher rates — on average 18 percent higher than those paid by large companies. And their administrative costs, built into those premiums, are typically as high as 25 percent of the premium, compared to only 10 percent for big companies.
Our system pooled small employers into purchasing groups large enough to obtain the lower wholesale insurance rates that big companies get.
Initially, the alliance worked exactly as planned. Sixty-three percent of the businesses that participated were able to offer their employees health coverage for the first time. The alliance offered small businesses a low-cost, nonprofit option: our administrative arrangements did away with the high marketing costs that insurers pass on to small businesses. And we didn’t charge higher rates to firms with older or less healthy workers. This in turn led other insurers, outside the alliance, to lower their prices. We did all this not by creating a government bureaucracy, but by relying on the private sector.
Nevertheless, six years after the program got off the ground, it folded. Many factors contributed to our failure. Some elements of the program, like the restriction it put on the size of eligible companies (only employers with 50 or fewer employees could join), proved unpopular. In addition, the governor who helped create the alliance, Ann Richards, was replaced in 1995 by George W. Bush, who did not consider it a priority.
Most important, though, our exchange failed not because it wasn’t needed, and not because the concept wasn’t sound, but because it never attained a large enough market share to exert significant clout in the Texas insurance market. Private insurance companies, which could offer small-business policies both inside and outside the exchange, cherry-picked relentlessly, signing up all the small businesses with generally healthy employees and offloading the bad risks — companies with older or sicker employees — onto the exchange. For the insurance companies, this made business sense. But as a result, our exchange was overwhelmed with people who had high health care costs, and too few healthy people to share the risk. The premiums we offered rose significantly. Insurance on the exchange was no longer a bargain, and employers began backing away. Insurance companies, too, began leaving the alliance.
Texas wasn’t the only state to see its insurance exchange fail. Florida and North Carolina were also unsuccessful. And California, which had the first exchange (established in 1992) and the largest market, shut its doors in 2006. All these state exchanges failed for the same reason: cherry-picking by insurers outside the exchange.
If Congress now creates new exchanges, as seems increasingly likely, it must prevent this phenomenon by setting two national rules: Insurers have to accept everyone and have to charge everyone the same rates regardless of health status.
Such rules would force insurers to spread risk. But enforcement would also be difficult. Every aspect of health insurance — from the rules for underwriting and setting premiums to the marketing of policies — would need to be monitored stringently to prevent companies from steering all bad risks to the exchanges.
It would be smarter for Congress to revisit the idea of creating a public plan that could provide an attractive choice for consumers and real competition for private insurers, to give them the incentive to offer good coverage at affordable prices.
But without a public plan, tough rules and restrictions on insurance companies will be essential. Otherwise, Americans will never be able to count on good, affordable health care.
Cappy McGarr, the president of a private equity firm, was the chairman of the Texas Insurance Purchasing Alliance from 1993 to 1995.
# # #
The Associated Press
September 18, 2009Texas Unemployment Rate Hits 22-Year High
AUSTIN (AP) ― The Texas unemployment rate rose to 8 percent for the first time in 22 years.
The Texas Workforce Commission said Friday the jobless rate for August was up from 7.9 percent in July. The state also lost 62,200 nonagricultural jobs last month.
The state's unemployment rate last hit 8 percent in November 1987, the dying days of an oil bust that ravaged the Texas economy.
Texas was still tracking well below the national unemployment rate of 9.7 percent.
Leisure, construction and manufacturing were the hardest-hit industries last month, losing a combined 35,500 jobs.
# # #
The Dallas Morning News
September 10, 2009
More than 1 in 4 in Texas lack health insurance
By ROBERT T. GARRETT
AUSTIN — Once again, Texas has the nation's highest rate of people without health insurance.
More than one of every four Texans – 25.1 percent – were uninsured in a two-year average ending last year, a Census Bureau report showed today. That's up from 24.1 percent for 2005 and 2006.
Despite the recession, the percentage of Americans who were uninsured for all of last year – 15.4 percent – did not change significantly, said David Johnson, head of the bureau's housing and household economic statistics division.
He said a record 29 percent of Americans had government-provided insurance, offsetting an eight-year decline in the share of people who get coverage through jobs – now 58.5 percent.
California still has the highest number – not percentage – of uninsured residents. It had 6.7 million uninsured people, compared with 5.9 million Texans in a three-year average ending last year. The Texas number is up from 5.7 million reported last year for 2005 to 2007.
New Mexico and Florida had the next-highest rates, with 23.1 percent and 20.1 percent of their populations, respectively, uninsured in 2006 and 2007.
Massachusetts and Hawaii came in at the bottom, with respective rates of 5.4 percent and 7.7 percent.
# # #
The Dallas Morning News
September 7, 2009
Texas has restrictive birth control policy, even for minors who are already parents
By ROBERT T. GARRETT
AUSTIN – Texas, a leader in teen pregnancy and the state where more teens give birth to subsequent children than in any other, maintains one of the most restrictive policies in the nation for minors to obtain prescription birth control.
Not even young parents in Texas can get birth control without their own parents' permission at nearly a third of the family planning clinics on contract with the state health department.
While most privately and publicly funded clinics in North Texas prescribe contraceptives without insisting that parents be notified, all 10 school-based clinics run by Parkland Health & Hospital System in Dallas must have a parent's signed consent. One in Carrollton-Farmers Branch, at the school district's insistence, can't prescribe any birth control.
And many doctors in private practice in Dallas-Fort Worth also won't prescribe birth control confidentially. Public health officials and women's health advocates say some doctors aren't aware that Texas laws are silent on whether a minor may independently obtain contraceptives.
As a new report last week showed, Dallas leads all U.S. cities in the percentage of teen births that weren't the mother's first delivery. Critics of state policies said they are idealistic, ideologically driven and woefully out of touch.
"We're in denial that our teens are sexually active," said Janet Realini, a doctor and former Bexar County health department leader seeking to reduce teen pregnancy. "Parents think they've talked to their kids about sex but if you talk to their kids, at least half the time, the kids don't remember that."
She cited the latest federal survey of teenagers' risky behavior, which showed that 53 percent of Texas high school students said in 2007 they'd had sexual intercourse.
Parental rights
While some social conservatives blame the state's high teen pregnancy and birth rates on immigration and cultural decline, others said they struggle to find solutions that don't impinge on parental rights.
Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, acknowledged that teen pregnancy is a "serious problem," but said he felt compelled to oppose a bill last spring that would have let unmarried 16- and 17-year-old mothers give "medical consent" to obtain contraceptives, without involving their parents.
"I supported the general concept [but] the majority of the Senate agreed with me that a doctor should not prescribe contraceptives to minors without giving the parents notice," he said. "The problem is not that we need more contraceptives but more parenting."
Patrick won approval for the parental-notification provision. But the bill's author, Leticia Van de Putte, D-San Antonio, let it die rather than see Patrick's provision become law.
Van de Putte said it's ironic that under existing law, a young mother calls the shots on her child's medical care but isn't trusted to do things to prevent a quick second pregnancy, which for teens carries high risk of a premature baby.
"Until we can as legislators look at common sense rather than trying to win the next primary, we're not going to be courageous enough" to help teens, Van de Putte said.
Teaching abstinence
Texas carefully controls what public schools tell youngsters about sex and how health care providers dispense birth control. A recent study showed only 4 percent of Texas schools teach about potential benefits, as well as risks, of contraception. Abstinence-only instruction focuses on different methods' failure rates.
With the power change in Washington this year, federal funding for abstinence-only education appears to be dying. And in the Legislature, resurgent Democrats tried but failed to soften laws that make it hard for minors to be taught about contraceptives, obtain them and avoid "coverage gaps" in various health programs.
Texas is one of four states that doesn't let its Children's Health Insurance Program for low-income youngsters provide contraceptives. Though it spends $1.2 billion for Medicaid to cover 228,000 births each year, it doesn't automatically enroll those women in a 3-year-old offshoot of Medicaid that covers family planning services for a year at a time, as some states do. And minors aren't allowed in anyway.
Only Texas and Utah forbid giving teens birth control without a parent's consent at state-funded clinics.
"Texas is kind of on its own," said Elizabeth Nash, who tracks state policies for the Guttmacher Institute, a nonpartisan health research center that supports abortion rights.
She said Utah is "more straightforward" because it tells youths on a state health department Web site that they'll have to go to Planned Parenthood clinics if they want birth control and are unwilling to involve their parents.
Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican seeking re-election, "continues to support a focus on abstinence education, and he has advocated strongly for a number of initiatives that protect marriage, strengthen parental rights and provide children the best opportunity to succeed in life," said spokeswoman Katherine Cesinger.
Perry believes "the state should not usurp the role" of parents, but should try to empower them to discuss sex and its consequences with their children, Cesinger said.
Doctors who work with teens say that while some who are sexually active can navigate through a confusing state system of care, others lack street smarts – and transportation.
"The trend is the teens seem to be knowing less," said Celia Neavel, an Austin doctor who runs an adolescent health center at People's Community Clinic, a nonprofit that serves the working poor. "We certainly see some that don't know their own body at all. Or they'll come in pregnant and not even understand their own anatomy. It's really frustrating."
Kathryn Allen, vice president for community relations at Planned Parenthood of North Texas, said local doctors are "very mixed" in responses to minors' requests for birth control pills, implants or shots.
"A lot of young people switch to us when they're 16 and 17 because they're unsure whether the family doctor will immediately turn and walk out of the room and tell the parents in the waiting room," she said.
But minors generally have to have a car and $100 to get on birth control on their own at a clinic, she said. The clinics encourage young women to consult their parents, but many feel they can't, Allen said.
Van de Putte, the Democrats' leader in the Senate, said state officials need a new approach to reduce teen births.
"I've been a pharmacist for over 30 years," she said. "And I can tell you, once they start having sex, they ain't going to stop."
# # #
The Dallas Morning News
September 1, 2009
Dallas leads nation in repeat teen births
By ROBERT T. GARRETT
Dallas leads the nation in the percentage of teen births that aren't the mother's first delivery, a nonpartisan national research group finds in a new report.
Dallas had the highest percentage of teen births that are repeat births – 28 percent – among 73 major U.S. cities in 2006, the latest year for which city-level data are available.
Texas has the highest repeat rate of any state – 23 percent of teen births. And five of the 15 worst-ranked cities are in Texas, according to the group Child Trends, in a report to be released Wednesday.
"That's not where we want to be, for sure," said Sarah Wheat, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood in Austin.
The findings could spark more local and statewide debate of abstinence-only sex education. They also raise questions about availability of contraceptives and whether other strategies may slow teenage girls from giving birth again and again, which can end their schooling, strain social services and reinforce a cycle of poverty.
Child Trends, a nonpartisan Washington-based group that tries to improve child well-being by providing research to policymakers, teases out repeat teen births from vital statistics gathered by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Texas had the highest repeat rate of any state for the sixth consecutive year. Among seven metro areas, Arlington had the lowest rate, 19 percent, while Fort Worth's 25-percent rate was in a tie nationally for seventh-highest. Also making the list were San Antonio with 26 percent, and Houston and Austin, both with repeat teen birth rates of 24 percent.
It's the first time Child Trends has ranked cities, but Jennifer Manlove, a senior social scientist with the group, said Dallas' dubious distinction is not surprising because the city "has a higher percentage of teen births at some of the younger ages, which ... probably leads to the repeat teen birth rate being higher."
Of the city's 3,739 teen births in 2006, the report says, 64 percent were to Hispanics, 30 percent to blacks and 6 percent to whites. Although most were to 18- or 19-year-olds, there were 72 to girls 14 or younger.
The 28 percent repeat birth rate means nearly 1,050 of the babies born to local girls that year weren't the girls' first.
Cathie Adams, president of Texas Eagle Forum, a social conservative group, said the statistics reflect how Dallas is a magnet for immigrants.
Adams said an abstinence message needs to be pushed in the public schools in a variety of languages.
"If mom had a baby at age 15, are her morals going to be setting different standards than someone who has grown up in the American culture where that is not typical?" she said. "As a matter of fact, we would look at someone impregnating a 15-year-old as child abuse."
Adams insisted that abstinence-only sex education in Texas has been working, but Holly Morgan of Planned Parenthood of North Texas said no reputable study supports that view.
"Texas took the most money from that whole abstinence education fund the Bush administration offered," and the report shows it to be ineffective, Morgan said.
Under a Democratic Congress and the Obama administration, federal funding appears to be drying up, Morgan said. But school districts in Texas continue to have complete freedom to use ineffective scare tactics and spread inaccurate information to teens, she said.
"Unfortunately, what ends up happening is that teenagers have sex anyway," Morgan said. "And they think, 'Well, our health teacher at our school is telling us that condoms usually don't work. Then why even use them?' "
Teenage girls in Texas face a bewildering set of mixed messages about whether they can obtain birth control without a parent's consent.
State law doesn't specifically give minors the ability to give consent for themselves to get contraceptives. For many years, lawmakers have passed budget measures that try to prevent it, by placing restrictions on teens on Medicaid or low-income teens served by clinics that receive federal family planning grants.
Generally, federal rules override the state's effort. Teens can and do receive birth control without parental consent under those programs – but they are very rarely taught about that at public schools. And some clinics receive federal money that comes with a requirement of deference to state rules on parental consent.
"Most physicians don't really understand very well," said Janet Realini, a doctor and former San Antonio public health official who has started Healthy Futures, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing teen and unplanned pregnancy in that city and across Texas. "There's a lot of confusion," she said, even among clinics on contract to the state health department.
Madeline McClure, who heads Dallas-based TexProtects, a group that tries to prevent child abuse and neglect, pointed to a program that has been successful in avoiding repeat teen births: the Nurse-Family Partnership.
The Dallas YWCA and Parkland Health & Hospital System manage the effort locally. It soon will pay for regular home visits by a nurse to 400 first-time, low-income mothers.
"It's about ensuring that the next births are spread out so the family can get on their feet, get off welfare, get employed, get their education," she said. "The nurse visitors have proven to be the most effective intervention because these low-income mothers and their families trust nurses to provide good medical information."
For teen births of all kinds, first time or repeat, Texas has ranked in the top three of the 50 states each year between 2000 and 2006, Manlove said. It had 63 births per 1,000 females ages 15 to 19 in 2006, compared with a national average of just under 43.
BY THE NUMBERS: CITY RANKINGS
|
Large cities with the highest percentages of teen repeat births |
|
Dallas |
28 percent |
|
Jackson, Miss. |
27 percent |
|
Providence, R.I. |
26 percent |
|
San Antonio |
26 percent |
|
Cincinnati |
26 percent |
|
Oklahoma City |
26 percent |
|
Phoenix |
25 percent |
|
Fort Worth |
25 percent |
|
St. Paul, Minn. |
25 percent |
|
SOURCE: Child Trends |
|
Newsweek
Aug 29, 2009
Return of the Abortion Question
Opponents of health-care reform are gearing up to bring abortion back into the debate.
By Eleanor Clift
Much has been made in the coverage of Sen. Ted Kennedy's death about his religious faith and how he would often slip away in the middle of the afternoon to sit alone in the pews of a Catholic church on Capitol Hill. In his final months, a priest from his parish on Cape Cod came to the Kennedy house each Sunday to hold a private mass in the living room. And just two weeks before he succumbed to brain cancer, the Massachusetts senator was well enough to lead the family in prayer after the death of his sister Eunice.
Kennedy's strong Catholicism coexisted with his commitment to preserving a woman's right to choose, and is one more in a long list of reasons why he will be missed as the health-care-reform battle crescendos this fall. Along with anxiety about rationing care at the end of life and fear that illegal immigrants will gain benefits they don't deserve, the anti-reform movement is gearing up to make abortion the next big donnybrook.
All the familiar protest figures are suiting up for their first big battle since the family feud over Terri Schiavo's right to die devolved into a national debate over what's euphemistically termed "the culture of life." Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry and a band of noisy supporters disrupted a town-hall meeting this week in Virginia, shouting down featured speaker Howard Dean, a physician, and calling him a baby-killer. The Rev. Pat Mahoney, who led the protests at Schiavo's Florida hospice, showed up in Martha's Vineyard looking for some media action. "It's hard to imagine we've progressed as a nation," says Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards. "I hope we're just seeing the bitter end of this thing."
She may be right in that the protesters didn't get much attention. Kennedy's death created a pause in the rancor over health-care reform. But it's foolhardy to think the opposition forces that gained such traction over the summer are going to withdraw. They'll be back to spread misconceptions about possible provisions in a government-run public option for people to get health-care insurance. What Richards describes as "the knife's edge" in the debate is finding a realistic way to separate federal dollars so they do not fund abortion services. She says there is precedent, citing public hospitals that receive state funds and perform abortions, and are able to erect a firewall.
It has been the law for more than 30 years to disallow federal money to pay for abortions through the Medicaid program as part of the health services it provides for low-income women. The late Henry Hyde, a conservative lawmaker from Illinois, sponsored the amendment that bears his name. There has been no serious effort in the last three decades to dislodge the Hyde amendment, and it is certainly not part of the current health-care debate. But that hasn't stopped critics from suspecting that Democrats are looking for a back-door way to fund abortions. California Rep. Lois Capps, in an attempt to keep the issue of abortion from derailing health care, offered what's known as the Capps amendment, which says insurance companies are neither prohibited from offering nor mandated to offer abortion services, language that preserves the status quo of the free marketplace and that would govern any insurance exchange that offered a public option.
Critics immediately decried it as "phony common ground," charging that it opens the door to federally funded abortion. The confusion arises when people conflate a public option with Medicaid, which is publicly funded. The public option under the reform proposals debated on Capitol Hill would be open to people paying with their own dollars, and for those women abortion services ought to be covered, just as they are under 80 percent of private insurance plans. "The challenge is how to create a whole new infrastructure that doesn't take women backward," says Richards.
Most of the health services that Planned Parenthood provides have to do with family planning and cancer screening. With state budgets strapped, clinics everywhere are operating above capacity, with women literally having to decide between spending their money for birth control or bus fare. "It's heartbreaking," says Richards. "Women don't get up every day thinking where they're going to get an abortion, but how they're going to get health care. This is less about ideology than practical health care."
Critics of health-care reform too often drown out the serious voices that should be heard advocating for reform. Planned Parenthood is one of the oldest and most respected organizations representing women's interests. It has an approval rating of 68 percent, which suggests that it would be a good ally in the face-off over health care. One in four women in America has been to Planned Parenthood at some point in her lifetime. Throughout the summer, with Ted Kennedy sidelined and Democrats too scared to mention abortion for fear of riling up the right, angry minorities have had the debate pretty much to themselves. Now that Kennedy's voice is stilled, others must be heard, or the dream of universal health care that he championed will die.
# # #
The Wall Street Journal
August 27, 2009
Abortion Is New Front in Health Battle
By FAWN JOHNSON and LAURA MECKLER
WASHINGTON -- Anti-abortion groups are gearing up for a battle in the fall over health-care legislation, another headache for Democrats who already face concerns about the measure's cost and reach.
Most versions of the Democratic health plan would create subsidies for lower-income people to buy private health insurance. If that insurance includes coverage for abortion, as many existing private plans do, it effectively means federal taxpayers are subsidizing abortion, critics of the legislation argue.
While it gets less attention than some other parts of the plan, abortion has often been raised by critics at town-hall meetings during the August congressional recess.
Abortion opponents are funding advertisements targeting key lawmakers. The Family Research Council is running television and radio ads in several states that are home to swing-vote Democratic senators, while the National Right to Life Committee is targeting pro-life Democrats in the House who likely will take the first vote on the measure in September.
Before they vote, "lawmakers will know this is a bill to set up a big federal abortion program," said the right-to-life committee's legislative director, Douglas Johnson.
Randall Terry, an antiabortion activist, at a town-hall meeting in Reston, Va., on Tuesday. Police ejected him for disrupting the proceedings.
Those who favor abortion rights say the bills aren't giving any special treatment to abortions. National Organization for Women President Terry O'Neill said the conservatives' proposals would deny many women their reproductive rights. "There is no constitutional basis for taking that away or for any politician to use reproductive health care as a political football," she said.
Abortion opponents say they will be satisfied only if a health bill specifically bans all abortion coverage in any federally subsidized plan. They note that Congress has already established similar bans in other federally funded health programs, such as Medicaid, health insurance for federal workers and military plans. The only exceptions are for rape, incest or danger to the life of the mother.
Anti-abortion activists have attended town-hall meetings and plan to hold prayer vigils in front of lawmakers' district offices before the legislators return to Washington in September. At a town-hall meeting Tuesday night by Rep. Jim Moran (D., Va.), police ejected anti-abortion activist Randall Terry for disrupting the proceedings, to competing shouts of "We won't pay for murder!" and "Kick him out!"
Planned Parenthood members have shown up at some town-hall meetings to remind lawmakers to "make women's health a priority" in the legislation, said spokesman Tait Sye. Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro Choice America are also seeking to debunk claims that a health-care overhaul will expand taxpayer-funded abortions.
Some Democrats have been searching for a compromise approach. An amendment approved by the House Energy and Commerce Committee would allow coverage of abortion, but the money would have to come from the portion of the premiums that are paid by the individuals. A sliver of those monthly premiums would be segregated and abortion services would be reimbursed from that separate account.
The amendment also says there would have to be at least one plan that covers abortion and one that doesn't in every part of the country. State restrictions on access to abortion would remain in place.
"It's very personal and it's very emotional," said Rep. Lois Capps (D., Calif.), who sponsored the amendment. "The goal is to not have controversial points stand in the way of making progress."
The Capps amendment was enough to satisfy Rep. Tim Ryan (D., Ohio), an abortion opponent. "As long as we have no federal funding going to abortions -- that to me is the No. 1 principle," he said. "For most, I think this will resolve the abortion funding issue."
Other abortion opponents said the measure was inadequate. Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, chairman of the House Republican Conference, said the vote on the Capps amendment "demonstrates just how far Democrats are willing to go to force taxpayers to fund abortion."
Rep. Bart Stupak (D., Mich.) voted against the Capps proposal in committee and was one of 20 Democrats to sign a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying they would not support any health bill that does not explicitly exclude abortion coverage.
# # #
Jezebel.com
August 25, 2009
The Margaret Sanger Papers Project [Between The Lines]
Via Feminist Law Professors, Academics at NYU have been working on an archive of the work of Margaret Sanger, the early 20th century birth control advocate, and responding to New Jersey Republican Congressman Christopher Smith's misrepresentations of her work.
Margaret Sanger is an early birth control advocate that has often been accused of Nazi-style genocide by the pro-life community. As Rep. Smith's comments at a congressional hearing this April suggest, her work has been taken out of context and misrepresented to suggest that Sanger was the kind of person that wanted to kill babies. He took a quote from one of her books that said,
The most merciful thing a family does for one of its infant members is to kill it.
