Mothers We Could Save: Family Planning Is Just As Essential For Humans As For Horses
Here’s a Mother’s Day thought: There’s a way to save many of the world’s 350,000 women who die in childbirth each year. But it’s very controversial, for it’s called family planning.
Republicans in Congress have gone on the warpath this budget season against family planning programs at home and abroad. To illustrate the stakes, let me share a Mother’s Day story about a pregnant 30-year-old Somali woman named Hinda Hassan.
Ms. Hassan lived in a village near this remote town of Baligubadle in Somaliland (a self-ruling enclave carved from Somalia). She never used family planning, for none is available within several days’ walk. When her eighth child was still an infant, she became pregnant again.
“I was happy when she became pregnant,” said her husband, Muhammad Isse, who tends a herd of 13 camels with his family. “I was very happy, because I had faith in God.”
When Ms. Hassan went into labor, she was looked after by two traditional birth attendants, both of them unschooled, untrained and unequipped. “We try to wash our hands with soap and water,” one of them, Amina Ahmed, told me. “But sometimes we don’t have soap. And if there is no water, we rub our hands in the sand to clean them.”
Ms. Hassan’s labor did not go well. After 11 hours, her husband paid a man with a pickup truck $50 to drive her three hours to the clinic here in Baligubadle. The clinic couldn’t help Ms. Hassan and sent her on another two-and-a-half-hour bone-rattling drive in the back of the pickup to the Somaliland capital of Hargeisa. Shortly after Ms. Hassan arrived at the Edna Adan Maternity Hospital (mentioned in my last column), she died.
Her death was infuriatingly unnecessary — and I felt doubly saddened when I met some of her eight orphans.
There are any number of ways that Ms. Hassan’s life could have been saved. She had an off-the-charts hemoglobin level of just 4, reflecting a stunning level of anemia. A trained midwife could have given her a deworming pill and iron supplements early in the pregnancy, addressing that anemia and strengthening her. Later, Ms. Hassan developed a complication called eclampsia that would have been detected if she had had pre-natal care.
Yet maybe the simplest way to save her life would have been contraception. If Somali women had half as many pregnancies (they now average six births), there would be only half as many maternal deaths. But modern contraception doesn’t exist in this part of Somaliland.
“The only method of family planning we have is breast-feeding,” said Nimo Abdi, the midwife at the clinic here, noting that breast-feeding reduces the likelihood of a new pregnancy. Ms. Abdi thinks that some local people would accept modern contraceptives if they were available.
“If I had injectables and condoms, people would accept them,” she said. “They would want them.”
I wonder if that isn’t a bit optimistic; in a place like this, family planning requires much more than just handing out contraceptives. Ms. Hassan’s husband told me that he had never heard of contraception, and he sounded wary of the idea.
Many people in poor countries want large families, partly to ensure that some will survive despite high death rates. Or a woman may distrust contraceptives or fear her husband’s reaction if she is caught using them.
By United Nations estimates, 215 million women worldwide have an “unmet need” for family planning, meaning they don’t want to become pregnant but are not using effective contraception. The Guttmacher Institute, a widely respected research organization, estimates that if all the unmet need for contraception were met, the result would be 94,000 fewer women dying of pregnancy complications each year, and almost 25 million fewer abortions each year.
Greater access to birth control would also help check the world population, which the United Nations warned a few days ago is rising more quickly than expected. The U.N. now projects the total population in 2100 will be 10.1 billion.
Yet this year, Republicans in Congress have been trying to slash investments in family planning. A budget compromise last month cut international family planning spending by 5 percent, but some Republicans are expected to seek much bigger cuts in future years.
If they succeed, the consequences will be felt in places like this remote Somali town. Women won’t get access to contraceptives, and the parade of unwanted pregnancies, abortions, fistulas, and mothers dying in childbirth will continue.
Ah, but there was one Republican-sponsored initiative for family planning in Congress this year. It provided contraception without conditions — for wild horses in the American West. It passed on a voice vote.
Maybe on Mother’s Day, we could acknowledge that family planning is just as essential for humans as for horses.