The Margaret Sanger Papers Project points out that the quote comes without context. When you look at the surrounding chapter, you see that Sanger is talking about infant mortality in poor large families. At the time of her writing, more than 300,000 infants died, more than 90 percent from malnutrition. Still those like Congressman Smith draw parallels between her work and Nazism.
But Sanger wasn't a Nazi. Far from it. She joined the American Council Against Nazi Propaganda and "gave money, my name and any influence I had with writers and others, to combat Hitler's rise to power in Germany." The only intersection she had with Nazis was that she lived at a time when Hitler ruled Germany.
Sanger's work, of course, needs to be looked at through cultural context. Her early work was done at a time when eugenics was not widely studied and almost viewed as a new secular order on the same level as religion. My alma matter, the University of Minnesota, even had a eugenics society that worked on "improving" the human race. Sanger viewed the movement as useful, and pushed them to back access to birth control as part of that movement. Of course, modern academics have abandoned eugenics as a field of study, but it's important to not that at the time it was a significant and widespread movement.
Sanger remains a figure that didn't always reflect the values of the modern reproductive rights movement. As Michelle Goldberg says in her recent book, The Means of Reproduction:
Sanger was a complicated figure, a groundbreaking feminist of her time that who transcended some of the prejudices of her time while remaining mired in others. She operated in an era when eugenics, often a cousin of the Malthusian doctrine, was considered a respectable pursuit on both the left and the right, and rarely hesitated to invoke eugenics arguments for birth control ... Many eugenicists opposed birth control, fearing that it would lead to genetically desirable women to have too few children.... She was not, in fact, a racist, believing that inherent ability and intelligence varied among individuals rather than among ethnic groups, but at times used dubious language that reeks of racism to modern ears.
What Sanger did do was play an important role in shaping access to birth control in this country, especially among poor women who were desperate not to have their seventh or eighth child. She founded the American Birth Control League, which later merged with Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau to create the Birth Control Federation of America. That organization became what we know as Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The important thing is to look at Sanger's work with a critical eye, but to keep it in context.
Margaret Sanger Papers Project [NYU]
The Margaret Sanger Papers Project [Feminist Law Professors]
# # #
The Associated Press
August 25, 2009
Texas among 12 states in which lawmakers get health insurance free, AP finds
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Lawrence Cafero Jr. can’t help but feel a bit guilty while waiting in line at the pharmacy to pick up prescriptions.
Cafero is a state representative in Connecticut, and taxpayers subsidize his generous health insurance plan, which requires only a $10 co-pay for any brand-name prescription drug.
"I’m standing behind either an elderly person or a working-family person and they’re taking out wads, like dropping 20, 40, 60 bucks. And I’ve got $10 — $5 for a generic," said Cafero, R-Norwalk. "I’m embarrassed."
Pressure is mounting in states hit worst by the recession to take back some of lawmakers’ generous health benefits that are funded by taxpayers.
A review by The Associated Press showed that lawmakers in 12 states, including Texas, get health insurance for free, while those in 28 states share the costs with taxpayers, often getting a better deal than private sector workers.
In California, where finances are so bad the state has issued IOUs, the citizen commission that sets benefits for elected officials voted in June to reduce funds for lawmaker health insurance. The change takes effect in December.
In Michigan, supporters are renewing efforts to end lucrative retiree health benefits for lawmakers or at least force lawmakers to work longer before they qualify for them. Similar proposals failed in 2007.
Meanwhile, many Rhode Island lawmakers accustomed to free health insurance at taxpayer expense have bowed to public pressure and started voluntarily contributing toward its cost.
Federal lawmakers, who are debating an overhaul of the nation’s healthcare system, also get subsidized insurance. Members of Congress are covered by the federal employees health plan and get VIP medical access at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington and the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. For about $500 a year, federal lawmakers can also have unlimited visits with a physician assigned to the Capitol for routine care.
At Tuesday’s town hall meeting in New Hampshire, President Barack Obama was asked why he hadn’t talked more about the differences between the benefits offered to federal lawmakers and the system for everyone else. Obama responded that his proposal would give the public options similar to those given to federal employees.
Some state lawmakers also receive generous benefits:
Michigan lawmakers get retiree healthcare after six years of service and can tap into their benefits at age 55. That perk is the envy of workers in a state with 15.2 percent unemployment.
Members of the Massachusetts Legislature pay about $200 to $230 per month for family health coverage, about 18 percent less than what the average U.S. consumer pays, according to a national survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational Trust.
In comparison, about 63 percent of employers offered health coverage last year, according to Kaiser’s annual survey of roughly 1,900 firms.
# # #
Salon.com
JULY 24, 2009
16 and aborting
In the United States, discussing a fully legal act can make you look like a criminal
BY AMY BENFER
In a feature story that ran yesterday, I wrote about the MTV documentary series “16 and Pregnant,” which followed five pregnant teenage girls and their partners through pregnancy, delivery and early parenthood, and one couple who choose to place their child for adoption. But there’s a large segment of pregnant teenagers who are not represented on the show: the roughly one-third of pregnant teenagers who choose to have an abortion. Isn’t their choice an awful lot more common than the 1 percent of women who choose adoption? Where are their stories?
In my original interview with Morgan J. Freeman, the executive producer of “16 and Pregnant,” I asked him if they had considered doing a segment on abortion. “It’s a constant discussion,” he told me, “but we’re looking at how we could cover a story like that in a safe, responsible way.” In the end, I decided that there was so much else to talk about in my piece that discussing something that hadn’t actually happened on the show seemed pretty tangential. The next day, I took one look at the comments to my piece and immediately regretted not raising the issue. So, hey, let’s do so now.
Is there any safe, responsible way to film interviews with teenage girls who had abortions, then broadcast them on national television? The question alone almost answers itself. As someone who has written and edited first-person essays by women for 10 years, I can tell you that pretty much every pro-choice editor wishes like hell that we could get women to go on record, under their own damn bylines, writing about their own abortions. (Salon editor Sarah Hepola and I spent one night dreaming about some hypothetical column called “My Abortion Story.” But we have yet to do it.) Some do. But most won’t, and for good reason. What happens if your story gets Googled by your boss? Your mother-in-law? Your pro-life next-door neighbor? Or, even more dramatically, some right-wing dude compiling a hit list? It’s absurd, but also true: This is the kind of thing that gets a few unlucky people harassed, and even shot and killed.
In the print world, one must often resort to pseudonyms. But the options for film are even worse: Do you have girls filmed in shadow, like government witnesses or criminals? Do you have paid actors read their words, thus losing the documentary realism? Any of those options only underscores the unfortunate fact that, in the United States, discussing a fully legal act can make you look like a criminal.
But frankly, abortion stories are better suited to print than film anyway. Unless there’s some sort of crazy complications, there’s not a whole lot of action (and nothing that compares to the drama of birth). It’s more a question of how one feels about it all. And honestly, it makes me downright squeamish to think of putting a teenage girl in a position to be judged by others about a procedure that even adult women can’t talk about without having their decision subject to debate: One can imagine a girl who expresses nothing but relief at being able to get the hell on with her SAT practice test being branded as selfish. (What, she had to go to an Ivy League school? The local college wasn’t good enough for her?) On the other hand, the kind of girl who expresses grief or regret might be branded a traitor. (Doesn’t she know she’s ruining it for all of us?) The consequences of not portraying the full range of abortion experiences leaves us afraid that anyone who does express ambivalence may jeopardize every woman’s right to a safe, legal abortion. That situation alone should make those of us who are pro-choice mighty pissed off.
But here’s the second half of the problem: By not talking about the girls who do choose to have an abortion, we leave the girls who don’t in the position to take the full brunt of our collective ire about teen sex and teen pregnancy. It’s an inexact analogy (separated by the rather large difference that adoption involves pregnancy, birth and an actual, rather than theoretical, child), but in many ways abortion can be the social, if not emotional, equivalent to the girls of the “Baby Scoop Era” -- when girls, by and large those from “good families” (whatever the hell that means), were encouraged to preserve their bright futures and their family’s good name by spending their pregnancies hiding out in maternity homes, knocked out for delivery, and releasing their babies into a closed adoption, never to speak of the experience again. In both cases, girls who choose that route retain the option to remain invisible, and thus avoid being stigmatized for their pregnancies. If they wish, they can become Ginia Bellafante’s girls who get in the 99th percentile on their SATs, and go off to Wesleyan or Berkeley without anyone knowing they, too, fall into the much maligned category of girls who got pregnant in high school.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, and as an adamantly pro-choice woman, I applaud it. But I don’t think that everyone who claims to be pro-choice, even pro-choice feminists, always show enough consideration for the girls who aren’t invisible, whose highly pregnant bellies advertise the fact that they made a different choice. Over the past year, even feminists have felt comfortable questioning the idea that Bristol Palin “chose” to raise her child, or mocking the girls of “16 and Pregnant” as little more than advertisements for contraception. And yesterday over at Double X, Torie Busch wondered if perhaps the upside of the emotional season finale, in which Catelynn and Tyler release their child for adoption, would encourage more teens to pursue adoption.
While I, too, teared up at that episode, the thing that impressed me most about their story was how much love and respect the couple who adopted their daughter displayed toward Catelynn and Tyler, and most of all, how perfectly clear it was that Catelynn and Tyler were absolutely committed to their choice. And a huge part of their committment came from the fact that they had absolutely no support at home -- last night on the reunion special, Catelynn talked about living in a home where her mom was always drunk and she had to raise her 2-year-old brother. But as much as we may be touched by their decision, it does not mean that every other girl should have done the same. When host Dr. Drew asked Maci if she had ever considered adoption or abortion, she said she hadn’t. “They were options, but neither one was for me. Not with the support I had from my family, and the relationship I had at the time.” And Whitney said that she thought her decision to keep her child made her stronger. “In some ways I feel like I’m going to be even more successful because it gave me that push.”
We don’t know how it will all shake out for these six girls, and that isn’t really the point. They don’t stand in for every girl who has ever received a plus sign on her EPT test any more than I do. But this is the point: Choice really means choice. We don’t have to encourage girls, as a whole, to do any one thing. This isn’t a public referendum: We aren’t voting on some socially sanctioned, one-size-fits-all choice that, going forward, will represent the official code of Girls Whose Reproductive Decisions We Agree With. Some women may have an abortion without regret; others may have a respectful, loving adoption and keeping one’s child does not necessarily mean condemning both of you to lifelong poverty and despair -- or even that you won’t finish college.
Pro-lifers, of course, have no problem saying that they support one choice and one only, and often suggest that pro-choice is a cover for being “pro-abortion.” Finding better ways to talk about teens who have abortions will help us all. But if we want to prove that choice really means choice, we have to openly and adamantly support the other two-thirds as well.
# # #
The Associated Press
July 24, 2009
New push in Congress for common ground on abortion
BY DAVID CRARY (AP)
NEW YORK — Seeking elusive common ground on abortion, prominent activists and clergy on both sides of the debate are throwing their support behind a bill aimed at preventing unintended pregnancies and supporting pregnant women.
The bill's backers hope President Barack Obama, who has appealed for a more civil tone to the debate, will embrace it as a step toward reducing the need for abortions, but many staunch anti-abortion leaders remain hostile. "It's part of a big political scam," said Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee.
At issue is the so-called Ryan-DeLauro bill — first introduced in 2006 and being reintroduced Thursday by Reps. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, and Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn. Supporters range from abortion-rights activists to Roman Catholic academics who consider abortion an evil.
"This is a landmark bill for the culture wars — a prototype for how we can approach things in the future," said the Rev. Joel Hunter, an evangelical megachurch pastor from Orlando, Fla., who opposes abortion.
Hunter, who serves on the White House faith-based advisory council, said the key to the bill is its breadth — appealing to liberals with proposals to prevent unintended pregnancies and to conservatives with provisions to support women who choose to carry unintended pregnancies to term.
"When you realize you need someone who's been an adversary to help you advance your own projects, that's a big deal," Hunter said.
Among the bill's many provisions: increased access to contraceptives, expanded Medicaid coverage for family planning, more support for comprehensive sex education, support for pregnant and parenting college students and expanded adoption assistance. The Congressional Budget Office has not yet done an analysis of the bill's potential cost.
While Obama has urged Americans to seek common ground on reducing the need for abortions, the White House has yet to propose or endorse any specific legislation to achieve that.
Joshua DuBois, director of Obama's Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, said the administration is still assessing input gathered during consultations with groups on both sides of the debate.
Ryan and DeLauro noted that Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, had backed their bill when he served in the House, and they expressed optimism that presidential support would come eventually — boosting its chances for advancing.
"This is a bill that seems to mesh with the president's interests," DeLauro said. "I see no reason why the White House could not endorse it."
Among those backing the bill are two major abortion-rights groups — the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and NARAL Pro-Choice America. Abortion opponents voicing support include the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, and the Rev. Frank Page, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention who, like Hunter, serves on Obama's faith-based council.
Page expressed concern that the bill might lead to more federal involvement in personal lives, but said the overall intent — to reduce abortions — was positive.
"This isn't a radical bill," said Laurie Rubiner, head of Planned Parenthood's Washington office. "It only seems radical because it's been so long that we could have a constructive conversation ... with both pro-choice and anti-choice groups around the table."
Thus far, no major anti-abortion organization or senior Catholic clergyman has endorsed the bill.
For the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, one of the main problems is the promotion of contraception. Anthony Picarello, general counsel of the conference, said the bishops favor a competing bill — the Pregnant Women's Support Act — that would encourage women to carry unintended pregnancies to term but does not deal with preventing such pregnancies.
Douglas Johnson, the National Right to Life Committee's legislative director, described the Ryan-DeLauro bill as a part of "political scam" aimed at portraying Obama and other Democrats as moderate on abortion while catering to their backers in the abortion-rights community.
"The common ground that Barack Obama seeks for the pro-life movement is the burial ground," Johnson said. "The bill is crafted in such a way as to put more resources in the hands of people providing and advocating for abortion."
Johnson and his allies also have been active this week warning that current Democratic proposals for overhauling health care would lead to taxpayer-funded abortions. Ryan has waded into that dispute, suggesting a compromise that would let private insurers decide for themselves on abortion coverage but bar use of federal funds for the procedure.
Ryan, a Roman Catholic, describes himself as "pro-life" but has drawn the wrath of anti-abortion activists in recent years for several votes he's cast.
"Don't blame me for wanting to solve problems," he said. "Whether you say you're pro-life or pro-choice, most reasonable people will say we should try to reduce unintended pregnancies and the need for abortions."
Among the enthusiastic supporters of his bill is Jim Wallis, founder of the liberal Christian social-justice network Sojourners.
"This issue has polarized and paralyzed us for years ... but with all the debate and the blaming and yelling, nothing has changed in the abortion rate," Wallis said. "We have to look for solutions, and that's what this bill does."
"If we can find common ground on abortion," he added, "we can find it on anything."
# # #
TIME magazine
JulY 22, 2009
Teen Pregnancy: An Epidemic in Foster Care
What's tougher than being a pregnant teenager? Try being a pregnant teenager in foster care. Miranda Sheffield had pinballed in and out of more than 10 foster homes in Southern California by the time she became pregnant with her daughter at the age of 17. "I was close to aging out [of the system]," she says of the program that in most states finds temporary homes for children until they are 18. "And when I got pregnant, I found there was no support for me. It was like, 'We need to get you out of foster care because we won't be able to handle you and a baby.' "
After years of steady decline, teen-pregnancy rates are rising around the country. But the numbers for girls in the foster-care system have reached truly epidemic levels. A study at the University of Chicago found that nearly half of girls who had spent time in the foster-care system had been pregnant at least once by the time they were 19 years old. Even more troubling, unplanned pregnancy had already become a pattern for many of the young women — close to one-quarter had experienced multiple pregnancies in their teens.
The stats shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who knows the risk factors for teen pregnancy. A report released the week of July 20 by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy found that almost half of the 500,000 or so kids in foster care had sex for the first time before age 16, compared with 30% of their peers not in foster care. They're also more likely to have experienced forced sex and less likely to use contraception.
Yet very few advocates and policymakers have focused on the issue of pregnancy among foster youth. "Most people in the teen-pregnancy field don't really pay much attention to teens in foster care," explains the National Campaign's senior policy director, Andrea Kane. "And most people working in the child-welfare system are so busy trying to place kids in homes that they don't focus much on pregnancy prevention." That's starting to change. Last week, her organization announced that it is teaming up with Planned Parenthood to address the crisis in foster care — and to make sure that the White House doesn't forget about foster teens as it develops a strategy to reduce the number of abortions nationwide.
Perhaps the most important asset teenagers need to avoid early parenthood is a strong relationship with parents or other adults in their lives. But these are precisely the kinds of bonds that many foster teens lack. "You're so busy being transferred from home to home," says Alixes Rosado, who has been in foster care in Connecticut since he was 6 years old. "You don't have a lot of stable connections." The 20-year-old estimates that he has worked with a different social worker every year for the past 10. "And not a single one talked about sex."
If many social workers are disinclined to make sure their young charges are schooled in the basics of sex education, foster parents are often equally uncomfortable with the topic. Having "the talk" with their own kids is something many parents dread; discussing sex with a teenager they don't know well is even less appealing for foster parents. And the frequency with which many foster children switch homes makes it easy for some parents to assume — or hope — that someone else already covered the birds and the bees.
Effective sex ed, however, is an ongoing conversation. And that's where Planned Parenthood and the National Campaign can come in: providing professionals who can train social workers and foster parents in age-appropriate ways to discuss sex with younger children and teenagers. "Foster parents already go through trainings. The delivery system exists," says Kane. "And we have people who can teach them how to do this. We just need to put the two together."
Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood is recruiting and training thousands of peer educators — many of them in foster care themselves — who can reach out to teens with medically accurate advice. The organization is also testing out an online chat service that enables teens to get answers from a health professional at any time, day or night. "Sometimes," says Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, "we find teens are more comfortable asking a total stranger."
While unplanned pregnancy is a concern for many girls within the foster-care system, intended pregnancies are part of the story as well. "For some foster youth," says University of Chicago researcher Amy Dworsky, "having a child is a way to create a family that they don't have, or to fill an emotional void." Sheffield confirms that observation. "Sex education is awesome," she says. "But that's not always the issue. You don't really have an identity in foster care because you move around so much. And if you're not sure of who you are, you don't make good decisions."
Now the mother of a 4-year-old girl, Sheffield has found an identity for her life after foster care. She is spending the summer interning on Capitol Hill and advocating for other foster kids. It turns out there is life after foster care.
# # #
The Washington Post
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Health-Care Reform Efforts Marred by Abortion Dispute
By Dan Eggen and Rob Stein
President Obama, who has vowed to find common ground on culture-war issues, finds himself in the middle of a classic Washington dispute over abortion that is further undermining support among conservative Democrats for his ambitious health-care reform efforts.
Abortion is not explicitly mentioned in any of the major health-care bills now under consideration in Congress. But abortion opponents charge that the legislation would make abortion both more widely available and more common by requiring insurance plans to pay for the procedures and providing government funding to subsidize plans that pay for them.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said this week that decisions on specific benefits such as abortion coverage should be "left to medical experts in the field," referring to a proposed advisory board that would recommend minimum levels of coverage for private insurers.
The dispute presents another unwelcome distraction for the White House and a political opportunity for Republicans, who are seizing on the issue as part of a broader attempt to kill health reform legislation that they believe is too intrusive and costly. A group of conservative Democrats led by
Rep. Tim Ryan (Ohio) proposed a compromise Tuesday that would neither require nor bar private insurers from offering the procedure as long as no federal funding is used; another group of Democrats and Republicans is holding a news conference today to call for an explicit ban on funding.
The conflict comes as two House Democrats on either side of the abortion divide prepare to introduce legislation later this week aimed at encouraging pregnancy prevention and greater government support for young mothers. The measure from Ryan, who opposes abortion, and
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who supports abortion rights, has attracted an unusual array of supporters ranging from Planned Parenthood to evangelical leaders such as the Rev. Joel Hunter of Orlando.
The developments underscore the emotional and often intractable nature of the abortion debate, which also flared during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor this month. Obama has repeatedly called for finding "common ground" between the two sides by advocating policies to reduce the number of abortions and unintended pregnancies, a message he amplified as part of a widely watched address at Notre Dame University and during a recent Vatican visit with Pope Benedict XVII.
But the health-care reform legislation has reignited allegations from antiabortion groups that such pledges are an attempt by Obama and his allies to paper over their support for abortion rights with policies that will do little to reduce use of the procedure.
"This is a president who says he wants to reduce abortions," said Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee. "But the actual policies that this administration is promoting will result in massive public subsidies for abortion and result in a massive increase in the number of abortions."
Democratic leaders and abortion rights groups say those concerns are exaggerated, and some accuse abortion opponents of attempting to use the health-care debate to further restrict legal access to abortion under private insurance plans. "This is the kind of divisiveness that the public has grown very tired of," said Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, which has endorsed the Ryan-DeLauro bill. "We think those benefits should be decided by experts and not politicians."
Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), who believes House legislation contains "a hidden abortion mandate," said he is in talks with House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) in an attempt to find compromise language that will mollify him and other abortion opponents. He and other lawmakers are holding a news conference on the topic today.
"It's been a long held conviction by many members that taxpayer dollars should not be used for abortion," Stupak said in an interview, referring to restrictions first enacted in 1976 for Medicaid funds. "They're open for discussions."
In their separate proposal to
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Ryan and four other Democrats say that allowing insurers to chart their own abortion policies as long as taxpayer money isn't used for the procedure represents "a common ground solution" that effectively maintains current law on abortion funding. Their proposal would also stipulate that current state restrictions on the procedure would still apply.
Adam Sonfield, a senior policy associate at the Guttmacher Institute, a nonpartisan reproductive health research group, said such a solution will "probably disappoint a lot of people on both sides, but it's probably something that people on both sides can live with."
The prevention bill being proposed by Ryan and DeLauro would establish a series of new and expanded initiatives focused on contraceptives and other prevention measures, including restoration of Medicaid coverage for family planning services. The bill, to be announced formally on Thursday, also includes a series of grants and policies aimed at helping young mothers, including expanded maternity care options and more financial assistance for adoptions.
Backers say the Ryan-DeLauro bill has been carefully scrubbed for months to remove policies that might alienate either side, such as eliminating financial support for the morning-after pill. Hunter, senior pastor of Orlando's Northland megachurch, said the proposal "isn't going to end the disagreement or the alarm that comes up on both sides. But I think it is the first of its kind to take such an incendiary culture-war issue and really make progress. It's a start."
Ryan, who opposes abortion but has come under attack from some antiabortion groups for supporting the use of contraceptives, said he also believes the bill will help calm the current dispute over how to address the procedure in health-care legislation. "I'm hopeful this will spill over into the health-care debate and encourage both sides to find common ground there as well," Ryan said in an interview.
The White House has not endorsed any specific legislation on reducing abortions. But Melody Barnes, Obama's domestic policy adviser, said in an interview that the Ryan-DeLauro proposal represents "a very positive development." She also said the administration, which has been holding meetings between advocates on both sides of the abortion debate throughout the summer, expects to issue its own package of proposals later in the year.
"The president started this process with the desire to find common ground and to work with people across the political spectrum," Barnes said, adding: "The bottom line is to put concrete ideas on the table."
# # #
St. Petersburg Times (Florida)
July 12, 2009Don't give up the fight for choice on abortion
By Robyn E. Blumner, Times Columnist
In reading about the life of Wichita, Kan., physician George Tiller, who was murdered in May , I was reminded again of an abiding truth: Doctors who perform abortions for desperate women are courageous, moral agents for good.
If we are going to be debating abortion again - and skirmishes are already erupting over whether abortion services will be included in the nation's health care overhaul - the prochoice side needs to pridefully assert the moral high ground. Because it is ours.
Our side saves millions of women from having children they cannot afford or care for properly. Our side prevents women from dying from botched illegal abortions. Our side ensures that the children brought into this world are truly wanted. Our side brings women hope and vanquishes misery on a towering scale.
Dr. Tiller was one of the few physicians in the nation who would perform late-term abortions for women facing severe health consequences by continuing their pregnancy or for women carrying fetuses so massively deformed they would only survive a short time after birth.
His clinic would treat these women regardless of their ability to pay, according to Dr. William Harrison, a physician from Fayetteville, Ark. In a moving remembrance in the Arkansas Times, Harrison said Dr. Tiller was called St. George for the care and kindness with which he treated every patient. (Read it at tinyurl.com/m9y3kb.)
But Dr. Tiller, a former U.S. Navy flight surgeon, was endlessly harassed, shot once before and ultimately murdered for the abortions he performed. Some on the religious right suggest he reaped what he sowed; others decry the murder but think that an evil man was subdued. In fact, Dr. Tiller was a national hero, brave, kind and devoted to conscience.
Which brings me back to the national debate on health care, where there is a major effort stirring to block abortion coverage in the plans that emerge. If abortion becomes a disposable pawn in this political game, then the Democrats will have betrayed women.
Among the numerous anti-abortion amendments filed in Congress last week on health care reform were measures to ban abortion services in any government-defined health plan or one subsidized by federal funds. This would mean no abortion coverage in any government option, and women who currently enjoy such coverage in private insurance could lose it. About 90 percent of private health insurance plans currently cover abortion services.
Why am I worried that Democrats, who are in solid control of Congress, and the White House may allow this? Because they refuse to be out front making the humanist case for the right to choose. This political cowardice plays into the perception that the other side has cornered the market on morality.
Here's how gutless Democrats have gotten. After Dr. Tiller was murdered three Democratic women senators offered a resolution condemning violence against providers of reproductive health care. (Read it at tinyurl.com/m8uyaq.) It should have passed unanimously. But apparently any notion of protecting abortion clinic workers from violence is too much for so-called prolife lawmakers. An anonymous senator put a secret hold on the resolution, preventing a vote. Republicans wanted any reference to reproductive health services eliminated.
This disgrace should have led the nightly news, but there was no concerted effort by Democrats to make an issue of it, preferring instead the typical strategy of cowering in a corner.
How about taking the offensive for once? Here's a start: Go after the Hyde Amendment, a law that for more than 30 years has yoked poor women to their unwanted pregnancies by preventing them from using federal Medicaid money for an abortion. These are destitute women. How is it in any way moral to force them to have children they can't afford?
Here's another idea: Demand that restrictions on abortions at military hospitals be lifted so our deployed women service members aren't left stranded. How about the slogan "Support our troops' constitutional rights - you know, the ones they are fighting and dying for."
Giving women control over their biological destiny is not simply a right, it is a social good. The women Dr. Tiller helped sent him piles of grateful letters. This case is easy to make, so let's hear it made from the people who count. Hello, Democrats? We're waiting.
# # #
Associated Press Wire Service
July 11, 2009
Obama, pope discuss the poor, abortion, stem cells
AP Staff
VATICAN CITY – President Barack Obama sat down with Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican on Friday for frank but constructive talks between two men who agree on helping the poor but disagree on abortion and stem cell research.
"It's a great honor," Obama said as he greeted the pope, thanking him for this first meeting, which lasted 30 minutes. They sat down at the pontiff's desk and exchanged pleasantries before reporters and photographers were ushered out of the ornate room.
The pope was heard asking about the Group of Eight summit, the meeting of developed nations that concluded before Obama's arrival at Vatican City. Obama said it "was very productive."
After the meeting, the Vatican said the two leaders discussed immigration, the Middle East peace process and aid to developing nations. But the Vatican's statement also underscored the pair's deep disagreements on abortion.
"In the course of their cordial exchanges, the conversation turned first of all to questions which are in the interest of all and which constitute a great challenge ... such as the defense and promotion of life and the right to abide by one's conscience," the statement said.
Even in his gift to the U.S. leader, the pope sought to communicate his beliefs. Benedict gave Obama with a copy of a Vatican document on bioethics that hardened the church's opposition to using embryos for stem cell research, cloning and in-vitro fertilization.
"Yes, this is what we had talked about," Obama said, telling the pope he would read it on the flight to Ghana.
Earlier, the pope's secretary, the Rev. Georg Ganswein, had told reporters the document would "help the president better understand the position of the Catholic church."
Upon leaving, Obama again thanked the pope. "We look forward to a very strong relationship between our two countries," he said.
With some Catholic activists and American bishops outspoken in their criticism of Obama, even as polls have shown he received a majority of Catholic votes, the audience was much awaited.
Obama is very popular in Italy and several hundred people lining the broad avenue leading to St. Peter's Square cheered his limousine as it went by. Obama waved. Awaiting him at the Vatican was an honor guard of Swiss Guards in their colorful, striped uniforms.
Obama's election presented a challenge for the Vatican after eight years of common ground with President George W. Bush in opposing abortion, an issue that drew them together despite Vatican opposition to the war in Iraq.
But the Vatican has been openly interested in Obama's views and scheduled an unusual afternoon meeting to accommodate him at the end of his Italian stay for a G-8 summit meeting in the earthquake-stricken city of L'Aquila and just before he leaves for Ghana.
In the tradition-conscious Vatican, most such meetings are held at midday. The Vatican also arranged live television coverage of the open session of the meeting after their private talks.
Benedict broke Vatican protocol the day after Obama was elected by sending a personal note of congratulations rather than waiting and sending the usual brief telegram on Inauguration Day.
"I've had a wonderful conversation with the pope over the phone right after the election," Obama told a group of Catholic journalists in Washington before he left for Europe. "And in some ways we see this as a meeting with any other government the government of the Holy See. There are going to be some areas where we've got deep agreements; there are going to be some areas where we've got some disagreements."
But he acknowledged the pope is more than a government head, saying the church "has such profound influence worldwide and in our country."
L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's daily newspaper, gave Obama a positive review after his first 100 days in office. In a front-page editorial, it said that even on ethical questions Obama hadn't confirmed the "radical" direction he discussed during the campaign.
Tensions grew when Obama was invited to receive an honorary degree at the leading U.S. Catholic university, Notre Dame. Dozens of U.S. bishops denounced the university and the local bishop boycotted the ceremony.
Former St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke, who now heads a Vatican tribunal, accused Obama of pursuing anti-life and antifamily agendas. He called it a "scandal" that Notre Dame had invited him to speak.
Yet L'Osservatore concluded that Obama was looking for some common ground with his speech, noting he asked Americans to work together to reduce the number of abortions.
Some conservative American Catholics criticized the Vatican newspaper for its accommodating stance.
This week, Cardinal Justin Rigali, who heads the U.S. bishops' Committee on Pro-Life Activities, complained that the final guidelines of the National Institutes of Health for human embryonic stem cell research are broader than the draft guidelines.
As a child in Indonesia, Obama's Muslim father enrolled him in Catholic school for a few years. Obama is a Protestant.
White House national security aide Denis McDonough, speaking to reporters Thursday on the influence of Catholic social teaching on Obama, said the president "expresses many things that many Catholics recognize as fundamental to our teaching."
In the interview with Catholic journalists, Obama said he would tell the pope of his concern that the world financial crisis is not "borne disproportionally by the most poor and vulnerable countries."
Just this week, Benedict issued a major document calling for a new world financial order guided by ethics and the search for the common good, denouncing the profit-at-all-cost mentality blamed for bringing about the global financial meltdown.
As Obama has pledged to step-up efforts for Middle East peace through a two-state solution, Benedict made a similar appeal during a trip in May to Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories. He issued the Vatican's strongest call yet for a Palestinian state.
Obama met first with Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican's secretary of state, before meeting Benedict in the pope's study.
Obama's wife, Michelle, joined him at the end of the meeting, and gifts were exchanged. Daughters Malia and Sasha, who accompanied their parents on the weeklong trip, also met Benedict. They were ushered out of the room before the media were allowed back in.
Several senior White House staff members also met the pope, with some either shaking his hand or kissing his ring.
# # #
The Houston Chronicle
July 7, 2009
Texas drops health education requirement
By APRIL CASTRO, Associated Press
AUSTIN — Health class will no longer be a state requirement for high school students this fall, making Texas one of the few states in the country with no required health education, officials said.
Education Commissioner Robert Scott announced the move in a recent letter to school districts, causing some to worry Texas students will miss out on critical topics like alcohol awareness, sex education and basic nutrition.
“It was very surprising to a lot of people,” said Diana Everett, executive director of the Texas Association for Health Physical Education, Health, Recreation and Dance. “We’ve all been in shock.”
Individual school districts still can require students to take health classes, but Scott eliminated the state requirement to comply with a new law that bumps up the number electives required to graduate. Starting this fall, students must take six elective courses, instead of the currently mandated three-and-a-half.
Officials wanted to give students more flexibility to pursue electives of their own choosing, so while two required semesters of fine arts were maintained, a semester of physical education and two semesters of a technology class also were removed from the state’s recommended high school program.
“It’s a major statement about where we’re going,” Everett said. “We’ve been trying to address the issue of childhood obesity, but we seem to be losing ground every time the Legislature meets.”
One national health education advocate said removing the course requirement is likely to contribute to students making poor choices.
“It runs the gamut, from tobacco use ... substance use and abuse, nutrition and physical activity levels, unplanned pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, injuries,” said Susan Woolley, executive director of the Ohio-based American School Health Association. “It covers a wide area and it also covers being informed health consumers, knowing when to use medicines or over-the-counter products, properly using the health care system ... all of these things should and could be covered in a good curriculum somewhere between first grade and high school.”
Everett said the decision came too late for many school districts and students to change schedules, so many districts will still teach health as if it were required during in the upcoming school year. But schools will have to decide next spring if they’ll continue with the courses.
Without a state mandate, “there are going to be a lot of people saying ‘well I don’t have the time, I’m not comfortable with this, I don’t have to hire these teachers or I can get rid of that out of the day,’” Woolley said.
Fine arts advocates, meanwhile, are applauding the state’s decision to maintain that requirement.
“Creative aspects of what students learn in fine arts classrooms contributes to 21st century work force preparation,” said Robert Floyd, chair of the Texas Coalition for Quality Arts Education. “Having more electives also gives students who are truly interested in the fine arts the opportunity to take additional courses beyond the fine arts requirement.”
The state’s recommended high school program still will require most students to complete 26 credits. Each semester counts for a half-credit. In addition to the core requirements of math, science, English/language arts and social studies, Texas high school students also will be required to take two years of a foreign language and one year each of fine arts and PE.
# # #
The Dallas Morning News
July 7, 2009
Texas adds electives, scales back required classes in high school
By TERRENCE STUTZ
AUSTIN – Texas high school students are getting a break on course requirements this fall, courtesy of the state's education chief and the Legislature.
State Education Commissioner Robert Scott has decided that all high school students – not just incoming freshmen – will take more electives and fewer required courses under a bill that lawmakers approved in May.
Students will be no longer have to take two semesters of computer technology, a semester of health education and a semester of physical education – though two semesters of PE will still be required.
In the past, students had to take at least three semesters of PE.
In place of those four semesters of course requirements – equal to two credits – students will be able to take more electives for a total of six credits of elective classes.
Students need 26 credits to graduate under the Recommended High School Program – the plan followed by most students.
The standards, announced by Scott in a letter to school superintendents released Monday, would typically take effect with students starting high school in the next academic year.
But Scott decided that the standards apply to all students immediately, unless a district has tougher requirements of its own.
"All students will be able to graduate under the [new] high school graduation requirements beginning in the 2009-10 school year," he wrote.
State lawmakers approved new graduation standards as part of a massive school accountability bill passed during their regular session.
The new graduation requirements were intended to give students more course options in preparing for college or post-secondary training programs.
House Public Education Committee Chairman Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, author of the school accountability measure, said he had no problem with the commissioner expanding the new requirements to all students.
"This will tell us right away how well this [more elective courses] is going to work," said Eissler, who originally wanted to do away with all PE course requirements but later agreed to reduce the number of semesters of PE from three to two.
The lawmaker who has pushed for more PE in public schools as a way to fight rising obesity rates said the change wasn't ideal.
"It's not my preference, but I understand that it could have been worse, considering that the bill as originally filed completely removed the PE and fine arts requirements," Sen. Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound, said through a spokesman.
"Because so many of our students are facing serious health challenges as a result of obesity and inactivity, we need to monitor the effects of this legislation closely to determine its impact on student health."
Eissler emphasized that the state is not telling school districts to do away with computer technology, health and some PE courses, but instead to offer them to students who are interested.
"If a kid chooses a course, he or she is more likely to be interested in it and probably will do better in it," he said. "That was one of the goals of the legislation, to make our course requirements a little more market-friendly for students."
Eissler said he expects to see many students take computer technology and health classes on a voluntary basis. "We just wanted to free up as much time as possible for electives," he said.
Debbie Ratcliffe, a spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency, said the legislation also calls for eliminating another required class, a half semester of speech.
But speech will still have to be taken for the time being because current State Board of Education rules require it.
Other graduation standards are unaffected by the legislation and Scott's decision, including the so-called 4-by-4 core course requirements that call on most students to take four years each of English, math, science and social studies.
Seniors this year are under previous graduation standards that required only three years of math and science – and 24 credits – to receive a diploma.
A credit is equal to one year, or two semesters, of study in a subject.
Students also must take two years – or two credits – in foreign languages, one credit in fine arts, one credit in PE and six credits in electives.
Most high school students follow the "recommended" plan, with some taking the more difficult Distinguished Achievement Program – which includes an extra year of foreign language study.
A "minimum" plan also is available but can only be pursued with the written permission of the student's parents and school counselor.
Under the new law, those students would also have to meet one of these conditions: The student is at least 16 years old, has completed two credits in each of the core areas or failed to be promoted to the 10th grade one or more times.
Ratcliffe said those changes probably will reduce the number of students obtaining a diploma under the minimum graduation plan.
Eventually, high school students will have to get a passing average on 12 end-of-course tests – four each in English, math, science and social studies – to get a diploma.
The end-of-course exams will start with ninth-graders entering high school in the fall of 2011.
# # #
Newsday
July 6, 2009
Opinion: With teens and sex, politics takes priority over public health
By Marie Cocco
It hardly seems worth mentioning that the search for role models of sexual rectitude has gone pretty badly lately. That famous poster of Farrah Fawcett -- her golden locks tumbling around her shoulders and her gleaming smile offering a girl-next-door counterpoint to the suggestiveness of her red swimsuit -- sure makes it look as though, by comparison, the 1970s were an era of wholesomeness.
They weren't.
It was about then that social conservatives -- fed up with sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, divorce, Roe v. Wade, women surging into the work force and who knows what else -- began organizing politically to stamp out all this threatening change.
They failed. But eventually they did succeed in imposing their prescription -- abstinence-only sex education that studies have repeatedly shown doesn't work -- on the one group of sexually active people most in need of hard information and least likely to respond to harangues: teenagers.
It is widely known that teenage birth and pregnancy rates, which dropped dramatically between 1991 and 2005, are now climbing. By tracking changes in reported contraceptive use among sexually active high-school students, researchers at Columbia University and the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which studies sexual health, have identified as the leading culprit a drop in the use of birth control -- specifically condoms.
The team studied trends in teen sexual activity and contraceptive use between 1991 and 2007. During most of this period, the level of sexual activity reported by teenagers in routine surveys overseen by the Centers for Disease Control remained largely unchanged. But during a crucial period -- identified in the study as between 1991 and 2003 -- the use of condoms rose dramatically, climbing from 46.2 percent in 1991 to 63.0 percent in 2003. Then a perceptible decline in the use of condoms began, with 61.5 percent of students reporting condom use in 2007.
"These behavioral trends are consistent with the 2006 and 2007 increases in the teen birth rate, " the study published in the July issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health says. "They may well portend further increases in 2008. "
The decline in contraceptive use might cheer those who have promoted faith-inspired school curriculums that refuse to even mention birth control and, in some cases, specifically emphasize that condoms can fail. True enough.
But now we have clear evidence that political foolishness among adults is leading to foolish behavior among kids. Who could reasonably want more teen pregnancies, more abortions among teenagers, more unmarried mothers, more babies born with greater health risks and with the sorely limited economic prospects that burden the children of young, single mothers? No one would dare promote such a policy.
Yet these are the results of our recent national sex-education policy, which was based on religious faith, not science, and put political gamesmanship ahead of public health.
President Obama's budget would eliminate funding for abstinence-only education programs that show no results in changing teenagers' behavior. That's a proper step, but only a first one.
The same researchers who documented the drop in condom use link the decline in part to waning concern about transmission of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The clear increase in the proportion of teenagers using condoms came during years when public health and media messages about the dangers of HIV were at a height. More recent trends, the researchers write, "may suggest faltering of HIV prevention efforts among U.S. youth."
That is a dire warning of tragically diminished futures and early deaths among a generation that shouldn't be condemned to such suffering.
In the past few months, we've experienced near hysteria over swine flu and almost constant media attention to scares about tainted food. These are genuine health hazards -- but they aren't necessarily deadly, nor do they affect nearly as many people in the United States and around the world as does AIDS. The difference, of course, is that you get HIV from having sex or using drugs intravenously, not from unwittingly eating a bad burger or sitting next to a flu carrier.
You can argue that when it comes to teenagers and sex, good policy and genuine leadership get better results than moralizing or ignoring signals that an upsurge in HIV infections might emerge. The tragic lesson of the AIDS pandemic is that squeamishness is no substitute for common sense.
# # #
NPR’s Morning Edition
July 6, 2009
Some Docs Resist Repeal Of Bush-Era Abortion Regs
Doctors who oppose abortion and, in some cases, birth control pills say they may stop providing care if the Obama administration follows through on threats to repeal controversial Bush administration regulations aimed at allowing health care workers to refuse to provide care that conflicts with their beliefs. Opponents of the rules point out that those health care workers have plenty of other protections to fall back on.
According to a survey conducted for the Christian Medical Association, "90 percent of those surveyed said they will quit their practices before violating their conscience," said David Stevens, the group's executive director. Repealing the rules, which officially took effect on former President Bush's final day in office, said Stevens, "sends a clear message: It's open season on health care professionals of conscience — discriminate at will."
But not so fast, says Nancy Berlinger, deputy director of the Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank in Garrison, N.Y. "Conscience clauses are on the books in almost every state," she said, in addition to being codified in a series of federal laws.
Most date back to the early 1970s, after the Supreme Court legalized abortion in the landmark ruling Roe v. Wade.
"The idea was that when abortion moved from being an illegal procedure, therefore something that you did not offer in a hospital, to being a legal procedure, therefore something that you might offer in a hospital, there was a move to protect providers — usually framed as physicians, but sometimes they're more generally written — from having to participate in abortions," Berlinger said.
But conscience laws are not always abortion-specific. Many reference sterilization; some are silent, allowing practitioners to exercise their right to opt out of providing sometimes controversial end-of-life care, in vitro fertilization, or even some birth control pills that some practitioners insist cause very early abortions by preventing fertilized eggs from implanting in a woman's uterus.
Joxel Garcia, who was assistant secretary for health in the Bush administration and helped write the regulations now at issue, said they're needed because so few health workers even know that protections exist. He didn't, he said, when he was applying to be a medical resident in obstetrics and gynecology in the late 1980s and was told point-blank not to apply to certain programs if he wouldn't do abortions.
"I didn't know at that time that those facilities that were receiving federal funds were not supposed to discriminate against me because I did not perform terminations of pregnancy or abortions," he said.
Garcia also said the regulations give health care workers "a mechanism to seek help" through the Department of Health and Human Services.
But Berlinger, like many other opponents of the rules, thinks they are so vague that they would let any health worker object to providing any service at any time for any reason — even reasons that don't necessarily stand up to scientific scrutiny.
"Words like belief," she said, "when you talk about them in the context of health care, aren't just anything you might think of. They have to be defensible. And a false belief about science or the promotion of ambiguity where things can be disambiguated," as in the idea that birth control is equal to abortion, "is not ethical."
All of which puts the Obama administration in a tight spot. President Obama has been eager to find a middle ground in the touchy abortion debate. Administration officials can try to rewrite the rules, which will undoubtedly anger abortion-rights and other women's health groups. Or they can repeal them, which will anger anti-abortion groups.
A decision is expected later this summer.
# # #
The New York Times
June 4, 2009
Dr. Tiller’s Important Job
BY Judith Warner
The 9-year-old girl had been raped by her father. She was 18 weeks pregnant. Carrying the baby to term, going through labor and delivery, would have ripped her small body apart.
There was no doctor in her rural Southern town to provide her with an abortion. No area hospital would even consider taking her case.
Susan Hill, the president of the National Women’s Health Foundation, which operates reproductive health clinics in areas where abortion services are scarce or nonexisistent, called Dr. George Tiller, the Wichita, Kan., ob-gyn who last Sunday was shot to death by an abortion foe in the entry foyer of his church.
She begged.
“I only asked him for a favor when it was a really desperate story, not a semi-desperate story,” she told me this week. Tiller was known to abortion providers — and opponents — as the “doctor of last resort” — the one who took the patients no one else would touch.