By: Nicholas D. Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, May 7, 2011
Toxic Misfits: Donald Trump, Birthers And Other Hazardous Materials
It seems that there is no end in sight. You can’t turn to any television channel or listen to any radio station without hearing something that has to do with Donald Trump and his vile birther rants. One wonders when will it all end. Some have given Trump a pass in this regard. Many believe that he is simply doing it for the attention while others, for some odd reason, see his actions only as a joke.
It seems that this whole “birther” issue began with Jim Geraghty, a conservative blogger for National Review and National Review On-line. The spark for the birther campaign began by Geraghty suggesting that President Obama’s first and middle names were not the same as listed on his birth certificate. The embers were kindled by Jerome Corsi in an interview on Fox News where the idea that Obama’s birth certificate was fake. This quackery has been non-stop since.
This birther theory was elevated to a different level of insanity by Orly Taitz, who not only believes that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States, but also believes that Hawaii cannot be considered part of the United States “unless it can produce an authentic statehood certificate”. Taitz, mind you, emigrated from the Soviet Union to Israel and then to the United States and is a dual citizen of Israel and the U.S. In her view, “the islands of Hawaii appear to be colonies of Kenya”. As such, “everyone born in Hawaii is legally not an American but a Kenyan”. Never mind that these assertions have no basis of fact. Joshua Wisch, Attorney General of Hawaii has repeatedly noted that the presidents certificate of live birth is on file in the archives of the Department of Health of Hawaii.
Then you have the likes of Andy Martin, Michael Savage, G. Gordon Liddy, Lars Larson, Bob Grant and…. oh yes, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, Chuck Norris, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Roy Blunt and David Vitter.
The latest participant in this land of make believe is none other than Donald Trump. Over the past several weeks, Trump seems to have gone out of his way to etch his place in history as the “birther of all birthers”. He has been given numerous opportunities by the media, often unchallenged, to espouse again and again what he surely knows to be flat out lies. Despite “prima facie” evidence, Trump has chosen to continue down a path that can be best described in every category as bigoted, racist and divisive.
I have been trying to figue out why this gang of “misfits” continue to propagate this charade on the American people. Surely they cannot believe that actions of this nature will endear them to the majority of the American people, or do they? It really makes you wonder if they are merely front persons for the real behind the scenes “power players” whose goal is to completely alienate and isolate certain segments of the population. This idea seems to have worked very well in the past with groups such as the teaparty and the christian right. Could it be that they are attempting to expand their grasps to include even more radical segments?
Power, radicalism, extremism, racism, bigotry, hate, fear…they all work, but at what cost to the rest of the country. There is a bigger picture here…one larger than Trump or Bachmann or Newt. The “power players” are all about the preservation of an aggressive, radical and dangerous conservative ideology…an ideology that is appealing more and more to the fringe and most noxious elements of our society…nothing more and nothing less.
Continued unfettered tolerance of these types of behavior is merely an assent of their vile actions and intents. That is just not acceptable. At some point, good people will have to take a stand and put a stop to the shananigans of these toxic misfits.
By: Raemd95, April 20, 2011
Budget Compromise Shows Conservative Big Government Hypocrisy
They hate big government, those conservative Republicans—especially a big federal government, trying to meddle in Americans’ lives on everything from healthcare to light bulbs.
Except, of course, when it comes to the District of Columbia, which the GOP-controlled House seems to view as its own little political petri dish. As part of its pending agreement to cut $38 billion from the federal budget, negotiators decided to cave in to the GOP’s demand to bar the District from using its own money to subsidize abortions for poor women.
A lot of people don’t like abortion, think it should be illegal, and don’t think government should pay for it. That’s a simple equation: if you don’t like abortion, don’t have one. If you think it should be illegal, take it up with the courts, or push for a constitutional amendment banning it. Barring government money from being spent on a legal women’s health service—however controversial—is not defensible. We all have to pay for activities we don’t want, through our taxes or health insurance premiums. Some taxpayers would prefer that their contributions to the federal treasury not be used to pay for wars; some who pay health insurance premiums don’t want the pool of money to be used to pay for someone’s Viagra. But group funds don’t allow for individual micro-management.