“He took her for free,” she said. “He kept her three days. He checked her himself every few hours. She and her sister came back to me and said he couldn’t have been more wonderful. That’s just the way he was.”
Other patients of Dr. Tiller’s shared their stories this week on a special “Kansas Stories” page hosted by the Web site “A Heartbreaking Choice.”
One New York mother wrote of having been referred by an obstetrician to Tiller after learning, in her 27th week of pregnancy, that her soon-to-be son was “so very sick” that, once born, he’d have nothing more than “a brief life of respirators, dialysis, surgeries and pain.” In-state doctors refused to perform an abortion.
“The day I drove up to the clinic in Wichita, Kansas, to undergo the procedure that would end the life of my precious son, I also walked into the nightmare of abortion politics. In this world, reality rarely gets through the rhetoric,” wrote another mother, from Texas, of the shouts, graphic posters and protesters’ video camera that greeted her when she came to see Tiller.
Our understanding of what late abortion is like has been almost entirely shaped in public discourse by the opponents of abortion rights. In recent years, discussions of the issue have been filled with the gory details of so-called partial-birth abortion; the grim miseries that drive some women and girls to end their pregnancies after the first trimester have somehow been elided.
“Late abortion is not a failure of contraception. It’s for medical reasons,” Eleanor Smeal, the president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, who has worked to defend abortion providers like Tiller against harassment and violence since the mid-1980s, told me this week. “We’ve made pregnancy a fairy tale where there are no fetal complications, there’s no cancer, no terrible abuse of girls, no cases where to make a girl go all the way through a pregnancy is to destroy her. These are the realities of the story. That’s what Dr. Tiller worked with — the realities.”
There was a great deal of emotion in the air this week as the reality of Tiller’s death set in. Much of it was mournful, some was celebratory, some was cynical and self-serving.
There were the requisite expressions of disapproval and disavowal by politicians from both sides of the abortion divide. And yet it seemed to me that even from pro-choice politicians, the response was muted. In death, as in life, no one wanted to embrace this man who had specialized in helping women who learned late in their pregnancies that their fetuses had gross abnormalities.
It seemed that no one wanted to be too closely associated with the muck and mire of what Tiller had to do in carrying out the risky and emotionally traumatic second- and third-trimester abortions that other doctors and hospitals refused to do. In news reports, there was a tendency to frame the “abortion doctor’s” murder almost as a kind of combat death: a natural occupational hazard.
Yet Tiller — who went to work in a bulletproof vest, lived in a gated community and drove a bulletproof car — was a doctor, not a soldier. And it is precisely this kind of thinking — this viewing of his life and work through the lens of our most gruesome cultural warfare, this slippage and mixing up of medicine and politics — that left him largely unprotected at the time of his death.
Someone resembling Scott Roeder, the man charged in Dr. Tiller’s murder, was seen on Saturday trying to pour glue into the lock on the back door of a Kansas City clinic. Before that, abortion providers around the country had been telling local law enforcement and the United States Justice Department that harassment at their clinics was on the rise, and they were scared. The Feminist Majority Foundation had been hearing all spring that the atmosphere outside clinics was heating up in the wake of the new pro-choice president’s election. “We all lived through Clinton, the shootings in ’93 and ’94. We were concerned some of the extremists said they had to take the fight ‘back to the streets,’” Smeal said.
There are legal protections in place that ought to keep abortion providers like Tiller safe. The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, passed by Congress after the 1993 murder of Dr. David Gunn outside his Pensacola, Fla., women’s health clinic and the attempted murder of Tiller that same year, prohibits property damage, acts or threats of force, and interference with and intimidation of anyone entering a reproductive health care facility.
When the federal law is backed by complementary state laws, and when local law enforcement officers apply those laws assiduously, serious violence greatly declines. When the law’s not applied strenuously, when vandalism goes uninvestigated, when protesters are allowed to photograph or videotape patients arriving at women’s health clinics, when death threats aren’t followed up, more serious acts of physical violence follow. In fact, when intimidation occurs at a clinic, the reported rate of violence triples, the Feminist Majority Federation’s 2008 National Clinic Violence Survey found.
“We really do need to arrest people who are trespassing. Arrest people who are gluing locks. Committing more minor violations of the law so criminal activity doesn’t escalate, so these criminals don’t feel emboldened,” said Vicki Saporta, the president of the National Abortion Federation. “In places where the laws are enforced, you don’t see violence escalate. Protesters generally go someplace where there’s a more hospitable climate,” she told me. But, she added, in a lot of communities, law enforcement views clinic violence as a political problem. “They don’t view it for what it is: criminal activity outside of a commercial establishment,” she said. “Law enforcement can’t treat this as a political issue. It’s a criminal issue.”
We as a nation cannot continue to provide a hospitable environment for the likes of Roeder because the thought of what happens to fetuses in late abortions turns our stomachs. We have to accept that sometimes terrible things happen to young girls. We have to face the fact that sometimes desired pregnancies go tragically wrong. We have to weigh our repugnance for late abortion against the consequences for women and girls of being denied life-saving medical treatment.
Only a tiny handful of doctors in this country will, like Dr. Tiller, provide abortion services for girls or women who are advanced in their pregnancies. These doctors aren’t well known to patients or even to other doctors, but they’re closely monitored by anti-abortion groups, who know where they work, where they live and where they worship. Roeder may have been a lone gunman, but in the largest possible sense, he did not act alone. The location of Tiller’s gated community was prominently featured on an easily-accessed Web site, along with a map of the streets surrounding his house. It was really only a matter of time before someone was unbalanced enough to take the bait.
Most Americans, I’m sure, do not believe that a 9-year-old should be forced to bear a child, or that a woman should have no choice but to risk her life to carry a pregnancy to term.
By averting our eyes from the ugliness and tragedy that accompany some pregnancies, we have allowed anti-abortion activists to define the dilemma of late abortion. We have allowed them to isolate and vilify doctors like Tiller.
We can no longer be complicit — through our muted disapproval or our complacency — in domestic terror.
# # #
The Dallas Morning News
June 2, 2009
2009 Texas Legislature: Winners and losers
Emily Ramshaw and Christy Hoppe
It was a legislative session without big winners. But if there's any consolation, it's that everybody lost something. Voter identification was lost. A transportation agency overhaul, including North Texas' big gas-tax priority, was lost. And during the five-day chubfest, a lot of time we'll never get back was lost. But even the biggest losers can find a silver lining:
Teenagers
What they lost: Grounded. They can't use a cellphone or text behind the wheel. They have to take real-live road tests to get their driver's licenses. And they can't jump into the tanning bed unless they're 16 ½ and have a parent with them. Could life be any more unfair?
What they won: Just-above-average high school students will have a better chance of partying at the University of Texas at Austin, now that the top 10 percent rule has been scaled back.
Homebuilders
What they lost: The Texas Residential Construction Commission, long considered a protector of homebuilders' interests, is dead, after lawmakers failed to extend its lifespan. Homebuilder Bob Perry can't be happy, and neither can the lawmakers who count on his campaign contributions. Not even millions can buy love.
What they won: Thanks to a last-minute amendment, cities can no longer force homebuilders to install fire safety sprinklers in new homes.
Tobacco lovers
What they lost: Companies that sell low-budget smokeless tobacco will be dipping into their coffers to pay higher taxes, money that will relieve rural doctors' student loan debt.
What they won: They stubbed out a proposed statewide smoking ban, sticking it to the movement's celebrity advocate, Lance Armstrong.
Gamblers
What they lost: Lawmakers were forced to fold on resort casinos, racetrack slot machines and legalized Texas Hold 'Em. And Indian reservation gaming got even less traction than it did two years ago.
What they won: BINGO! A bill awaiting the governor's signature would ease restrictions on operators of the charitable game. Lawmakers also approved a study on the future of gambling in Texas.
Green energy ADVOCATES
What they lost: Lawmakers failed to pass bills setting new energy efficiency standards and providing incentives for solar power.
What they won: A measure creating green building standards for state offices and schools squeaked in under the wire.
Social conservatives
What they lost: What didn't they lose? A proposed ban on stem cell research, mandatory pre-abortion sonograms and even "choose life" license plates fizzled out.
What they won: Campaign issues and the right to come back and try again next session.
# # #
The New York Times
June 2, 2009
The Deadly Toll of Abortion by Amateurs
By DENISE GRADY
BEREGA, Tanzania — A handwritten ledger at the hospital tells a grim story. For the month of January, 17 of the 31 minor surgical procedures here were done to repair the results of “incomplete abortions.” A few may have been miscarriages, but most were botched operations by untrained, clumsy hands.
Abortion is illegal in Tanzania (except to save the mother’s life or health), so women and girls turn to amateurs, who may dose them with herbs or other concoctions, pummel their bellies or insert objects vaginally. Infections, bleeding and punctures of the uterus or bowel can result, and can be fatal. Doctors treating women after these bungled attempts sometimes have no choice but to remove the uterus.
Pregnancy and childbirth are among the greatest dangers that women face in Africa, which has the world’s highest rates of maternal mortality — at least 100 times those in developed countries. Abortion accounts for a significant part of the death toll.
Maternal mortality is high in Tanzania: for every 100,000 births, 950 women die. In the United States, the figure is 11, and it is even lower in other developed countries. But Tanzania’s record is neither the best nor the worst in Africa. Many other countries have similar statistics; quite a few do better and a handful do markedly worse.
Eighty percent of Tanzanians live in rural areas, and the hospital in Berega — miles from paved roads and electric poles — is a typical rural hospital, struggling to deal with the same problems faced by hospitals and clinics in much of the country. Abortion is a constant worry.
Worldwide, there are 19 million unsafe abortions a year, and they kill 70,000 women (accounting for 13 percent of maternal deaths), mostly in poor countries like Tanzania where abortion is illegal, according to the World Health Organization. More than two million women a year suffer serious complications. According to Unicef, unsafe abortions cause 4 percent of deaths among pregnant women in Africa, 6 percent in Asia and 12 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Reliable figures on abortion in Tanzania are hard to come by, but the World Health Organization reports that its region, Eastern Africa, has the world’s second-highest rate of unsafe abortions (only South America is higher). And Africa as a whole has the highest proportion of teenagers — 25 percent — among women having unsafe abortions.
The 120-bed hospital in Berega depends on solar panels and a generator, which is run for only a few hours a day. Short on staff members, supplies and even water, the hospital puts a lot of its scarce resources into cleaning up after failed abortions.
The medical director, Dr. Paschal Mdoe, 30, said many patients who had had the unsafe abortions were 16 to 20 years old, and four months pregnant. He said there was a steady stream of cases, much as he had seen in hospitals in other parts of the country.
“It’s the same everywhere,” he said.
On a Friday in January, 6 of 20 patients in the women’s ward were recovering from attempted abortions. One, a 25-year-old schoolteacher, lay in bed moaning and writhing. She had been treated at the hospital a week earlier for an incomplete abortion and now was back, bleeding and in severe pain. She was taken to the operating room once again and anesthetized, and Emmanuel Makanza, who had treated her the first time, discovered that he had failed to remove all the membranes formed during the pregnancy. Once again, he scraped the inside of her womb with a curet, a metal instrument. It was a vigorous, bloody procedure. This time, he said, it was complete.
Mr. Makanza is an assistant medical officer, not a fully trained physician. Assistant medical officers have education similar to that of physician assistants in the United States, but with additional training in surgery. They are Tanzania’s solution to a severe shortage of doctors, and they perform many basic operations, like Caesareans and appendectomies. The hospital in Berega has two.
Abortions in Berega come in seasonal waves — March and April, August and September — in sync with planting and harvests, when a lot of socializing goes on, Dr. Mdoe said. He said rumor had it that many abortions were done by a man in Gairo, a town west of Berega. In some cases, he said, the abortionist only started the procedure, knowing that doctors would have to finish the job.
Dr. Mdoe said he suspected that some of the other illegal abortionists were hospital workers with delusions of surgical skill.
“They just poke, poke, poke,” he said. “And then the woman has to come here.” Sometimes the doctors find fragments of sticks left inside the uterus, an invitation to sepsis.
In the past some hospitals threatened to withhold care until a woman identified the abortionist (performing abortions can bring a 14-year prison term), but that practice was abandoned in favor of simply providing postabortal treatment. Still, women do not want to discuss what happened or even admit that they had anything other than a miscarriage, because in theory they can be prosecuted for having abortions. The law calls for seven years in prison for the woman. So doctors generally do not ask questions.
“They are supposed to be arrested,” Dr. Mdoe said. “Our work as physicians is just to help and make sure they get healed.”
He went on, “We as medical personnel think abortion should be legal so a qualified person can do it and you can have safe abortion.” There are no plans in Tanzania to change the law.
The steady stream of cases reflects widespread ignorance about contraception. Young people in the region do not seem to know much or care much about birth control or safe sex, Dr. Mdoe said.
In most countries the rates of abortion, whether legal or illegal — and abortion-related deaths — tend to decrease when the use of birth control increases. But only about a quarter of Tanzanians use contraception. In South Africa, the rate of contraception use is 60 percent, and in Kenya 39 percent. Both have lower rates of maternal mortality than does Tanzania. South Africa also allows abortion on request.
But in other African nations like Sierra Leone and Nigeria, abortion is not available on request, and the figures on contraceptive use are even lower than Tanzania’s and maternal mortality is higher. Nonprofit groups are working with the Tanzanian government to provide family planning, but the country is vast, and the widely distributed rural populations makes many people extremely hard to reach.
Geography is not the only obstacle. An assistant medical officer, Telesphory Kaneno, said: “Talking about sexuality and the sex organs is still a taboo in our community. For a woman, if it is known that she is taking contraceptives, there is a fear of being called promiscuous.”
In interviews, some young women from the area who had given birth as teenagers said they had not used birth control because they did not know about it or thought it was unsafe: they had heard that condoms were unsanitary and that birth control pills and other hormonal contraceptives could cause cancer.
Mr. Kaneno said the doctors were trying to dispel those taboos and convince women that it was a good thing to be able to choose whether and when to get pregnant.
“It is still a long way to go,” he said.
# # #
Associated Press Wire
May 4, 2009
Texas Legislature: Contraceptive bill advances
AP Wire staff
AUSTIN — Certain unmarried teen mothers could get contraceptives without the consent of their parents under a bill that received preliminary approved from the state Senate on Friday.
But thanks to a hotly debated amendment by Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, the parents or guardians of the teen mother would still be informed that the contraceptives were provided.
The bill, which applies to mothers 16 and older, passed on a preliminary 19-9 vote Friday after a series of heated exchanges on the Senate floor.
Proponents said Texas has a high rate of repeat teen pregnancies, while critics said the legislation would encourage bad behavior and cut parents out of an important health decision.
Brochure debate
The Senate gave final approval to a bill requiring that ultrasounds be offered to women seeking abortions, but not before a new debate erupted over whether there is a connection between abortions and breast cancer.
Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, tried but failed to amend the bill to take out a reference to such a link in the pamphlet that women are required to be offered before an abortion. That brochure says that while some studies show a link, others do not.
Studies by the National Cancer Institute and American Cancer Society say there is no medical evidence of a link.
"The language was put in there to scare women," Shapleigh said.
Patrick, the bill’s sponsor, said women should be told that studies support both sides of the issue.
The Senate rejected the amendment 19-11 before sending the bill to the House.
# # #
NBCDFW.com
MAY 1, 2009
Senate Approves "Choose Life" License Plates
A tempest has risen nationally over plates promoting adoption
BY HOLLY LaFON
Cute. Stylish. Possibly obtrusive.
Those who wonder what a bumper sticker has ever done to change anybody’s mind about any issue or promote meaningful dialogue will be especially confused (regardless of their position on abortion) about the point of the newly approved “Choose Life” license plates.
However, the new plates will join a selection of over 130 specialty license plate options already available in Texas, such as “Read to Succeed” and “Animal Friendly.”
The main benefit: proceeds from the $30 plates will also go to charities, pregnancy centers and foundations that assist in adoptions, the cause they are ostensibly meant to support. The same plates, which are already allowed in 19 other states, have raised $10 million to promote adoption.
But critics of the plates note that attributing the cause entirely to the promotion of adoption could be misleading. The language of the bill clearly stipulates that recipient organizations must have no ties to abortion providers whatsoever.
"This bill, although it has a message of 'Choose Life,' the funds are going to go to promote adoption, because that is obviously a great opportunity to give an alternative," said a sponsor of the bill, Rep. Larry Phillips, R-Sherman, reports Lifenews.
Even more controversy has erupted nationwide over the free speech question the bright and cheery license plates raise.
In particular, Illinois has refused to issue the plates, though it sells roughly 60 others, including a special edition “Illinois Salutes President Barack Obama” (which shattered sales records, incidentally. Beats a real commemorative plate, maybe). In a court case, Illinois argued that the plates convey government, not private speech, and they are thus free from restrictions.
Missouri subsequently issued an opposite decision, allowing the plates by arguing they qualify as private speech and are protected as the free speech of the individual driving the vehicle.
The Texas bill has now passed the Senate and the House and will move on to Gov. Perry’s desk, where he is likely to sign it.
# # #
Associated Press State & Local Wire
MAY 1, 2009
Ultrasound bill gets early Senate approval
BY JIM VERTUNO
The Texas Senate voted Thursday to require doctors to offer an ultrasound to women seeking abortions and to let them see the results if they want to.
The 20-9 vote came on a bill that is a major step back from the original version. That one would have required the ultrasound and the women to see the results and hear any heartbeat detected.
Stuck with the possibility of not getting a vote on his original bill, Sen. Dan Patrick, a Houston Republican and conservative radio talk show host, offered the weakened version to give the woman the option to accept or refuse both the ultrasound and the results.
Patrick said that while he hopes the bill reduces the number of abortions in Texas, he insists the bill is about protecting women's health and giving them as much information as possible.
"The woman has total choice here. She's not forced to have it. She's not forced to see it," Patrick said. "I just want her to be informed."
But Planned Parenthood spokeswoman Sarah Wheat said the organization already routinely perform ultrasounds on women seeking abortions and as many has half of them choose to see the results.
"From a public health perspective, this bill is not necessary," Wheat said. "This bill is more about politics than about good health policy."
The bill still needs a final vote before it goes to the House, which could happen as early as Friday. The House is already considering an ultrasound bill.
If ultimately passed into law, Texas would join 16 states that already have laws related to abortion ultrasounds, some requiring they be performed and others requiring a woman be told where she can get a free ultrasound.
Even with the weakened version, anti-abortion groups praised the Senate vote that came just a few hours after it approved creating "Choose Life" license plates. The Free Market Foundation dubbed Thursday "Pro Life Day" in the Senate.
Anti-abortion activists had targeted the ultrasound bill as their top priority of the session. Just last week they worried they were running out of time before the June 1 conclusion.
Patrick has twice made major concessions to get the bill this far.
His first version required the woman to be shown the ultrasound results. His second version, offered a month ago, required the ultrasound but allowed the woman to refuse to see them.
Both of those versions were opposed by the Texas Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Those groups said the earlier versions could violate a woman's right to refuse a procedure that may not be medically necessary.
Abortion rights supporters say even the latest version seeks to bully women already facing a tough decision.
"I believe it's about shaming the woman," said Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, who voted against it.
"I'll ignore that," Patrick retorted in the testy exchange.
# # #
The Dallas Morning News
April 22, 2009
Local count finds Dallas County's homeless population is down
By KIM HORNER
A local count found that the number of people who are homeless on any given night in Dallas County dropped slightly from last year, despite the difficult economy.
A total of 5,675 people -- including 1,319 children -- were homeless on the annual one-night count by the city and the Metro Dallas Homeless Alliance. The total number of homeless people decreased 3 percent, from 5,869, in 2008.
But the number of homeless children, one of the fastest-growing segments, is up 15 percent from just two years ago.
The Dallas-based nonprofit that coordinates and provides homeless services conducts the annual count in shelters, outdoor encampments and special housing programs. Although it's considered a snapshot of the homeless population, it's impossible to get a complete picture. Some people cannot be found, and others scatter when police-escorted volunteers try to count them.
Mike Rawlings, a businessman who serves as the city's homeless czar, said the results show that Dallas is making progress at addressing homelessness.
"We've been working hard, and I think effectively, to drive the numbers down," Rawlings said.
The count found that the number of people sleeping outside decreased to 145, compared with 358 in 2005. And 500 now live in special housing for the homeless, compared with 158 that same year. The report states that The Bridge, which is run by the Metro Dallas Homeless Alliance, and an increase in special housing have helped reduce the number of people sleeping outdoors.
Of those still homeless, 37 percent reported having substance abuse issues, 33 percent reported mental illness and 26 percent said they had a physical disability.
The drop in homelessness surprised some who work with the homeless.
The Rev. Bubba Dailey, executive director of the Austin Street Centre near downtown, said record numbers are seeking shelter.
"We're seeing more people now due to the economy," she said. "We see 400 a night and we turn away at least 20 a night."
The Rev. Bruce Buchanan, executive director of The Stewpot, said his agency has seen a 55 percent increase in requests for assistance getting identification cards in the past year.
He said that police initiatives to step up enforcement against sleeping in public and other "quality of life" violations in January may have affected the outcome of the count.
"I think it was clear that the enforcement of quality-of-life ordinances in the downtown area led to people dispersing themselves throughout the area, so that it did not lend itself to the one-night count," Buchanan said. "People have kind of gone underground."
Organizers emphasized that they do the best they can each year to find homeless people, and that they conduct the count the same way each year. More than 100 volunteers conduct the outdoor count and surveyed 2,444 people.
In the surveys, people gave a variety of reasons for being homeless: job losses, substance abuse, family violence, mental illness, medical disabilities, evictions and legal problems. The number of people who said they were homeless because of job losses increased to 48 percent in 2009.
Layoffs have contributed to an increase of families seeking shelter at Family Gateway downtown, Acting Executive Director Kelly Harris said.
"We are seeing more couples, more intact families," she said. "We're seeing higher levels of education and people who've ended up homeless because of job losses."
The count found 601 people who were chronically homeless, or who have disabilities such as mental illness and have been on the streets long-term. The number of chronically homeless people decreased from 611 in 2008.
Cities nationwide conduct similar counts. A Tarrant County count found a nearly 10 percent decrease, to 2,181, from 2008. Results of a Collin County count have not been released.
# # #
D Magazine, MAY, 2009 Issue
APRIL 22, 2009
The Problem With Abstinence Education
In theory, abstinence is fail-proof. But Texas spends the most on abstinence while achieving one of the highest teen birth rates in the country. What does that mean for Plano-based Aim for Success, the country's biggest promoter of chastity?
BY LAURA BEIL
Amy Corless doesn't want her sixth-grade daughter to have sex. Not now, not any time soon. So last September, an abstinence presentation sponsored by the T.C. Marsh Middle School PTA sounded like an okay idea. The event was a production of Plano-based Aim For Success, which bills itself as the largest provider of abstinence education in the country and is the dominant voice of abstinence in Dallas' private and suburban schools. But Corless had never heard of the group. A preview showed her jazzy PowerPoint slides about sex, condoms, and long-term goals. Corless was skeptical of the abstinence-until-marriage message—around the Corless home, it's more like abstinence-until-adulthood—but was reassured by the Marsh mom network. "Everybody was like, 'Well, it doesn't hurt,' " Corless says.
Then her daughter came home from school one day reporting that condoms don't work 98 percent of the time. Aside from the spurious statistic, Corless was uncomfortable with the analogies her 12-year-old recited, some of which seemed judgmental toward women and even contradictory. Virginity is a gift that a girl can't ever take back, her daughter said, but if a girl has already had sex, she still can reclaim her status as a virgin. "It seemed like a backward thing to be teaching," Corless says. In the upcoming vote on next year's PTA budget, she plans to suggest a different use for the $1,600 that went to Aim For Success.
These are shaky times for the abstinence business, and Texas is Exhibit A. Critics like to point out that our state boasts the largest amount of spending on abstinence while achieving one of the highest teen birth rates in the country. (Mississippi took the No. 1 ranking earlier this year.) In fact, health authorities just reported that birth rates among American teens rose for the second consecutive year in 2007, ending a 14-year decline that began in 1991. And let's pile on the bad news while we're at it: in February, Bristol Palin, the most visible face of teen pregnancy in the country, deemed abstinence "not realistic." Even the editorial page of the Dallas Morning News, not known for leaning leftward, recently concluded that "an abstinence-only health curriculum fails our children." All this, while Democrats suddenly control the wellspring of abstinence funding. A state budget analyst has already predicted that abstinence money will evaporate under the Obama administration.
So it's understandable that Marilyn Morris sounds battle weary. The former pregnant teen began her career two decades ago with an unpaid talk at her daughter's school and founded Aim For Success in 1993. "We feel we're under attack," she says—from the media, from liberals, and especially from Planned Parenthood, which is "on a rampage to destroy abstinence." But unlike almost every other abstinence program in the country, Aim For Success has never drawn its lifeblood from federal funding. The group's annual revenue—about $700,000—is almost entirely supplied by schools that dip into their own budgets or PTA funds. In short, the future of Aim For Success will not rest on one sweeping vote in Washington, but on lots of little votes in places like DISD's Marsh Middle School.
As Amy Corless discovered, though, objecting to Aim For Success is an awkward undertaking. Even a group of smart moms who work well together, like the moms at Marsh, can find themselves divided on the question of abstinence education. Oppose the idea, and you get a little self-conscious that other parents will think you endorse wanton sex in adolescence and favor handing out condoms in school hallways. Corless wants the abstinence message first, last, and always—but also wants her daughter's class to get a better impression of contraception and disease protection than the fact that it can fail. It's also hard to answer this question: if not Aim For Success, then what? Aim For Success makes everything so tidy. Corless tried Googling "sex ed" and got a paralyzing 6 million hits covering hundreds of options. Which ones are any good? Which ones are appropriate for which age? Which comply with state laws that say abstinence should be emphasized? "Nobody has time for that kind of research," she says.
For a school like Marsh, these decisions are especially stressful. About three-quarters of the student body comes from low-income homes, but the school also has a nucleus of devoted, middle-class parents who choose to send their children to Marsh when they could afford private school—parents who cite a belief in public education, an impressive principal, and the fact that their children are genuinely happy going there. But given the school's demographic reality, the PTA does well to bring in $20,000; some suburban PTAs easily clear several times that amount. Every dollar in the bank at Marsh represents some parent's hours of organizing and running a fundraiser, and every budget item is a triage of what the school needs most. Parents like Corless will say, If you're going to spend $1,600 at Marsh, you'd better make darn sure it's worth the money.
No doubt, some parents think so. "If there's something we could better spend our money on, I would like to see it," says Katie King, another Marsh parent. She was skeptical of Aim For Success, she says, until she saw the program, which combines the seriousness of The Sex Talk with the pizzazz of a game show. "Once I heard the presentation, it turned me around," she says. "I was pleasantly surprised about the revelations they made about STDs." Like Amy Corless' daughter, King's son also came away from the Aim For Success presentation saying that condoms don't work. But in King's view, that's not so bad, at least in middle school. "In sixth grade, you tell them don't do it, and you tell them about the diseases," King says.
Susie McMinn, though, worries the Aim For Success approach is too steeped in the negative. Her sixth-grader came away believing that if she had sex before she got married, she might die or be left unable to have children. McMinn, who has a son and daughter at Marsh, does not want her children to have sex before they are grown, but neither does she want them to develop a destructive view of disease protection. "At some point, they are going to realize these are idle threats," McMinn says. "Some of their friends are going to have sex, and they won't drop dead." And years from now, when the time arrives for her son or daughter to have sex, she doesn't want them thinking that condoms don't work, so no point in fooling with them.
PTA president Melissa Higginbotham inherited the annual program from previous leaders, but remains firmly in favor of Aim For Success. "I believe it is important information for them to remain healthy, happy, successful students," she says. She doesn't mind that Aim For Success talks about the failures of condoms more than the benefits, and she believes the tone is appropriate for younger adolescents. "They need to know what the potential consequences of sex are when they have that first boyfriend or girlfriend and begin thinking about sex."
But when kids are considering having sex—and in middle school, 30 percent of Dallas public school children have had intercourse—is there any evidence that Aim For Success will give them pause? Generally speaking, data don't support abstinence education. Very few programs, including Aim For Success, have been subject to the kind of evaluation that withstands scientific rigor. This is not really Marilyn Morris' fault; these kinds of studies are expensive and logistically difficult to conduct. Students do fill out questionnaires after her program, and Morris says these come back with glowing reviews. At Marsh, for example, one girl wrote, "Everything was great. You have changed my future." About 95 percent of the students say the hour-long program is either "good" or "excellent."
All you can conclude from those survey numbers, says Doug Kirby, a California researcher who recently reviewed data for all sex ed programs for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, is that 95 percent of kids enjoy themselves for 60 minutes. "Students' immediate response to something is not a valid indicator of their future sexual behavior," he says. Most programs require a serious time investment. In his review of data for both comprehensive and abstinence education, he found no school programs less than about 11 hours long that could have any lasting effect on behavior. A general rule of thumb, he says, is the larger the group, the more time you have to spend with them to see an influence.
For her part, Aim For Success' Marilyn Morris agrees that a single hour will not change a kid's life. What she does say is that the issues presented should be springboards for continuing discussion with parents and in schools. Among other things, she provides monthly e-mail tips for parents to talk to their kids without being squeamish. "We believe parents need to be the sex educators," she says. On that point, the parents at Marsh, and even supporters of comprehensive sex ed, agree.
Whether they will agree to keep Aim For Success is up to the Marsh PTA—and the more than 150 school districts in Texas alone that hire its services. Morris points out that she was here long before the government got interested, starting with only an evangelical spirit of abstinence and a mission. That message will continue, she says, as long as there are schools that want to hear it.
# # #
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
April 22, 2009
Measure in Texas Legislature would add ultrasound to abortion procedure
BY ANNA M. TINSLEY
AUSTIN — Texas women getting abortions would have to undergo an ultrasound — and choose whether to see the images or hear the fetal heartbeat — under a bill considered by state lawmakers Tuesday.
The controversial measure by Rep. Frank Corte, R-San Antonio, requires the doctor to do the ultrasound at least two hours before the abortion to make sure the woman "understands the nature and consequences of an abortion."
HB36, referred to as the "informed consent" or the "ultrasound bill," is expected to trigger the biggest abortion debate in the Texas Legislature since lawmakers passed parental consent in 2005.
Supporters say this is the top priority for abortion opponents this year.
"It's patronizing to assume people don't need or want this information," said Kyleen Wright, president of the Arlington-based Texans for Life Coalition. "Planned Parenthood wants it to be easy, breezy and dehumanized. We owe the women who have to live with this decision."
Opponents say this bill is not needed and is a clear example of politicians meddling in medical procedures.
"This is already such a terribly, terribly difficult choice to make," said Holly Morgan, Director of Communications for Planned Parenthood of North Texas. "They are using this to shame women who terminate their pregnancies. It's incredibly unfair."
A similar bill in the Senate has been approved by committee but has yet to be considered by the full Senate.
The House version would require doctors to do the ultrasound, show the woman the image, let her hear the heartbeat and explain the fetus's development. She would be able to "avert her eyes from the ultrasound images." The House State Affairs Committee left the bill pending.
Some of the arguments:
For: Supporters say it could save countless unborn babies' lives.
"Women and young girls should not be effectively blindfolded as they are led into the abortion office," said Jonathan Saenz, director of legislative affairs at the Austin-based Free Market Foundation.
Cathie Adams, president of Texas Eagle Forum, a conservative Republican group in Dallas, said she has talked to many women who would have chosen not to have an abortion if they had seen a sonogram first.
"They did not have adequate information before making the life-and-death decision," Adams said. "Every other surgical procedure is preceded with all the information necessary to make a decision. Abortion should not be exempted from that requirement."
Against: Morgan said doctors at Planned Parenthood clinics already perform ultrasounds to determine the age of the fetus, and women can view the results.
She said Planned Parenthood works with women on what to do — have the baby and keep it or put it up for adoption, or have an abortion.
"We want to help her figure out what she wants to do and do it successfully," Morgan said. "With this bill, lawmakers are legislating in the arena of medical care.
"They are trying to force us to force them to view it."
Some medical groups have expressed concern that a woman's right to refuse an ultrasound would be violated.
# # #
The Austin Chronicle
April 16, 2009
Dismantling Family Planning, Pt. 2
BY JORDAN SMITH
With the House version of the state budget set for debate on the floor starting tomorrow morning, Rep. Warren Chisum, R-Pampa, is now proposing an amendment that women's health care advocates say would completely undo the state's system for providing reproductive health services to low-income women.
"If the goal here is to just totally dismantle women's access to care, then [Chisum's] done a great job," says Sarah Wheat, vice president for community affairs for Planned Parenthood of the Texas Capital Region.
The Chisum amendment would completely rearrange the way Texas' Dept. of State Health Services allocates roughly $42 million in funds to family planning providers -- a reorganization of "funding priorities" that would make the agency's lowest funding priority a large group of providers that currently provide services to the vast majority of women. Not surprisingly, this group includes a number of clinics run by Planned Parenthood -- it seems clear that defunding Planned Parenthood (an ongoing pet project for the right), is the goal of the Chisum amendment. Although the state currently serves just 17.5% of the more than two million women in need of reproductive health services -- often the only health care that low-income women receive -- it appears that figuring out a way to increase access to services is taking a backseat to that decidedly myopic goal.
Indeed, in an April 16 email to supporters, Joe Pojman, executive director of the Austin-based Texas Alliance for Life, announces an "URGENT LEGISLATIVE ALERT," calling on "friends" to "immediately" call lawmakers and encourage them to vote for the Chisum measure "to de-fund Planned Parenthood from the state budget."
Lawmakers, however, can't be that direct -- singling out Planned Parenthood as a target wouldn't pass legal muster. Instead, Chisum has cobbled together a convoluted scheme for prioritizing which groups receive funding, with a limited number of county health departments presumably at the top of the list. Last in line for funding would be roughly two dozen providers that last year served just more than 50% of women receiving family planning services. The Chisum plan would actually "make it most difficult for the providers who see the most clients day in and day out to get funding," says Wheat.
According to Fran Hagerty, CEO of the Women's Health & Family Planning Association of Texas, the providers in this group last year served 128,370 clients. Conversely, the public entities that would receive funding first under Chisum's proposal served just 12,735 clients last year -- less than 1% of the total number of women served.
And Wheat says that the number of priority-one providers might actually decrease if Chisum's proposal becomes law. Those groups would essentially be forced to agree to a "gag rule" that would prohibit them from referring clients to other community resources, like Planned Parenthood, that offer abortion counseling and referrals. In Austin, says Wheat, the Travis Co. health department regularly refers clients to Planned Parenthood, and vice versa, typically as a way to ensure a client receives the most timely and affordable care possible. For example, she says, if a woman were to go to the county seeking treatment for a possible urinary tract infection, but they were unable to see her within the week, they might refer the client to Planned Parenthood, which generally can see a client within one to three days, she says. Under Chisum's proposal, the county would be banned from making that referral.
"In the medical community here in Austin, we refer back and forth constantly," she says.
In theory, of course, if the providers in the higher priority categories had access to additional funds they would be able to see additional clients, absorbing the more than 100,000 clients that ultimately could lose access to their provider of choice. In reality, Hagerty says it is hard to imagine that these priority providers would actually be ready to pick up the slack by September 1, the start of the new fiscal year.
At least that's they way it played out in 2005, when a budget rider authored by Sen. Robert Deuell, R-Greenville, became law. That rider directed DSHS to shave $10 million each year from the family planning budget to first fund Federally Qualified Health Centers, which provide a number of other primary care services in addition to family planning.
Although it was sold as a way to increase access to comprehensive health care for low-income women, the rider has yet to deliver.
In 2005, before the rider took effect, the state's family planning program provided services to nearly 670,000 clients. In 2006, however, after the rider took effect, the number of clients served dropped to 442,000; the number of women served has declined in each subsequent year.
Meanwhile, there have not been enough FQHCs using the funding opportunity to expend the entire $10 million allocation. As a result, each year the Centers have actually returned millions in unspent funds to DSHS.
As the number of clients served decreased from 2006 through 2008, the amount of funds allocated under Deuell's set-aside that has been returned to the state has actually increased, from roughly $2.5 million in 2006 to just more than $4.2 million in 2008. The number of women in need of services continues to grow, and it is hard to imagine things would get any better under the Chisum plan.
"From a [client] service perspective, this is just awful," says Hagerty.
Thus, although Chisum's measure is pitched as a way to increase women's access to comprehensive health care, it is unlikely that would be the result. Under the amendment, DSHS would be required to first fund public entities that provide family planning services "including state, county, and local community health clinics" that do not refer pregnant women to abortion providers or to organizations that perform "elective abortions for any family planning services."
Second on the list are "non-public" entities that provide "comprehensive primary and preventative care" in addition to family planning services, but which also do not refer women to abortion providers or to organizations that perform abortions as part of family planning services. (Chisum's amendment also says a provider under these two groups is prohibited from performing abortions – language that is essentially unnecessary, since no public funding can be used to provide abortions.)
The providers that would appear to be eligible for top priority funding are public health districts -- including, presumably, the Austin-Travis Co. Health and Human Services Dept. as a public provider, and community clinics, like the Community Health Center of Lubbock, among private providers.
Lower on the priority list would be public entities that provide family planning services and private entities that provide comprehensive primary and preventative care in addition to family planning, but without the restrictions on referrals to abortion providers or those that perform abortions. This could include major urban community hospitals, and smaller non-profits like Austin's People's Community Clinic.
The key difference between these two groups and those in the first and second funding priority groups is that these latter categories include providers that use federal Title X funds. Among the requirements of Title X is grantees provide women with so-called "options counseling," which includes information about and referrals for abortion care if requested.
Last on the list is everyone else – including, it seems, at least 10 Planned Parenthood clinics.
Despite the lack of demonstrated success with the FQHC rider, Deuell last month proposed allocating the entire family planning budget to county health departments and FQHCs. That proposal died in committee – but, it appears, Chisum has now stepped up to give it a go.
If the measure were to pass, says Wheat, "it would be absolutely calamitous," and "tens of thousands or women would no longer be able to access basic preventative health care."
In addition to Chisum's, there are four other proposed amendments authored by members of the Legislature's Conservative Coalition that would divert money from family planning to other programs – including a proposed $20 million diversion to fund children's mental health services (proposed by Rep. John Davis, R-Houston), and one that would funnel an additional $1.5 million to the Alternatives to Abortion program (authored by Rep. Kelly Hancock, R-Richland Hills), which provides funding for "crisis pregnancy centers" (unlicensed and unregulated groups that provide no medical services) to "promote childbirth." The Davis amendment could displace more than 114,000 women in need of reproductive health services, according to Hagerty, while the Hancock amendment could knock more than 8,500 women out of services.
The House debate on the budget, including proposed amendments, is slated to begin Friday morning.
# # #
The Dallas Morning News
MARCH 21, 2009
Senators rescind efforts to cut state funding for Planned Parenthood
BY MARCUS FUNK & ROBERT T. GARRETT
AUSTIN – Senators have rescinded – for now – efforts to cut millions in state funding for Planned Parenthood and its women's wellness clinics.
GOP Sens. Tommy Williams of The Woodlands and Bob Deuell of Greenville want to channel funding from the women's clinics, which offer pap smears, cancer screening and contraception, to general practice clinics. A Senate budget panel backed their plan Wednesday night but met Republican reluctance and Democratic fury Friday morning.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Steve Ogden, R-Bryan, pulled it from the proposed state budget before a public hearing because it "didn't have the votes."
Williams and Deuell have a history of targeting Planned Parenthood because it seeks private donations to operate separate abortion clinics. Public money cannot be used for abortions, but organizations with privately funded abortion programs are eligible for it.
Senators critical of Planned Parenthood funding said it would be more efficient for the money to go to comprehensive clinics that might reach more people and offer a variety of treatments. Opponents of that say the current system already serves hundreds of thousands of women efficiently and needs more support, not less.
The abortion debate boiled when Republican Sens. Kel Seliger of Amarillo and Kevin Eltife of Tyler sided with the Democrats to withdraw the provision, fearing it would shutter the only clinics available in some rural areas.
Deuell indicated afterward that the debate was not over.
"We'll just have to sit down and show [Seliger and Eltife] this plan will get services to their areas," Deuell said. "Planned Parenthood gave them a bunch of misinformation about their districts."
Eltife said that lobbying by Planned Parenthood officials did not make the difference. He said lawmakers weren't given time to thoroughly read or review the provision.
"It's a moving target," Eltife said. "It's probably something I'd support, but I need to know what's in it first."
Meanwhile, women's health advocates said they were ecstatic. A similar 2005 cut in funding cost Planned Parenthood about 200,000 patients across the state, said Holly Morgan, Director of Communications at Planned Parenthood of North Texas.
# # #
Salon.com
MARCH 11, 2009
"Affordable birth control": No longer an oxymoron
Senate finally reverses high-cost SNAFU.
BY LYNN HARRIS
Freaky Wednesday! News from Planned Parenthood that includes the word "victory!" Late yesterday, the Senate passed the 2009 omnibus appropriations bill that included a provision to make birth control affordable -- once again -- at community health centers and college campus clinics. As a result of a SNAFU in the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act, which tightened eligibility requirements for low-cost drugs, women had been paying up to 10 times more per month for basic contraception (depending on whom you ask, the equivalent of approximately 385 packages of ramen noodles). And, as a result of a SNAFU in the 2004 elections, the legislative branch had not heretofore seemed particularly interested in making the cost-free fix.
"We applaud Congress for righting a wrong that has restricted access to basic but critical preventive health care services, and left millions of women at risk of unintended pregnancy," Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said yesterday. "The passing of today's legislation is a victory for women's health and especially for women who have struggled to afford the rising costs of basic contraception in these tough economic times." Planned Parenthood notes that with 14,000 Americans losing health coverage every day, access to basic healthcare -- which, yes, includes affordable birth control -- is more important than ever. (President Obama's -- STILL love that -- re-upping of SCHIP should help, too.)
In related "victory" news, the fatuous anti-abortion/contraception amendments filed (and covered here) last week -- including Jim DeMint's downright dumbass attempt to call the federal-funding-free birth-control fix an "earmark" -- never even made it to the floor. Meaning: Vitter and DeMint's colleagues' response to the proposals was basically, "Yeah, don't even waste our ... Oh, look, a sandwich."
Of course, when it comes to reproductive health and justice, this is not yet Obamatopia; we are so not done. The bill did include, for one thing, a $14 million cut in abstinence-only education, with (long story short) new language stating that remaining grants must support stupid-boy and slutty-girl-based scientifically accurate curricula (PDF). Yeehaw. But that's a cut, not a down-to-zero purge. So today -- Happy Abstinence Day on the Hill! -- we have to make sure that abstinence-only education (both a "colossal failure" and a "national embarrassment") gets 100 percent un-earmarked for 2010. But as of yesterday, at least, the Senate has spent approximately 385 times more capital than before on common sense.
# # #
The Associated Press
MARCH 10, 2009
Texas worst in US for homeless kids, report says
BY LINDA STEWART BALL, Associated Press Writer
DALLAS – Larry Canady took his family to a homeless shelter three weeks ago, no longer able to make ends meet after he and his wife were laid off from their jobs.
The family of five was already living from paycheck-to paycheck. They went from renting a four-bedroom brick home in a south Dallas suburb to sharing one room in a dormitory-like shelter.
"No one knew the economy was going to crash so hard like it did," said Larry Canady, 38, now at the nonprofit Family Gateway facility in Dallas. "It caught us off guard."
The Canady family's story is a familiar one and in no place more so than Texas. A study by the National Center on Family Homelessness released Tuesday placed Texas 50th — last of all states — in how homeless children fare.
The ranking considered four areas: the percentage of homeless children; their overall well-being; risk factors for homelessness, such as poverty and foreclosure rates; and what the state is doing to address the problems.
Dr. Ellen Bassuk, president of the national center that produced the report, said the child poverty level in Texas is 23 percent, compared to 18 percent nationwide.
"You're a big state, you've got a significant problem," said Bassuk, who also is an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "Texas needs to respond."
The report defined as homeless any child age 18 or younger living with at least one parent or caregiver in such places as emergency shelters, motels, cars, or campgrounds due to economic hardships or losing their own homes. It did not include runaways or abandoned children.
The center estimates that 1.5 million children nationwide experienced homelessness at least once in 2005-2006. The states that fared best were Connecticut, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Rhode Island and North Dakota. At the bottom were Texas, Georgia, Arkansas, New Mexico and Louisiana.
Texas has more than 337,000 homeless children — just over 5 percent of all kids living in the state, according to the study. It noted, however, that number may have been temporarily inflated by families who lost their homes during the hurricanes Rita and Katrina in 2005.
Bassuk said that while Texas has a trust created to provide low-income housing — something a lot of states don't have — it has no statewide plan in place to address homeless issues.
Across the U.S., the study found that one of every 50 kids are homeless each year. The rate in Texas is probably a bit higher.