The attack on the District of Columbia adds even more insult to the unforgivable injury Washingtonians already endure as the nation’s only legally disenfranchised voters. It’s bad enough that U.S. citizens in Washington—people who pay local and federal taxes, volunteer, serve in wars and on jury duty—don’t have a full voting representative in the House and have no U.S. senators. It’s the height of arrogance for members of the U.S. Congress from other parts of the country to presume to tell the District how to spend tax dollars it collected from its own citizens. Aside from the abortion restrictions, the pending budget agreement also reinstates and expands a private school voucher program for the District.
D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray, who was arrested at the Capitol this week in protest over the meddling, sounded just like a genuine political conservative as he described his objections: “I’m tired of being a pawn in a political game. All we want is to be able to spend our own money.”
How unfortunate that congressional Republicans, who demanded the control over the District—and Democrats, who caved into their bullying—can’t see their way to apply true conservative principles when it comes to the city where they work. Other jurisdictions have imposed a “commuter tax” on people who live in one state and work in another. Members of Congress pay taxes in their home districts and states, but not here. If they want a say in how District funds are used, maybe it’s time they started to pay up.
By: Susan Milligan, U.S. News and World Report, April 12, 2011
How The Media Promotes Ignorance And Stifles Debate
Friday night, my eyes were glued to to the news, as I awaited any and all emerging details about the possible government shutdown. As outlets began reporting that republicans and democrats had finally reached a deal, I immediately felt a sense of relief. Thank goodness, I thought, so much unnecessary suffering averted. But the relief didn’t last long, because in the pit of my stomach was fear for the many millions of people who will be affected by the $38 billion in budget cuts passed by congress. Unfortunately, the media feels differently, preferring to discuss ad-nausium the budget cut’s political ramifications for the two parties.
The same thing happened when the GOP was determined to shutdown the government if democrats did not sign on to defunding Planned Parenthood. Again, the media’s focus was not on the health of the 3 million people the organization treats every year, by providing cancer screenings, HIV and STI checks, and contraceptives. They focused on how this painted republicans as partisan ideologues, or the democrats as supporters for women’s rights, which party was to blame for the almost-shutdown, and most notably, the consequences this would have on their popularity.
Almost all of the reporting by the establishment media centers around how X will affect the democrats favorability numbers, or how Y will affect the republicans chances in 2012. Whether I was watching MSNBC or CNN, the sole concern was always on the political implications of the budget cuts, rather than the real life consequences for the many millions of Americans already suffering from unemployment, foreclosures, and sky-rocketing medical costs.
And therein lies the problem with our media establishment: Every major policy issue is strangled by the established “right vs left” consensus. Whether it’s civil liberties, our endless wars, healthcare reform, or the economy, all are presented through the prism of democrat and republican disagreement. Not only does this ignore the tribulation of people around the country, but most importantly the media omits discussion of issues that receive bipartisan support, which has increasingly become the case, issue after issue.
There is very little that republicans and democrats in office disagree on. They both support the wars, the private insurance industry, tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, budget cuts during an economic recession, and the list goes on. Perhaps this is because both parties are corporately owned by the same interests. The only real difference today remains their position on social issues. Republicans are still against women’s reproductive rights and marriage equality, while democrats remain pro-choice and advocates for ending institutionalized discrimination against homosexuals (although they don’t do a very good job at consistently standing up for these rights). While these issues are of great importance, they are not the only problems afflicting the nation.
Look no further than the lack of coverage on economic suffering for proof. Republicans want to cut all social spending, while democrats prefer to cut a fraction of social services that benefit the public at large. So rather than discussing alternatives to austerity aimed at the working class and poor, the media solely focuses on how much austerity is enough. Poll after poll shows that Americans overwhelmingly support increasing taxes on the wealthy to reduce the deficit. In addition, major cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, or Social Security to balance the budget are wildly unpopular. But the mainstream narrative does not even challenge whether budget cuts are necessary, or if other alternatives for deficit reduction exist, let alone the public’s opinion.