State officials and advocacy groups differ on the number of homeless children in Texas — estimates range from 55,000 to 250,000 — but all agree that the numbers are increasing.
Michael Gerber, Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs' executive director, said there's no doubt more people are in poverty.
"We're really needing to think long and hard about how we integrate our social service system because homeless kids are truly the most vulnerable among us," Gerber said.
Gerber said the Texas Interagency Council for the Homeless, which coordinates the state's homeless resources and services, hopes to release a comprehensive plan to battle homelessness next month.
Ken Martin, executive director of the Texas Homeless Network, an information clearinghouse for more than 250 organizations that help the homeless, said there are signs that the problem is being taken seriously.
Still, he called the percentage of Texans without health care insurance, the lack of affordable housing and high poverty rates a "recipe for disaster."
"At the other end of the scale are people who are way over their heads in houses they can't afford," Martin said. "When they lose their jobs or have a health care crisis, they're out on the street and they take their kids with them."
For the Canady family, newly relocated to a shelter, their children, ages 13, 11, and 6, appear to be adjusting to their cramped but clean quarters and new inner-city schools.
"I can only thank God they've been OK," said Linesa Canady, 35, a former risk analyst for a bank. "They've been very understanding."
Eleven-year-old Tyra said she doesn't want people to pity or look down on her.
"Just because you live in a shelter doesn't mean you have to be treated any different," she said, explaining that she's still the same girl who dreams of being a veterinarian, pediatrician or actress someday.
familyhomelessness.org
thn.org
# # #
The Nation
March 9, 2009
National Day of Appreciation for Abortion Providers
by Katha Pollitt
March 10th is National Day of Appreciation for Abortion Providers, and man oh man could they use some love. Obama's victory may protect Roe v Wade in the Supreme Court, but state legislatures are doing their best to pile on the obstacles and restrictions: mandatory ultrasounds are the latest fad, with bills being considered in eleven states ( because apparently women are so stupid they might not realize they're having an abortion because they're pregnant).
And then, as Michael Winerip reported in an unusually thorough piece in Sunday's New York Times (in the Style section, sigh, along with the rest of the girlynews), the women's health activists who form the backbone of many clinic staffs are retiring and proving hard to replace in the more conservative and rural regions, like upstate New York, the South and Midwest. Doctors, nurses and technicians are reluctant to work in clinics in anti-choice places where they will be picketed, socially ostracized and forced to protect themselves daily against possible violence.
Low pay is another factor: anti-choicers love to talk about abortion as a business, but adjusted for inflation, the price of a first trimester abortion is about what it was 30 years ago, although security-related costs have skyrocketed -- one reason why clinic staffers make about half what they would in another specialty.
Will the next generation step up to the plate? Sally Burgess, head of the National Abortion Federation, thinks that growing up with legal abortion, too many lack "the fire in the belly." Then too, med school policies mean only a small proportion of medical students are even learning how to perform this relatively simple procedure.
You can show your support for the selfless people who make more than words on a page by making a donation to the Women's Reproductive Rights Assistance Project (WRRAP), an all-volunteer group which helps low-income girls and women around the country pay for their abortion care. As the economy sinks and unemployment rises, more and more women will find themselves both needing to terminate a pregnancy and unable to come up with the cost. Help WRAPP be there for clinics and for women.
Donations of any size are more than welcome (and yes, the rather odd name on the Paypal account is correct -- I checked), but if you send me your receipt for $50 or more, I will mail you a signed copy of Learning to Drive: and Other Life Stories, my collection of personal essays.
http://www.thenation.com/directory/bios/katha_pollitt
# # #
The New York Times
March 8, 2009
Generation B: Where to Pass the Torch?
By MICHAEL WINERIP
GRANITE CITY, Ill.—When Anne Baker graduated from Southern Illinois University in 1975, she was pleased to be hired as a birth control counselor for a Planned Parenthood clinic, though it was not her dream job. "I wanted to be an abortion counselor," she recalled. "I wanted it so bad."
Ms. Baker was thrilled when the Supreme Court legalized abortion in its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. "I remember going to rallies, and this was so long ago, instead of calling opponents pro-life, we called them 'fetus supremacists.' " She had been raised by her Catholic divorced mother and her great-aunt. They had little money, and to put herself through college, she worked a year, saved, went to school for a year, then worked the next year. "I was so convinced that to stay independent, women needed abortion for a backup," she said. "It was like a calling for me."
And so, the following year, in 1976, when a counseling job opened at the abortion clinic here, a 30-minute drive across the Mississippi River from her home in St. Louis, Ms. Baker grabbed it and never left, becoming the head of counseling at the Hope Clinic for Women.
In that time, she estimates she has done abortion counseling for 25,000 women and a few girls, some as young as 11, others as old as 53. "It's been my dream job," she said. "I wanted to be standing by the side of someone who was making a decision that others would condemn her for, and support her and link arms and say, You're a good person making a hard decision, and that's what I've done for 33 years."
But here is the question: As Ms. Baker's generation approaches retirement — women whose commitment to abortion was forged in the pre-Roe v. Wade days — will younger women take their places at the clinics?
"We worry about that a lot," said Sally Burgess, executive director of the Hope clinic, who is also chairwoman of the National Abortion Federation, the main professional support group for abortion providers. "Younger women have always had access to abortion care, they don't fully appreciate the battle that was fought to have it available to them. And more important, I don't think they know how precarious the option is at this point, even with Obama's election."
"What I observe for women in their 20s and 30s — there are fewer who really have the fire in the belly for this," she said.
At 50, Ms. Burgess is the youngest member of the Hope clinic's leadership team, which includes Ms. Baker; Debbie Wiehardt, 57, the office supervisor; and the two doctors performing abortions (the only men on the 30-person staff), who are both in their 60s.
A recent survey of 273 abortion clinics published in the journal Contraception found that 64 percent of their doctors were at least 50 years old, and 62 percent were men. Abortion advocates like Kelli M. Conlin, president of Naral Pro-Choice New York, say that while it's not a problem finding younger doctors and support staff to work in clinics in large urban areas like New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago, it is an issue in more conservative places, like upstate New York; smaller Midwestern cities; Southern states, including Texas; and rural areas.
For eight years, Ms. Burgess said, she has been trying to add a doctor who was not only younger but a woman. "Many women prefer females, and it's particularly important if there's been abuse," she said. She has participated in a program with the University of Chicago aimed at teaching young physicians to do abortions, and though two women came here to train, neither stayed. "I take every opportunity to put feelers out for doctors," she said. "We're aging, we're looking for leaders to take over for us."
The staff at abortion clinics typically earn less than their counterparts in other medical disciplines. "We were able to pay about half what a doctor's office or hospital paid," said Tina Welsh, 67, who in 1981 helped found the Women's Health Center, a nonprofit abortion clinic in Duluth, Minn. She was ready to retire as director in 2005, but couldn't find a replacement.
Ms. Welsh said that when she finally did retire in 2008, she was making under $60,000 a year. After a two-year search that yielded little, she replaced herself with her associate director, who is in her 50s.
Most of the women hired at the Duluth clinic from 1981 to the present — nurses, counselors, lab technicians — came of age in the pre-Roe v. Wade era, Ms. Welsh said. When her nurse practitioner retired several years ago, she could not find a replacement and instead hired two registered nurses. Finally, last month, the clinic hired a nurse practitioner — a woman in her early 60s who had retired and decided to work again part time.
The lower pay at the nation's 816 clinics — which provide about 94 percent of abortions according to a 2008 study in the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health — reflects a modest revenue stream. The average cost for a first-trimester abortion — surgery that typically involves a four-hour stay — was $413 in 2006, said Rachel Jones, a senior researcher at the Guttmacher Institute. Ruth Arick, an abortion care consultant, said: "At many clinics, fees have not changed much since the mid-1970s. The cost was $175 then and I can still find you an abortion for that price in Detroit and Miami."
While doctors like the two at the privately owned for-profit Hope clinic can supplement their incomes with a private gynecological practice, that's rarely true of the other workers.
"People running these clinics," Ms. Arick said, "have brains wired for social work and social justice even though they're in the medical business." Studies show the typical woman having an abortion is a poor, single parent in her 20s. Many don't have insurance, or the insurance won't cover abortion. Ms. Burgess said half who come to her clinic need financial help, and she employs a staff member to search for charitable grants.
Working at an abortion clinic intrudes into a person's private life. "I never wanted to be political," Ms. Welsh said, "but for the clinic to survive, I had to know all the legislators from our area. They can make or break you."
"You work in abortion," Ms. Burgess said, "it will affect who you will date, the parties you will be invited to." Every day when she comes to work, she's picketed. On the weekday I visited, 15 protestors carried signs comparing abortion to Hitler's Holocaust.
A decade ago, after an Atlanta clinic was bombed, Ms. Welsh had to take terrorism prevention classes. "I'm a director of a nonprofit, and I'm sitting there thinking, Why am I learning about letter bombs?" she recalled. "My board decided after that, only I could open the clinic mail — I was the only one they insured, to save money on the premium."
On July 11, 2008, protestors picketed Ms. Welsh's retirement party.
It's been years since there was violence at the Hope clinic. In 1982, the clinic was firebombed, and eight months later, the owner and his wife were kidnapped for a week, before being released. When Ms. Burgess arrived as director in 1990, all the windows were still boarded.
But in 1999, she opened a new clinic building that is twice as big and tastefully decorated with paintings, dried flowers, framed letters of commendation from former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore. The building was designed like a fortress — walls are three cinder blocks thick, windows are bullet-resistant and out front is a concrete booth where an armed guard is stationed.
After 33 years, Ms. Baker doesn't worry, but she is still cautious, having the guard escort her to her car during periods when anti-abortion protest historically flares up — Christmas and Easter; the Jan. 22 Roe v. Wade anniversary; Mother's Day. Her greatest joy is when a woman tells her, "You make me feel like I'm not a bad person." Her biggest disappointment is how little has changed since the 1970s. "I used to hope some day, instead of people being so scared and ashamed, that the taint, the stigma, would stop. It has not."
# # #
The Dallas Morning News
MARCH 8, 2009
Guilt trips would not end abortions Ultrasound proposal is misguided, says Erin Goldman of Dallas
BY ERIN GOLDMAN
Texas is one of three states considering bills that would require doctors to show an ultrasound image of a fetus before a woman gets an abortion.
Sixteen states currently have laws related to pre-abortion ultrasounds; some require they be performed, while others require women be referred to a place where they can obtain a free ultrasound.
Nebraska and Indiana, too, are considering the ultrasound requirement. Nebraska Sen. Tony Fulton claims that the bill is about informed consent. "Many times, these are young mothers who are in vulnerable situations. And they are about to make a very grave choice," he said.
Placing patients in such a position is not "informed consent." It's a guilt trip. The claim that mostly young women are making rash, ill-informed decisions is a ludicrous generalization. It is a far graver choice for a woman who does not have the means to properly care for a child to bring her baby into the world.
Abortion is an unbelievably difficult choice for any woman to make, and her decision should remain between her and her doctor. In Texas, it is legal to have an abortion before the third trimester; it is a woman's right to choose. Where's the choice in mandating that women view an ultrasound as a prerequisite to abortion?
When male pro-life legislators utilize a diagnostic procedure that is performed already, it shames women and strips them of their rights.
Last week, Gov. Rick Perry welcomed hundreds of anti-abortion activists outside the state Capitol. He promised to prohibit embryonic stem cell research in Texas and bragged about his record for passing more restrictions on abortion than any prior Texas governor. He also reprimanded Washington for its "misplaced priorities." He said the issue was as simple as this: "Do you value life?"
Well, I'd like to ask the governor the same thing. Is putting an infant in the hands of a mother who is unprepared indicative of valuing life?
One commenter on the dallasnews.com story discussing the proposal said: "Irresponsible sexual behavior can result in an unplanned pregnancy. Be an adult, take responsibility and do what is right."
I agree. Irresponsible sexual behavior can result in unplanned pregnancy. However, to suggest that a woman should be forced to go through with an unplanned pregnancy regardless of her age, socioeconomic situation and marital status is not responsible nor right.
Perhaps our legislators should spend more time in an effort to provide access to sex education and preventative health care and less time chastising women for "murdering" their infants. As far as I'm concerned, my birthday is the day I was born - not the day I was conceived.
Right-to-life advocates who declare they are attempting to save lives and speak for those who have no voice should concern themselves with children in foster care or who have not been adopted. These are the children who truly need representation.
Our tax dollars should go to organizations like Child Protective Services. In a recent 18-month period, Texas workers who are responsible for visiting abused children saw only 74 percent of their children each month. With inadequate funding, caseworkers are often overworked and underpaid, and thus, leave the agency.
Gov. Perry, gearing up for the 2010 gubernatorial election, continues to emphasize his pro-life, anti-stem-cell research views with support for bills like creating a "Choose Life" license plate and pre-abortion ultrasound requirements. However, he neglects to promote the causes that affect each and every Texan day-to-day.
I'm just glad I'll be of legal voting age by 2010.
Erin Goldman of Dallas is a senior at Greenhill School in Addison. She is also a Student voices volunteer columnist.
# # #
Salon.com
MARCH 4, 2009
The War on Planned Parenthood
Sen. David Vitter reminds us that the anti-reproductive-rights movement has hardly gone fishin'.
BY LYNN HARRIS
Sen. David Vitter, who we assume has availed himself of contraception and/or STI screening, has risen from Crystal Lake to get all Friday XIII on Title X. His goal -- which is so '07 -- is to strip federal funding for Planned Parenthood from the 2009 omnibus appropriations bill currently in the Senate. The vote on Amendment 601 -- if it comes to the floor at all -- could take place this afternoon.
This bill, it should be noted, is a bit of a sham to begin with. No federal funding may be used to support abortion services in the first place. (Some states now pitch in.)
But Vitter's plaint, as LifeNews.com paraphrased it, is that "while the money Planned Parenthood receives from Title X funds doesn't pay for abortions directly ... it still helps the abortion business." Mmm, except for the part where access to contraception er, hurts the abortion business, in a way we can all kind of agree on.
Further, no one should have to explain why it'd be a particularly bad moment to make the full range of Planned Parenthood services (including breast and cervical cancer screening) less accessible to low-income and uninsured patients. In fact, as Feministing notes, US News has reported that in these tough times, more and more women (and men) are visiting Planned Parenthood, many as their source of primary healthcare. Yet since the anti-reproductive rights movement sees Planned Parenthood as the veritable Death Star of abortion, it will always be a major, if symbolic, target.
Will the Vitter bill actually make it to the floor? And if so, how much do we really need to worry that this rather preposterous piece of work would pass? Well, if the bill does not come to a vote, it'd be because Republican lawmakers (especially with P.P. already rallying its troops) decided not to choose a losing fight. Sorry, Senator.
That said, this effort -- while a bit flailing in and of itself -- should serve as a reminder that the anti-reproductive rights movement has hardly gone fishin'. Their forces remain plenty active at the state level, with some scary successes. Just because we've got a fella in the White House who rescinds gag rules, strikes "conscience" clauses, re-ups health coverage for kids, and supports planned families (did I just type all that? Pinch me!) doesn't mean we can start mixing Obamatinis and call it a day.
So, in the meantime, it wouldn't hurt to call your senators, and let 'em know you're still watching.
UPDATE: Broadsheet hears that Sen. Jim DeMint has just filed an amendment (No. 649) to "strike provisions relating to the Medicaid drug rebate program and prevent the implementation of a funding earmark for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America." His goal: to remove from the appropriations bill a long-needed, much-discussed, technical -- and no-cost -- correction that would restore the ability of pharmaceutical companies to offer nominally priced drugs to college and university health clinics and family planning health centers without penalty, just as they had done for decades before a change to the law went into effect in 2007. There is no federal funding in this provision. So while you're calling your lawmakers, perhaps ask Sen. DeMint exactly how it constitutes an "earmark."
# # #
The Associated Press
March 02, 2009
Legislators say current sex ed law inadequate
BY AP STAFF
Several Democratic state lawmakers said Monday they'll try to expand Texas' sex education curriculum to include more medically accurate information about contraception and disease prevention and replace the existing law that leans toward abstinence-only instruction.
A proposal by Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, and Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, attempts to give teenagers access to "complete, medically accurate and age-appropriate" sexual health information at school with the aim of reducing teen pregnancy and infections, the legislators said.
Other Democrats joining Ellis and Castro in pushing the measure said it would allow parents to "opt out" if they don't want their children to be taught from the sex ed curriculum. They noted the measure would still present sexual abstinence as the only method that's totally effective in preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases and infections.
But social conservatives have another view — they like the current law that has been in place since the mid-1990s when George W. Bush was governor. Republican Gov. Rick Perry's office said he would review the new proposal but that he favors the existing policy and supports abstinence programs.
The conservative Texas Eagle Forum views the Democrats' proposal as "anti-woman" and something that tries to cover up for immoral behavior by men while doing the bidding for abortion providers, said Cathie Adams, president of the organization.
Existing state law does not require schools to teach sex education, so some districts may have it and some don't. The Democratic legislators said their proposal would not force districts to teach sex education, but that if they do it will require complete and accurate information.
Currently, districts that teach sex ed must devote more attention to sexual abstinence than other behavior.
Rep. Garnet Coleman, a Houston Democrat who wrote the current law with Republican Rep. Warren Chisum of Pampa in 1995, said he supports the proposed change because the education code has been misinterpreted as abstinence only.
# # #
The Associated Press
FEBRUARY 28, 2009
Obama to rescind Bush abortion rule
Current rule protects health professionals who refuse to perform abortions
WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama wants to rescind a Bush administration rule that strengthened job protections for doctors and nurses who refuse for moral reasons to perform abortions.
A Health and Human Services official said Friday the administration will publish notice of its intentions early next week, opening a 30-day comment period for advocates, medical groups and the public. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the notice has not been completed.
The Bush administration instituted the rule in its last days, and it was quickly challenged in federal court by several states and medical organizations. As a candidate, President Barack Obama criticized the regulation and campaign aides promised that if elected, he would review it.
The news that he was doing so drew praise from abortion-rights supporters and condemnation from groups opposed to abortion.
"It would be a horrible move. These regulations were a long time coming," said Tom McClusky, a vice president at Family Research Council. "What they seek to do is protect patients, nurses, doctors and other health care professionals from being forced to violate their consciences."
McClusky and other abortion opponents said the Bush regulation clarified federal policies and raised awareness about the rights of medical providers to follow their consciences. But abortion rights advocates said it was vague and overly broad, and could reduce access to other services — allowing a drug store clerk to refuse to sell birth control pills, for example.
"I think it's a wonderful step," Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., who co-chairs the Congressional Pro-choice Caucus and has introduced legislation to overturn the regulation, said of Obama's move.
"That rule was actually a poorly drafted last-minute attempt to, I think, restrict health care access and I think it would have had far-reaching and unintended consequences."
Federal law has long forbidden discrimination against health care professionals who refuse to perform abortions or provide referrals for them on religious or moral grounds. The Obama administration supports those laws, said the HHS official.
The Bush administration's rule adds a requirement that institutions that get federal money certify their compliance with laws protecting the rights of moral objectors. It was intended to block the flow of federal funds to hospitals and other institutions that ignore those rights.
But the Obama administration was concerned that the Bush regulation could also be used to refuse birth control, family planning services and counseling for vaccines and transfusions.
"The administration supports a tightly written conscience clause," said the HHS official. "While we are concerned about the Bush rule, we also understand there might be a need to clarify existing laws."
The administration will review comments from the public before making a final decision. Options range from repealing the regulation to writing a new one with a narrower scope.
The administration's move was first reported by the Los Angeles Times.
# # #
The Democratic Blog of Collin County
February 25, 2009
Texas Gov. Perry: No Stimulus, Stem Cell Research Or Comprehensive Sex Ed In Texas
Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) News Item One: Texas Gov. Perry (R), who has taken every opportunity in recent weeks to slam President Obama's economic stimulus and recovery program, did so again Wednesday in remarks to several hundred Texas homebuilders gathered outside the Texas Capitol.
Gov. Perry's opposition to the economic stimulus program isn't shared by the Texas Association of Builders. According to a Dallas Morning News report, Scott Norman, the Association's executive director, said he hopes Texas takes every dollar it can get. "From our industry, we need it to succeed," Norman said. "We need the stock market to rebound. We need the credit markets to rebound. And we need people to get out there and drive our economy."
Texas stands to get $17 billion from the just-passed federal stimulus package. It includes an $8,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers, although Norman said, "We wanted more. We were pushing for anything, obviously."
Perry's likely Republican primary opponent next year, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, voted against and also stands opposed to President Obama's economic stimulus and recovery program.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) News Item Two: Gov. Rick Perry, who strongly supports teaching only "abstinence" sex education in Texas schools, greeted several hundred anti-choice activists rallying outside the Capitol. Gov. Perry promised the group that he would prevent embryonic stem cell research in Texas and touted his record for passing more restrictions on stem cell science and research than any previous Texas governor. [Apparently, Gov. Perry does not think Texas needs the high tech science dollars flowing into Texas to replace the crumbling telecom industry that is rapidly disappearing from Texas' "silicon prairie" corridor.]
Gov. Perry and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst are strongly pushing 2009 Tx legislative session legislation mandating that doctors require women seeking information about an abortion must view their own fetal ultrasound image and listen to the fetal heartbeat monitor.
Jim Dunnam, Tx House Democratic caucus chairman has observed that if Gov. Perry and other anti-abortion leaders would support broader sex education, such as provided for in the "Education Works!" 2009 Texas House and Senate legislation (HB741/SB515) – instead of strictly abstinence only – fewer abortions would be contemplated.
# # #
U.S. News & World Report
February 24, 2009
Lost Your Health Insurance? Consider Planned Parenthood Clinics
BY DEBORAH KOTZ
There is no joy in Mudville. Our house values have plummeted, and our portfolios and pensions were worth more a decade ago than they are today. A whopping 7.6 percent (and growing) of us are unemployed, while the rest of us are worried about losing our jobs. The hemorrhaging job market leaves an additional 14,000 Americans every day without health insurance, according to the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a left-leaning think tank.
No surprise, many of us are now praying that our birth control doesn't fail us, and some women have consciously decided to postpone having a baby in this recession. Many of those left without insurance have been swarming into Planned Parenthood clinics to get free or subsidized contraception.
In fact, a spokesperson from the Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania tells me it has seen a 10 percent increase in the number of women coming into its local centers in the past three months, many of whom are recently unemployed. The Yuma Planned Parenthood in Arizona saw 260 new patients from November 2008 to January 2009, up from 171 new patients during the same period a year earlier. And the affiliate in east-central Iowa now adds about five or six women each day to its patient roster where it used to add about that many a week.
"We also get about 10 to 20 calls a day from women who recently lost their health coverage or are worried about the what-ifs," says Jennifer Vick, the affiliate's director of development and communication.
There's no doubt that these family planning services, partially subsidized with your tax dollars, do a great service, especially as more of us find ourselves unable to afford basic healthcare necessities like a yearly Pap smear or monthly birth control pills.
In fact, a Guttmacher Institute report released today has calculated that publicly funded services, at both hospitals and nonprofit clinics, save taxpayers $4 for every $1 spent by preventing nearly 2 million pregnancies and 810,000 abortions every year.
"Having the ability to make decisions about when or whether to have a child is even more critical during these economic times," study author Rachel Benson Gold tells me, "especially as women struggle to complete their education or hold down a job."
What's more, the report found that 6 in 10 women who come to these centers consider it to be their usual source of medical care. "They get their annual Pap and pelvic exam, screening for sexually transmitted infections, a blood pressure check, breast exam," Gold says. "It's pretty much the same level of care that you get on your yearly gynecologist visit."
About 10 Planned Parenthood affiliates—out of 97 nationwide—offer primary-care services. Mar Monte, an affiliate in California's Santa Cruz region, has about 10 clinics that treat everything from diabetes to high cholesterol to ear infections. "About 85 percent of our patients are women, but we also treat men," says Cathy Bright, service director at Mar Monte.
Can anyone walk into a Planned Parenthood clinic and get free services?
"No, it doesn't work that way," explains Gold. "To get free care in most states, you must qualify for Medicaid." My jaw drops when she tells me that in order to receive Medicaid coverage, states require your income to be well below the poverty line of $18,310 for a family of three. In some states, the cutoff is $11,000 in annual income; in Arkansas, it's $3,113. On the other hand, Arkansas and 20 other states have implemented Medicaid waivers for pregnancy care and family planning services, which has raised the qualifying income level typically to about $37,000 for a family of three or about $21,000 for a single woman.
Still, that excludes most unemployed women from coverage if they're receiving unemployment benefits or have an employed spouse. The folks I spoke with at Planned Parenthood clinics tell me that they work with every patient to provide affordable care. At Mar Monte, fees are assessed on a sliding scale based on income, and Bright tells me that they're "considerably more reasonable" than what many middle-income women would normally pay out of pocket for contraceptives or lab tests. At the Iowa affiliate, Vick says, staff exhausts all funding options—including grants from other organizations and donations from community members—before billing a patient directly. "We ask what she can afford and take it from there," she says.
Now if only we had such a stop-gap system in place to cover the rest of our health needs, like mammograms, appendicitis operations, colonoscopies....
# # #
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram
February 24, 2009
Texas schools teach abstinence not sex ed, study says
BY MATT FRAZIER
The overwhelming majority of Texas schools use scare tactics and spread myths in place of teaching basic sex and health information that students can use to protect themselves and loved ones, according to a report released today from watchdog group Texas Freedom Network.
TFN’s 2-year study of education materials from 990 Texas school districts showed that about 94 percent of public schools use abstinence-only programs that usually pass moral judgments while either downplaying or ignoring contraception and health screenings, despite state code education requirements.
The result is that Texas teens continue to have one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the nation, conclude the report’s authors, David Wiley, professor of health education at Texas State University and Kelly Wilson, asst. professor at Texas State University-San Marcos.
They blame the lies and misinformation on poor state oversight, fear of controversy and religious groups that teach sex is shameful.
“I thought I was no longer capable of being surprised by the ignorance among our students,” Wiley wrote in the report. “Then last year a sincere male student asked aloud, ‘What is my risk for cervical cancer?’ Clearly, ignorance surrounding sexuality and health is a problem among young people today.”
The Fort Worth school district receives a favorable note in the report for having a health advisory council that promotes abstinence as the most appropriate and effective means of contraception, but that also recognizes a need for further education presented in a thoughtful and non-judgmental way.
“The council believes it is imperative that the high school age children in the district be armed with as much information as possible in relation to these matters,” according to the council’s unanimous 2006 recommendation to the school board.
Burleson schools are singled out by the report for using scare tactics designed to rouse feelings of shame, guilt and embarrassment. For example, a PowerPoint presentation on the subject says that sex outside of marriage starts a chain reaction brings guilt because “doing the forbidden” lets down future spouse, parents and friends counting on the student “to be strong for them.”
As a local example: the Star-Telegram recently published a report that, since 2001, the Hurst-Euless-Bedford school district’s eighth-grade science curriculum has taught that if used correctly, latex condoms are 80 percent effective in preventing pregnancy. But the success rate of condoms when used correctly is 97 percent to 98 percent, according to most experts and manufacturers.
H-E-B officials said they don’t know where they got their information. In January the district added an addendum correcting the information in its online curriculum. A district review committee has found several other problems, administrators say, and is now working to correct the problems.
Findings of the report include:
Most Texas students receive no instruction about human sexuality apart from the promotion of sexual abstinence.
Sexual education material used by 41 percent of school districts include factual errors. Most of these involve condoms (40.1 percent) and STDs (38.9 percent). Often these failures include particularly low effectiveness of condoms. Instruction about HIV and human papillomavirus is especially prone to error. For example, some list the tears, sweat and saliva of an HIV infected person as being dangerous, although there has never been a case shown to result from such contact.
Shaming and fear-based instruction are standard means of teaching students about sexuality.
Instruction on human sexuality often promotes stereotypes and biases based on gender and sexual orientation. For example: one abstinence-only programs used 53 school district says that women need “financial support” while men need “domestic support” according to the report. Some Texas classrooms mix religious instruction and Bible study into sexuality education programs. About a program called “Wonderful Days” that is used by three districts in the Fort Worth, the report states that, “Hardly a page can be found that does not include multiple references to Bible verses, invocation of Christian principles, even attempts to proselytize students with the Christian plan of salvation.” To fix these problems, the report’s authors suggest districts use qualified, trained classroom teachers and use materials from reputable sources. The state should refuse federal funds for abstinence-only education and adopt textbooks that emphasize abstinence while providing medically accurate information.
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, the state’s curriculum standard, requires of high school health course students be able to “analyze the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of barrier protection and other contraceptive methods, including the prevention of STDs. All but a handful of districts fail to meet that standard, according to the report. The word condom does not appear in any of the state-approved health books except one. That book mentions the word once and is used in fewer than 1 percent of the state’s districts. “Clearly, something is wrong in Texas,” the report states.
# # #
The Associated Press
February 24, 2009
Report urges boost in family planning program
Research tries to counter conservatives' attempts to limit expansion
NEW YORK - Publicly funded family planning prevents nearly 2 million unintended pregnancies and more than 800,000 abortions in the United States each year, saving billions of dollars, according to new research intended to counter conservative objections to expanding the program.
The data is in a report being released Tuesday by the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-health think tank whose research is generally respected even by experts and activists who don't share its advocacy of abortion rights.
Report co-author Rachel Benson Gold called the family planning program "smart government at its best," asserting that every dollar spent on it saves taxpayers $4 in costs associated with unintended births to mothers eligible for Medicaid-funded natal care.
Despite such arguments, federal funding for family planning is a divisive issue.
Last month, under withering Republican criticism, House Democrats abandoned an attempt to include an expansion of family planning services for the poor in the economic stimulus bill. One anti-abortion activist, Troy Newman of Operation Rescue, called the short-lived proposal a "shameful population control program that targeted low-income families."
However, Democrats in Congress are not abandoning their overall goal. They plan to push soon for a major funding increase for Title X, the main federal family planning program, as part of broader legislation endorsed by President Barack Obama to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies.
Ammunition for advocates
The Guttmacher report provides ammunition for those who will advocate the funding increase.
Surveying data from the 2006 fiscal year, the report says the national family planning program prevented 1.94 million unintended pregnancies, including almost 400,000 teen pregnancies. Based on statistical analysis and projections, these pregnancies would have resulted in 860,000 unintended births, 810,000 abortions and 270,000 miscarriages, according to the report.
Without publicly funded family planning, it said, the U.S. abortion rate would be nearly two-thirds higher, and nearly twice as high among poor women.
Other findings:
· More than 9 million women — including nearly 2 million under 20 — received publicly funded contraceptive services in 2006.
· Six in 10 women who use a family planning center consider it their basic source of health care. The services they receive often include pelvic and breast exams, tests for HIV, screenings for reproductive cancers, high blood pressure and diabetes, and referrals to other health providers.
· Public expenditures for family planning in 2006 totaled $1.85 billion, with 71 percent of the funds coming from the joint federal-state Medicaid program. Twenty-seven states have expanded eligibility for family planning for low-income women who otherwise wouldn't qualify for Medicaid.
"States as varied as Texas, New York, South Carolina and Missouri have decided to undergo the cumbersome and time-consuming process to seek federal permission, known as a waiver, to expand family planning services," said Gold. "It's a popular policy because it helps women while saving public dollars. It more than pays for itself."
The report recommends that Congress eliminate the waiver requirement and allow states to use the same income criteria to determine eligibility for family planning under Medicaid that they use to determine eligibility for pregnancy-related care. It also recommends lifting a ban on family planning coverage for legal immigrants in their first five years in the United States.
The report also endorses pending congressional legislation that would increase funding for Title X family planning. Some advocacy groups hope to more than double the current funding to $700 million a year.
Some conservatives, however, dislike Title X because one of its big recipients is the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, a major provider of abortions as well as family planning services. Title X funds cannot be used for abortions, but critics contend the federal money frees up other Planned Parenthood funds for its abortion services.
"It's another Planned Parenthood bailout," said Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council. "It covers their overhead."
Concern over public funding
He also expressed concern about the concept of public funding of contraception for unmarried people.
"The issue is whether taxpayers should fund, and thereby encourage, behavior that's risky and morally questionable," he said.
One of the Democrats leading the push for more family planning money, Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado, bristles at such criticism.
"Right-wing Republicans continually use sex as a weapon when they don't have an effective argument to stand on," she wrote earlier this month. "They attack commonsense policies that not only save taxpayers money, but also promote public health."
Adam Sonfield, a Guttmacher policy expert who co-authored the new report, said the institute is concerned by statistics showing low-income and minority women with higher rates of unintended pregnancies and abortions than U.S. women as a whole.
# # #
The Bismark Tribune
February 18, 2009
ND House OKs anti-abortion legislation
By BRIAN DUGGAN
A fertilized human egg has the same rights as a human being under a bill passed by House lawmakers on Tuesday, potentially setting the legal framework for a ban on abortion in North Dakota.
It was just one of many bills acted on by the North Dakota Legislature on Tuesday.
Rep. Dan Ruby, R-Minot, sponsored the anti-abortion legislation, which passed 51-41, arguing that life begins at the moment of conception. The bill now moves on to the Senate for consideration.
Daniel Woodward of the North Dakota Life League, said if the bill ultimately becomes law it would make it easier to challenge the U.S. Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade.
The bill also says the Legislature will appoint one of its members to defend the law if it faces any legal challenge.
Rep. Kari Conrad, D-Minot, said the legislation could cost the state millions in potential legal fees, adding it could create scenarios where a doctor could be committing murder by removing a fertilized egg even if it posed a threat to the woman.
# # #
NBC News
Feb 17, 2009
Bristol Palin: Abstinence Is "Not Realistic at All"
By XANA O'NEILL
Bristol Palin, the 18-year-old daughter of former VP candidate and GOP darling Sarah Palin, says abstinence from sex is unrealistic.
"Everyone should be abstinent but it's not realistic at all ... [sex] is more and more accepted among kids my age," Bristol told FOX News in her first interview since giving birth to Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston in December. "You should just wait 10 years. It's so much easier."
Bristol Palin was thrust into the international spotlight just days after Sen. John McCain picked her mother to be his running mate on the GOP ticket, but one of the most difficult parts of her pregnancy, Bristol said, was telling her parents.
The confession was "harder than labor," she said.
"I had to grow up a lot faster than they ever would have imagine," she said.
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, with Tripp in arms, briefly joined her daughter on the set during the taping. She said she's proud of her daughter but her pregnancy at such a young age isn't "ideal."
"It sounds naive," she said. "Life happens."
The young mom said that motherhood is "not glamorous" and that she's exhausted from tending to baby Tripp half the night but that she loves being a mom and is now trying to focus on getting on education. She said she hopes to marry the baby's father, Levi Johnston.
"It's not just the baby that's hard," she said. "I'm not living for myself anymore, it's for another person."
Palin said she has no regrets but cautioned teens against becoming young parents.
"I don't regret it at all I just wish it would've happened in 10 years and not right now," she said. "I hope that people learn from my story and prevent teen pregnancy."
# # #
NEWSWEEK Magazine
Feb 7, 2009, From the magazine issue dated Feb 16, 2009
THE LAST WORD: Anna Quindlen
On Their Own Terms
American women have found a new way to keep abortion a personal and private responsibility. It comes with a glass of water.
This is how it works: first, one pill in the doctor's office or at the clinic, and, a day or two later, a second set of pills at home. Then the waiting, with a husband or a girlfriend, watching television or reading a book, feeling sad or relieved or numb or frightened. Cramping, bleeding, pain and finally the end of a pregnancy.
This is not a best-case scenario. Best case is that contraception is always successful and pregnancies are always welcome. But that's not always how things turn out. And between the clinic demonstrations, the political discussions and the imprecations from the pulpit, too many American women have come to feel that their pelvis is public property. Slowly, quietly, a new abortion method has become part of the landscape, and it's no accident that those women who have chosen it often cite reclaiming privacy and control as the reason.
RU-486 was originally called the French abortion pill, after the country of its genesis, and many activists spoke of it as the answer to the rancorous, sometimes violent atmosphere that for so long had surrounded legal abortion. Clinics were being assailed by those armed with picket signs and, sometimes, guns; in part because of that, fewer physicians were training to perform surgical abortions. Medication abortions were said to be the answer to both problems.
But after the method was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2000, the expected rush to what were called medical rather than surgical abortions didn't happen. "Sometimes we forget that it always takes time for things to change in the medical community," said Vanessa Cullins, the medical director of Planned Parenthood of America. The public interest in RU-486 ebbed—except among pregnant women who didn't want to be pregnant anymore, where it steadily grew.
It's an early method, prescribed only before nine weeks, and consists of two medications, one that blocks the hormones that support pregnancy and another that triggers uterine contractions. And at Planned Parenthood facilities, fully half of those eligible now opt for it. But that's only part of the story. Family-practice doctors, gynecologists and other physicians are beginning to prescribe it to their patients rather than send them elsewhere. "I've treated her for 14 years," one such doctor, who did not want her name used for fear of harassment, said of a woman to whom she'd given the drugs. "Why would I not treat her in this situation when there's a simple way to do it?"
RU-486 flies in the face of anti-abortion orthodoxies, and not simply because some physicians who have never dreamed of performing a surgical abortion have no qualms about making the medication available. It counters the irresponsibility myth, which suggests that women who end pregnancies are thoughtless, feckless, and have not bothered with birth control or matrimony, despite the fact that many women who have abortions are married and were using contraception that failed. RU-486, which now accounts for 14 percent of all abortions nationwide, demands a high degree of responsibility. A woman has to ascertain early that she is pregnant and then take charge of the process herself, choosing to deal at home with the results. With every new political power shift the abortion issue arises again, with talk of a search for common ground and the future of Roe v. Wade. But change in party or philosophy cannot change this undeniable fact: women who do not want to be pregnant will try to end their pregnancies. They will do it because they don't have enough money, or enough support, or they think they are too young or too overwhelmed by circumstance. They always have, and they always will. Rat poison, Lysol, ergot, bleach—oh, the historical list of desperate measures is long. Over the years some have died, leaving motherless children behind.
Even today, there are women using extralegal means because of shame, denial and expense. An ulcer medication called Cytotec, which contains the drug used in the second part of the RU-486 process, has surfaced as the abortifacient of choice among immigrant women, who buy it bootleg at bodegas or get it from friends in Mexico. (You can also buy it online in less time than it takes to order a cardigan from J.Crew, which means that if Roe were to be overturned, the Internet would become the alternative to the back alley.) Doctors say Cytotec alone does not work as safely as the combination of drugs in RU-486 does, and in some cases women have been prosecuted for using it. South Carolina went after a 22-year-old migrant farm worker who said she had taken Cytotec because she had three children and didn't think she could support a fourth. State authorities held her in jail for four months while considering whether to charge her with murder under a statute prohibiting self-induced abortion. Of course, if she'd had another baby and floundered while trying to raise a family on subsistence wages picking vegetables, she might well have been accused of neglect.
I would suggest that you try putting yourself in her situation, but the problem here is with strangers passing judgment on other people's situations in the first place. That's why more and more women are choosing RU-486, because it enables them to take care of their own business in their own homes. No outsiders allowed. If we could travel back in time, before government was invited into the practice of gynecology, we might choose precisely this sort of private ritual. A glass of water, some pills, a decision that may be pragmatic or painful or both but is, above all, personal. Never has the word "choice" been so clear.
# # #
The Dallas Morning News – Opinion BLOG
Feb 3, 2009
Where are Ann Richards' successors?
BY William McKenzie
Texas Monthly's Paul Burka had a good piece on "Burka Blog" explaining that Texas Democrats may be coming back, but they still are a poorly organized party. That they still have a long way to go before catching Republicans in organizational strength, whether that's fielding good candidates, getting out the vote or raising sufficient money.
I came across this reality while researching my column this week about why Texas still matters. I make the argument that Democrats are emerging here, but I was struck with how few Texas Democratic women are likely to be the new stars in the party. Whether you like them or not, Republicans have a number of women on their bench.
Heck, Kay Hutchison is the senior senator and could be governor. Margaret Spellings just finished a successful stint as education secretary and could end up back in Texas politics. Karen Hughes is a regular commentator on CNN after working at both the State Department and the White House. Plus, Florence Shapiro and Jane Nelson are two of the most powerful Texas senators.
You just don't see Texas Democratic women of that same vein, either in office, as spokespeople for their cause or as folks growing their party. Those that are in power, like U.S. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson or state Rep. Helen Giddings, are more at the end of their careers than at the beginning. And the state legislative bench is nowhere as well-known as the Texas GOP legislative bench. Judith Zaffirini is a good state senator from Laredo, but she doesn't have a ton of company in the Legislature. I like Donna Howard, a state rep from near Austin. She could become an important voice on education, but she isn't there yet.
As I looked around, I got to thinking about people like Cecile Richards. She's head of Planned Parenthood nationally. She also strikes me as bright and an able spokesperson for her cause. She's someone to watch, either nationally or back here in Texas.
But contrast today's situation to almost 20 years ago when her mother, Ann, was elected governor partly on the strength of suburban women voters. And she did her best to bring Democratic women into the fold. If Gov. Richards were still among us, I doubt she would like what she saw.
The depletion is partly due to the GOP dominance of money, candidates and power over the last 15 years. At the same time, Democrats were strangled by their own problems, of the type that Burka mentions.
Those reasons give Democrats a natural out for their current predicament. But they can't afford to stop there, not with the party becoming more competitive with Republicans. They need to grow more women leaders.
I have to think there are plenty of Obama-voting women in business, law and academia in Dallas, Houston, Austin and elsewhere. They could form the next generation of Texas Democratic women.
Likewise, there must be plenty of Hillary supporters around the state, especially in the Lower Rio Grande Valley where she did so well in the Texas primary against Obama. They could start stepping up.
I realize Caroline Kennedy stepped out, then faltered. But there must be women like her in Texas who could broaden the Democratic leadership ranks here.
Who are they? When will they step forward?
###
Al Día
February 2, 2009
Estudio revela que las latinas son las jóvenes más propensas a embarazarse
Por VANESA D. SALINAS
Natallie Alvarado, estudiante de 18 años del Centro de Aprendizaje Union Bower en Irving, admite que quedar embarazada no estaba en sus planes.
La tasa de natalidad entre las mujeres estadounidenses de 15 a 19 años subió por primera vez en 14 años, y las latinas son las más propensas a dar a luz, según un estudio de una agencia federal.
El estudio sobre la tasa de natalidad, divulgado en enero por los Centros para el Control y Prevención de las Enfermedades (CDC) muestras que 83 de cada 1,000 latinas de esa edad dieron a luz en el 2006, comparado con 64 de cada 1,000 entre las afroamericanas y 55 de cada 1,000 entre las anglosajonas. En general, la tasa de natalidad creció de 40.5 por 1,000 en el 2005 a 41.9 en el 2006.
Los datos serán frescos, pero el problema es conocido desde hace tiempo en las escuelas y los centros de consejería para mujeres del Norte de Texas. Estos últimos atribuyen los embarazos y la creciente tasa de natalidad a la falta de información pública sobre salud sexual.
"Es preocupante porque los jóvenes de Texas no están recibiendo la información que necesitan para tomar el control sobre su sexualidad", dijo Kathryn Allen, vicepresidenta de comunicaciones de Planned Parenthood of North Texas. "Sabemos que el 50 por ciento de todos los embarazos no son planificados, y hay problemas sociales que se derivan de esos nacimientos".
Natallie Alvarado y Xóchitl Castro, estudiantes de 18 y 17 años del Centro de Aprendizaje Union Bower en Irving, admiten que el embarazo no estaba en sus planes. Alvarado se enteró cuando fue al médico a hacerse un examen rutinario de Papanicolaou, mientras que Castro sospechó cuando le empezaron a dar nauseas.
Xóchitl Castro continúa con sus estudios a pesar de cuidar a su hijo Erick Ruiz, de 6 meses.
Basada en su experiencia, Xóchitl recomienda a otras jóvenes evitar embarazarse hasta que terminen sus estudios. Agregó que desde el principio tuvo muchas dudas.
"¿Cómo iba a ser una buena madre para el niño? ¿Cómo iba educarlo? ¿Qué le iba a dar?", recuerda haberse preguntado.
La joven se sobrepuso al imprevisto y ahora continúa sus estudios a pesar de cuidar a su hijo Erick Ruiz, de 6 meses. "Me dedico al niño...juego con el niño, lo baño, lo cuido", dijo.
Alvarado dijo que las etapas de rebeldía por las que pasan muchas adolescentes pueden tener consecuencias inesperadas.
"Fue algo que no pensé. No pensé que iba a suceder", refirió sobre su embarazo. "Cada decisión que hagas afectará todo", dijo Alvarado. "He madurado un poco más. Tienes que hacer todo bien".
José Villaseñor, director de consejería en el distrito escolar de Irving, dijo que los embarazos juveniles son el resultado de muchos factores, incluyendo la pobreza, el haber crecido en un hogar encabezado por una madre soltera, y la falta de expectativas de éxito profesional y académico.