The media also refuses to bring up defense spending, which costs upwards of $1 trillion annually. Probably because both parties agree that the national security and warfare state are untouchable. Which is interesting, given that the public prefers cutting defense spending rather than social spending to reduce the deficit. Then again public support for the Afghanistan war is at an all-time low, but the bipartisan Washington consensus in support of the war remains unmoved. The fact that war spending is draining our treasury should be a significant story for the media, particularly since the government just launched another war in Libya, while ironically calling for fiscal responsibility.
If they aren’t even capable of exposing the cost of war, it is no surprise that the casualties of war, both the injured and dead, soldiers and civilians, are completely omitted from discussion. Again, this makes sense, given the bipartisan support for war, with tactical nuances making up the few points of contention. This was most apparent in the lead up to the Iraq war, which enjoyed strong bipartisan support, with the media following suit by forcing a pro-war narrative and firing those who loudly dissented.
The same is true for healthcare reform. Americans overwhelmingly support a single payer, medicare-for-all system, but since democrats and republicans are both in the pockets of the private insurance industry, single-payer is not a viable topic for debate on the airwaves. Even climate change has become a forgotten issue. Now that President Obama and his fellow democrats have adopted the Bush approach — i.e. refusing to cut greenhouse gas emissions, regulate resource exploiting industries, or invest in alternative energy — climate change and it’s very real, disastrous effects, are almost never examined.
It is no wonder so many Americans are turned off by politics. Many don’t realize how political decisions effect their everyday lives, from the quality of the water and air that they breath, to the seat-belts they wear and sick days they receive. If not for independent media outlets like Democracy Now! and independent journalists like Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, and Marcy Wheeler, to name a few, I would be an apathetic liberal uninterested in “silly political debate”.
If the goal of the establishment media class is to portray significant political decisions as boring ideological nonsense, then they have succeeded. One doesn’t need to attend journalism school to understand that the mainstream media has failed at its job of informing the public and holding those in power accountable. Instead they have successfully promoted ignorance and stifled debate, to the detriment of truth and social justice.
By: Rania Khalek, CommonDreams.org, April 10, 2011
What The Republican Budget Plans Tell Us About Republican Values
The Republicans want you to believe that they’re concerned about the deficit. Of course, that concern is a lie. They don’t care about the deficit. They only care about using the deficit as an excuse to pursue their extremist agenda. And the single most extreme part of it is their war on people. On workers. On women. On immigrants. On the environment that keeps us all healthy and alive. If they cared about the deficit itself, they’d have noticed that the previous three Republican presidents produced consecutively the largest deficits in human history, each outdoing his predecessor, and the most recent Republican president not merely shattering his father’s unprecedented standard, but actually having to destroy the federal surplus built by a Democratic president in order to do so. An impressive feat, by any measure. But when Republicans talk about deficits, you know they are lying. Republicans destroy surpluses and create record deficits. That’s the truth.
If Republicans cared about the deficit, they wouldn’t have held middle-class tax cuts hostage for a ransom of tax cuts for the very wealthy, tax cuts that the very wealthy do not need. Tax cuts for the wealthy that won’t create jobs or stimulate the economy. Tax cuts for the wealthy that added to the federal deficit, the same federal deficit Republicans now pretend to be so worried about that they need to slash and burn federal spending. Spending for such things as food assistance for low-income Americans, which Republicans want to cut even as they retain farm subsidies. Spending for such things as life-saving immunizations. Spending for such things as food and health assistance around the world, without which some 70,000 children could die. And not content to make Americans go hungry and die of preventable diseases, and for tens of thousands of children around the world to starve to death, rather than have the very wealthy pay more taxes, Republicans also have their “hearts” set on eliminating Medicare and eviscerating Medicaid. And they want to repeal the Obama health plan, even though doing so would make the deficit even worse.
Let’s not pretend that Republicans actually care about the deficit. If they did, their approach in addressing it would be responsible and humane. Republicans don’t care about the deficit. They only care about cutting government programs that help people in need. It’s part of their larger agenda of blatant class warfare. Republicans prefer that millions of people suffer, and that at least tens of thousands of people die, rather than that the very wealthy once again pay the taxes that eliminated the previous Republican deficits to create the previous Democratic surplus. Leave it to the mental health professionals to diagnose the psychology of such values. If anyone can afford mental health professionals, with states now also in budget crises thanks to the genius of tax cuts.
But lest you think that Republicans don’t have any spending priorities at all, keep in mind that they do want to use federal money, just so it is spent in pursuit of their Medieval social agenda. But that’s just relative pocket change. While Republicans seem actually to want for people in need to suffer and die, they also want to throw unfathomably budget-busting pallets of cash at their favorite budget sinkhole. As reported by Ryan Grim:
While media attention focuses on the cuts to government spending demanded by House Republicans and broadly accepted by Democrats, the Pentagon is poised to reap billions more in federal funds, according to sources close to the discussions. The confines of the budget negotiations established by the two parties results in a system where every extra dollar going to military spending ends up being offset by a dollar reduction in spending on domestic social programs.
Got that? It’s an actual tradeoff. Punish more people in need to free up more cash for the Pentagon. The Democrats actually proposed some reductions to the Pentagon budget, and in January Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen outlined plans for responsible Pentagon budget cuts:
“A major objective beyond creating monetary savings is to make this department less cumbersome, less top heavy and more agile and effective in the execution of its responsibilities,” Gates said. “My hope and expectation is that as a result of these changes over time, what had been a culture of endless money, where cost was rarely a consideration, will become a culture of savings and restraint.”
But Republicans know better than the Defense Secretary and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Grim:
Democrats and Republicans are now moving toward an agreement that would increase defense spending. But Democratic sources close to the talks said the Democrats’ spending recommendation remains roughly $2 billion shy of that of their Republican counterparts. A spokesman for the Senate spending panel declined to comment, citing ongoing talks. A spokesman for Senate Democratic leadership did not respond to requests for comment.
So the Pentagon itself says it doesn’t need more money, but not only are Democrats being pushed to give them more, the Republicans are insisting that the amount the Democrats are offering, and which the Pentagon says it doesn’t need, still isn’t enough! But it’s so important that we cut the deficit that we have to cut funding that feeds the hungry, prevents disease, and cares for the sick. And keep in mind that it’s not as if the Pentagon is anything remotely close to being underfunded. So what is it? Do Republicans think the answer to everything is to throw money at it? Do they have so little respect for the men and women in American uniform that they think they need such hardware overkill in order to protect the homeland? Are Republicans perpetually mired in a state of priapic adolescent arrested development, thinking the measure of their machismo is the size of their arsenal? Or is it just good old corporate welfare for the military industrial complex? Maybe it’s some combination of all of the above. But it’s a staggeringly irresponsible waste of resources that does nothing to enhance our national security.
As The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation made clear, the United States spends more than eight times as much on defense as does the next closest country, Russia. The United States spends more than twice as much as does the next major military presence, which is America’s combined NATO allies. And not that it will satisfy paranoid Republicans, but the United States spends more than three times as much as do imagined potential adversaries Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan and Venezuela combined. And for those particularly paranoid Republicans, the United States also spends more than 10 times as much as does that most sinister of all perpetual antagonists: France. And to put it in terms of actual budget and policy priorities, there is this concise explanation from The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:
Between fiscal year 2001 (the last year for which appropriations levels were set under President Clinton) and fiscal year 2008, funding for domestic discretionary programs has been more constrained than any other area of the budget and has shrunk both as a share of the budget and as a share of the economy. In contrast, appropriations for defense and other security-related programs have increased more rapidly than any other area of the budget — even more rapidly than the costs of the “big three” entitlement programs: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
Republicans don’t care about the budget. They are using the budget as an excuse and red herring to recast the very nature of the United States government, and the very nature of the United States. They don’t care if those in need suffer and die. They don’t care about jobs. They don’t care about a social safety net. They do care very much about protecting the very wealthy. They do care very much about wealthy corporations. And the one thing at which they want to throw truly unimaginable amounts of money is the military. This is a huge clue as to their mindset. Because when you stop and consider the consequences of causing more and more suffering and unrest among more and more people while at the same time ensuring that the military is much more powerful than any military anywhere needs be, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that Republican values are not only inhuman and inhumane, they are dangerous and creepy.
By: Laurence Lewis, Daily Kos, April 10, 2011
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