"Tu realidad es lo que está a tu alrededor. Hasta no educarte, vas a pensar que vas a ser lo que está a tu alrededor", dijo Villaseñor.
Emily Allen, trabajadora social de Promise House, una organización que ofrece ayuda a jóvenes y familias en crisis, incluyendo a adolescentes embarazadas y sin hogar, aconseja a los padres de familia hablar con sus hijos sobre las consecuencias de tener relaciones sexuales a una temprana edad.
"Los padres de familia realmente tienen que ser honestos con sus hijos sobre el sexo y tienen que educarlos", dijo Allen. "También tienen que ser papás, porque muchas de las veces los papás quieren ser amigos de sus hijos...y no quieren imponer límites ni reglas. Los niños necesitan límites".
Diferencias entre las jóvenes latinas de acuerdo a su país de origen
-77 por ciento de adolescentes de Puerto Rico reportaron haber tenido relaciones sexuales antes de los 18 años.
-53 por ciento de jóvenes de ascendencia cubana reportaron tener relaciones antes de los 18 años
-Más de la mitad de las adolescentes originarias de México (56 por ciento) tuvieron relaciones antes de los 18 años
- 68 por ciento de jovencitas de Centro y Sur América tuvieron relaciones antes de los 18 años
Fuente: The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy
# # #
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram
January 30, 2009
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend speaks at Planned Parenthood event in Fort Worth
By MARIA M. PEROTIN
FORT WORTH — Kathleen Kennedy Townsend knows what it means to face off against her own church.
As Maryland's first woman lieutenant governor — and as a Catholic — she drew attention for her support of abortion rights, she told attendees Thursday at the Planned Parenthood of North Texas luncheon.
Her parish priest condemned her from the pulpit. Catholic schools banned her as a speaker. Protesters picketed her public engagements.
Yet Kennedy Townsend said she believes that she can reconcile her abortion stance with her religion.
Her conclusion about the experience with Catholic leaders?
"They were just basically afraid of women," Kennedy Townsend said. "The church is afraid, and we have to teach them."
Kennedy Townsend, 57, addressed a wide range of issues as the keynote speaker at the annual Planned Parenthood event.
On balancing work and family: The juggling act extends beyond raising children to helping care for elderly relatives, too. And many women fail to realize how many others have a similar plight.
"We all have shared experiences, and too often we think it's ours alone."
On Sarah Palin: The Republican vice presidential candidate had men panting after her, and that may have set a good precedent for female politicians.
"Sex appeal gives you an ability to reach people in their gut," she said. "If men can be sexy, women should be able to be sexy, too."
On teen pregnancy: A focused, communitywide approach can help reduce the problem.
During her tenure, clinics and counseling services were added to try to prevent teen pregnancies in Baltimore. Officials also launched an advertising campaign that targeted young women with messages encouraging abstinence.
Kennedy Townsend, the eldest child of Robert and Ethel Kennedy, served as Maryland's lieutenant governor from 1995 to 2003. In 2007, she published Failing America's Faithful: How Today's Churches Are Mixing God With Politics and Losing Their Way.
Thursday's luncheon, which raised more than $110,000, drew about 500 attendees and a handful of protesters outside.
# # #
The Dallas Morning News
JANUARY 25, 2009
Abstinence-based ed lacking We must face facts: Many teens are sexually active, says Erin Goldman
By ERIN GOLDMAN, Student voices volunteer columnist
Last week, Dallas County commissioners overturned the 1995 decision to prohibit county health department workers from distributing free condoms. While I strongly support the Dallas County Department of Health and Human Services' distribution of condoms for those who live in "high-risk" neighborhoods - areas with high HIV and AIDS rates - this is only the first step.
Throughout adolescence, teenagers not only experience dramatic hormonal and bodily changes, but we tend to grow more independent and develop our own opinions, ideas and values, too. The combination of these factors promotes sexual experimentation as an intrinsic part of growing up. Without proper comprehensive sex education, sexually active students have a far greater risk of becoming pregnant or contracting a sexually transmitted disease.
According to a federal report released earlier this month, Texas' teen pregnancy rate is more than 50 percent higher than the national average in 2006 - for every 1,000 women who give birth, 63 are teens. One in four sexually active teens is infected by a sexually transmitted infection. These numbers are unacceptable. I blame abstinence-based sex education.
Texas law does not require public schools to provide sex education. If a school wishes to provide a course, it must use sex education text books the Texas State Board of Education adopted in 2003 that do not discuss contraceptives or condoms, except to point out that they are not 100 percent effective.
Abstinence-based sex education is like teaching that the only way to prevent obesity is never to eat an ounce of junk food. Sure, a diet solely consisting of fruits, vegetables and grilled fish will prevent obesity. But it's unrealistic. People eat cookies and french fries regardless of their knowledge of the latest Oprah-approved meal plan.
So we teach of the dangers of overeating as well as means of protection - like exercise. Similarly, sex education needs to educate students about the risks of unprotected sex and the ways, including abstinence, to prevent pregnancy and STDs.
What abstinence-only advocates don't realize about teenagers is that we are curious about and engage in adult behaviors because we are in the process of becoming adults. We deserve to know all our options so we can make mature decisions. For the roughly 47 percent of high school students nationwide who are sexually active, it's too late to promote the virtues of virginity. It is not, however, too late to prevent unwanted pregnancies and STDs.
Many of my classmates are members of Planned Parenthood's Teenage Communication Theater, a group of high school student volunteers who perform short vignettes about sexuality, substance abuse, peer pressure and decision-making for area schools, churches, synagogues, social service agencies and conferences around North Texas. I was struck when my good friend in that group told me about a recent performance at a juvenile detention center. Many of the 16- and 17-year-old audience members were completely unaware that they could contract a STD from oral sex or that "pulling out" could result in pregnancy - facts I assumed were common sense.
I am not suggesting that teachers just sit back in their chairs, sigh "kids will be kids," and hand out condoms. However, sex education in public schools should take a more comprehensive approach. Students should learn about all forms of contraception along with the potential consequences of sex.
Erin Goldman of Dallas is a senior at Greenhill School in Addison. She is also a Student voices volunteer columnist. To respond to this column, send an e-mail to voices@dallasnews.com
# # #
Albuquerque Journal
JANUARY 24, 2009
Woman Says IUD Removal Illegal;
Suit Claims Nurse Took Out Device, Wouldn't Replace It
By Rozanna M. Martinez, Journal Staff Writer
An Albuquerque woman is suing a Rio Rancho medical center claiming that her contraceptive device was removed without her consent by a nurse practitioner who told her it was a form of abortion.
In her complaint, Ashley Van Patten claims that the nurse practitioner, who was supposed to be adjusting her IUD, removed it instead. Although the nurse said it was an accident, she refused to replace it and suggested other means of contraceptives, according to Van Patten. Van Patten filed the federal complaint for civil battery, violation of Constitutional rights and negligence against Sylvia M. Olona, Pres- byterian Medical Services of Santa Fe and its Rio Rancho Family Health Center. Presbyterian Medical Services, which operates clinics throughout the state, has no affiliation with Presbyterian Healthcare Services.
According to her amended complaint, Van Patten went to the health center in January 2007 in order to get her IUD adjusted. An IUD is a contraceptive device placed in the cervix.
The complaint claims that, during the adjustment, she felt a tugging and then a "sharp pain in her uterus."
"Uh oh, I accidently pulled out your IUD," Olona told Van Patten.
The complaint contends that, because the IUD was removed without Van Patten's consent, it constitutes a civil battery, its removal causing Van Patten "damages and injuries."
It also says Olona's actions "arose out of negligence in performance of medical treatment."
"We are prohibited by federal law from commenting with regard to any specific patient or client unless we have an authorization from that client or a court order to do so," said Don Daniel, vice president of legal affairs and general counsel for Presbyterian Medical Services in Santa Fe, which operates the health center. "So I really can't comment on the pending litigation itself or the care provided to the particular patient referenced in this case."
He added, "We are proud of the care and treatment provided by our staff at the Rio Rancho Family Health Center."
Olona is no longer with the health center, Daniel told the Journal.
The complaint says Van Patten has a right to the contraception of her choice under the U.S. Constitution. Olona was acting as a federal employee and, therefore, violated this due process right, the complaint says.
Presbyterian Medical Services is a New Mexico-based nonprof it corporation. It receives federal funding to operate health clinics.
According to the complaint, the health center failed to use "ordinary and reasonable" care in "retaining, controlling and supervising" Olona when it had knowledge of her practice of removing IUDs from patients without permission.
The complaint also says Olona told Van Patten that the IUD coming out was a "good thing."
"I personally do not like IUDs," Olona told Van Patten. "I feel they are a type of abortion. I don't know how you feel about abortion, but I'm against them. What the IUD does is take the fertilized egg and pushes it out of the uterus."
Olona continued: "Everyone at the office always laughs and tells me I pull these out on purpose, because I am against them, but it's not true, they accidently come out when I tug."
Olona told Van Patten that she could now use a "nonabortion" form of contraception and suggested the Depo Provera shot or birth control pill. Olona made clear that she would not insert a new IUD.
Prior to the visit, Van Patten had worn the IUD for about eight months and had not experienced problems with it, the complaint says.
Van Patten is requesting a jury trial and seeking compensatory damages, costs and attorney's fees.
# # #
2008 NEWS ARTICLES
The Austin American-Statesman
December 19, 2008
Perry endorses anti-abortion license plates
Governor's efforts to back legislation highlight differences with possible foe Hutchison.
By Jason Embry
AUSTIN – Gov. Rick Perry on Thursday used his first public endorsement of a bill heading to the 2009 Legislature to support a proposed license plate with an anti-abortion message.
Perry's backing of a "choose life" plate allows him to further endear himself to abortion opponents as he prepares for a possible 2010 Republican primary challenge from U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, who is exploring a gubernatorial run. Although a spokesman for Hutchison's exploratory committee said she applauds the license-plate legislation and has voted for a number of abortion restrictions, she supports some abortion rights.
Conventional wisdom says anything other than an ardent anti-abortion record is dangerous in a fiercely contested Texas Republican primary, and the abortion question might present one of the clearer policy contrasts between the two Republicans.
Perry deflected a question about the 2010 race but made sure to recount his anti-abortion record, including the 2005 signing of a law requiring written permission from a parent or legal guardian before a minor could have an abortion.
"If there's been a more pro-life governor in Texas history, I'd be hard-pressed to name who that was," he said.
Hutchison has voted in step with the National Right to Life Committee 44 out of 47 times over the years, according to the committee's Web site. She has differed with the group on funding for stem-cell research, which she supports, and on a 2003 Senate vote in which she joined a Senate majority that expressed support for the U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion.
"For us, that is a real obstacle," said Joe Pojman, executive director of Texas Alliance for Life, which he said has a mailing list of 85,000 households.
Hutchison has voted to ban late-term abortions, opposes federal funding for abortions and says it should be a federal crime to drive a teenager across state lines to avoid a state's parental notification laws, said Todd Olsen, a spokesman for her exploratory committee.
"Pro-life voters have overwhelmingly supported Kay Hutchison," Olsen said.
David Hill, a Republican pollster from The Woodlands who is not working for Perry or Hutchison, said he does not think abortion is as powerful an issue as it was a decade ago. Gay marriage — which both Perry and Hutchison oppose — probably carries more weight among social conservatives because it's a fresher issue, he said.
"Even in a primary, it's very low double digits, in the teens, that would vote on (abortion), and even then it can bump up against other crucial issues that people care deeply about," Hill said. "I would not anticipate that it would be a major issue on which a lot of people make their decision."
Perry might also need some reconciliation of his own with social conservatives after calling last year for schoolgirls to be vaccinated against the human papillomavirus . Lawmakers overwhelmingly rejected that idea. In addition, Perry backed the presidential candidacy of former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who supports abortion rights.
The legislation Perry endorsed Thursday, House Bill 109 , would let Texans pay $30 for a license plate that says "choose life." The state would send $22 of that money to groups that provide counseling and other services to pregnant women considering giving their children up for adoption.
Texas has 156 specialty license plates, including some supporting universities, Special Olympics and the Texas State Rifle Association. Nonprofit groups can ask the Texas Department of Transportation to create plates benefiting their organizations, but the department can require legislative approval if the plates would be controversial or not meet other criteria.
Abortion-rights advocates said money from the "choose life" plates would go to unlicensed groups that offer inaccurate information instead of proper medical care.
"Once again, Gov. Rick Perry has put politics ahead of good health-care policy," said Sara Cleveland of NARAL Pro-Choice Texas.
Nineteen other states have "choose life" plates, although some efforts to create them have faced court challenges. Similar bills failed previously in the Texas Legislature.
Perry said supporters of abortion rights are welcome to file their own license-plate bill. "My bet is that a bill like that wouldn't get within 50 (feet) of the governor's office," he said.
###
The Wall Street Journal
December 17, 2008
Bush-Era Abortion Rules Face Possible Reversal
Obama Team Looks at Regulation Set to Be Finalized This Week Letting Medical Staff Refuse to Take Part in Practices They Oppose
By LAURA MECKLER
WASHINGTON -- The outgoing Bush administration this week will finalize a regulation establishing a "right of conscience" allowing medical staff to refuse to participate in any practice they object to on moral grounds, including abortion but possibly birth control and other health care as well.
In transition offices across town, officials in the incoming Obama administration have begun considering how and when to undo it.
The regulation is one of a swath of abortion and other reproductive-health issues under review by the Obama team, which is preparing to reverse a variety of Bush measures, according to officials close to the transition. The review is part of a sweeping scrutiny of Bush-era legislation and regulation on issues across the federal government, from environmental and labor rules to defense spending.
On abortion and related matters, action is expected early on executive, regulatory, budgetary and legislative fronts.
Decisions that the new administration will weigh include: whether to cut funding for sexual abstinence programs; whether to increase funding for comprehensive sex education programs that include discussion of birth control; whether to allow federal health plans to pay for abortions; and whether to overturn regulations such as one that makes fetuses eligible for health-care coverage under the Children's Health Insurance Program.
Women's health advocates are also pushing for a change in rules that would lower the cost of birth control at college health clinics.
Obama aides will have to settle many of these questions in issuing their first budget in February.
"We have a lot of work to do to fix the damage the Bush administration has done," said Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America.
As one of his first actions, Mr. Obama is likely to issue an executive order lifting President George W. Bush's restrictions on funding for research using embryonic stem cells, a move with bipartisan support.
Women's health advocates also expect early action on the "global gag rule," which bars foreign organizations from using their own money for abortion services or advocacy if they accept U.S. aid for family planning. This policy was instituted by President Ronald Reagan, immediately overturned by President Bill Clinton and then reinstated by Mr. Bush.
Mr. Obama is also expected to restore federal funding for family planning to the United Nations Population Fund soon after taking office. This policy also has gone back and forth with control of the White House, with Republicans arguing that the U.N. agency supports coercive abortions because of its work in China with its one-child policy, and Democrats saying that the agency doesn't.
Messrs. Clinton and Bush took action on those two issues in the opening days of their administrations. It isn't clear whether Mr. Obama will follow suit. He has suggested that he wants to find middle ground on abortion-related issues, and some Democrats worry about the politics of making abortion policy one of his opening moves.
As they face Democrat-controlled Washington, antiabortion activists are gearing up to fight the Freedom of Choice Act, or FOCA, which would codify Roe v. Wade into federal law. Mr. Obama said last year that he would sign the bill. Depending on how it is interpreted, the bill could overturn state laws regulating abortion, such as parental notification and mandatory waiting periods.
"Our No. 1 concern would be the FOCA bill," said Connie Mackey, senior vice president of Family Research Council Action, a conservative group that focuses on social issues. "We have to appeal directly to the American public."
The opponents of this legislation appear more eager for a debate over it than the proponents do, perhaps knowing it is a strong way to rally their supporters early in the administration.
While many abortion-rights supporters would like to see Congress pass FOCA, their advocates in Washington have concluded that there aren't enough votes in Congress and that it isn't politically smart to push such a divisive measure. A coalition of nearly 60 liberal and women's groups submitted a list of 15 requests for action in the Obama administration's first 100 days, and FOCA isn't on the list.
"We're going to be smart and strategic about our policy agenda to bring people together to make progress for women's health," said Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. "The Freedom of Choice Act is very important...but we have a long list of things to get done that I think can address problems immediately that women are facing, that are really immediate concerns."
Among them is the "right of conscience" regulation that is expected to be published this week. It will take effect 30 days after being issued. That means that if the Bush administration issues the regulation this week, it will become final before Mr. Obama's inauguration on Jan. 20, and his administration won't be able to undo it easily.
For decades, federal law has said that doctors and nurses can't be compelled to perform abortions. The new regulation broadens that to make clear that all health-care workers may refuse to provide information, such as a referral, to patients looking for an abortion. The Department of Health and Human Services estimates the regulation would affect 584,000 hospitals, doctor's offices, pharmacies and other entities.
Advocates on both sides of the issue have interpreted the rule as also protecting workers who refuse to participate in providing birth control or other care they don't support. The rule could be blocked by Congress, or Health and Human Services could begin the laborious process of issuing a new regulation reversing course. Officials close to the transition have signaled that they intend to begin the regulatory process anew.
###
Jezebel.com
December 16, 2008
Has The Pill "Increased Or Diminished Human Happiness"?
By anna n.
Birth control pills will go over the counter at a few locations in London in 2009, prompting James Berrill of The Independent to examine its legacy — and come up with some pretty weird opinions.
Berrill writes that "feminists who grew up in the 1960s have more recently claimed that it was a "misogynist tyrant in disguise", urging women to be ever more available for male pleasure, and pumping their bodies full of chemicals." It's not a new argument (and, to be clear, it's not Berrill's), but it does imply that men are the ones who enjoy sex, while women just want to cuddle and hold hands until they're ready to make babies.
Things get stranger when Berrill discusses the Pill's effect on women's sexuality. He writes:
"Young single women have always had sex – statistics show that in 1875, 40 per cent of brides were pregnant on their wedding day. What changed with the advent of the Pill was that they were able to enjoy sex for the first time."
Uh, what? This is almost as silly as Ali G's claim that "people has been reading books for millions of years, but thanks to new technology, now they is able to write them as well." Sure, lessening the fear of pregnancy helps many women enjoy sex more than they would have otherwise. But we weren't aware that no woman had ever liked sex until 1961!
Berrill says the consequences of the Pill include "delayed childbearing, the huge increase in women going out to work, an obsession with perfect sex, and the rise in infertility have led some to question whether it has increased or diminished human happiness." It's debatable whether the Pill has turned us into a society of sex-perfectionists — or whether it has really led to lower fertility except where it was, um, supposed to. But the Pill has affected women's sex lives, both by letting them control their reproduction and, possibly, by lowering their libidos. So has the Pill made humanity happier? Or have its side effects outweighed its benefits?
###
Newsweek magazine
December 15, 2008
The Abortion Wars Get Technical
Women have few rights at all when doctors can legally misinform them or deny service entirely.
By Dahlia Lithwick
What does it tell us about the state of the abortion wars, that battles once waged over the dignity and autonomy of pregnant women have morphed into disputes over the dignity and autonomy of their health-care providers? Two of the most pitched battles over reproductive rights in America today turn on whether health workers can be forced to provide medical services or information to which they ethically object. But as we learn from these fights, our solicitude for the beliefs of medical workers is selective: abortion opponents will soon enjoy broader legal protections than ever. Those willing to provide abortions, on the other hand, will enjoy far fewer. And women seeking reproductive services will be more caught up than ever in the tangle between the two.
The first dispute concerns a new rule purporting to protect the "right of conscience" of American health-care workers. Under a new midnight regulation crammed through by the Bush Department of Health and Human Services and poised to become law any day now, any health-care worker may refuse to perform procedures, offer advice or dispense prescriptions, if doing so would offend their "religious beliefs or moral convictions." Congress has protected the right of physicians to opt out of providing abortions for decades. This new rule, which President-elect Obama can overturn (although it may take months), is far broader. It allows one's access to birth control, emergency contraception and even artificial insemination to turn on the moral preferences of a pharmacist, nurse or ambulance driver.
The second dispute involves a South Dakota law that went into effect last summer after an appeals court lifted a preliminary injunction. The law requires physicians providing abortions to read from a state-mandated script advising the patient that she is about to "terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being" with whom she has an "existing relationship." The doctor must have her patient sign each page of a form indicating that she has been warned of the "statistically significant" risks of the procedure, including "increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide." These "risks" are almost completely unsupported by the scientific literature. A new comprehensive study released by Johns Hopkins found "no significant differences in long-term mental health between women in the United States who choose to terminate a pregnancy and those who do not." The disparity between the empirical data and the mandatory script thus forces physicians into a Hobson's choice between providing patients with accurate medical information, and possible license suspension and misdemeanor charges.
Reading the new HHS regulations together with the mandatory South Dakota "script," one can only conclude that those same health providers who cannot be compelled to perform an abortion may nevertheless be compelled to deliver misinformation about it. The freedom and autonomy of doctors who oppose abortion are protected by law. But those willing to provide abortions can be forced to deliver a state message with which they completely disagree. Both the HHS's right-of-conscience rules and the South Dakota script purport to clarify the complex legal relationship between health provider and patient, but each instead confuses and obfuscates settled law. The HHS rule, as written, is so ambiguous that nobody can say for certain which health-care workers or medical procedures are covered, beyond establishing that both categories are broadly expanded beyond those protected by existing right-of-conscience laws. The rule even fails to define abortion, leaving open the possibility that anyone who thinks birth control is abortion may decline to dispense it, turning every visit to the ER or the pharmacy into a spin of the constitutional roulette wheel.
A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine similarly blasts the South Dakota script for introducing novel and confusing legal language about "human beings," "constitutional rights" and "relationships" into a medical conversation between doctor and patient, concluding that these words are there "to intimidate pregnant women with vaguely described and legal-sounding consequences."
Almost completely missing from this fascinating legislative discussion of what health workers might be forced to do and say with respect to reproductive rights are the reproductive rights themselves. Whether we like it or not, the right to birth control, emergency contraception and—under most circumstances—abortion is still constitutionally protected. But these are not services a woman can provide for herself, which leaves her with few rights at all when her doctors are empowered by law to misinform her, withhold advice or deny services altogether. Even beyond the problem of subordinating a woman's rights to her doctor, however, there looms a larger question for health-care workers themselves: if they are indeed seeing their rights and freedoms either hugely expanded or severely restricted based solely on which side they've chosen in the culture wars, they might properly wonder whether any of them are truly free at all.
###
|
