Gov Rick Perry’s Abysmal Record On Women’s Health
If you’re a woman from Texas—or indeed, any woman—there’s a lot to dislike about Gov. Rick Perry.
The vanity. The boorishness. The belief you’re too stupid to make your own medical decisions. The weird resemblance to Animal House’s Niedermeyer in his college photo.
Perry reminds me of the scene in Thelma and Louise in which Thelma (Geena Davis) says of her n’er-do-well husband, “He kind of prides himself on being infantile.” Louise (Susan Sarandon) responds, “He’s got a lot to be proud of.”
So as we all prepare for the media barrage surrounding Perry’s presidential announcement on Saturday, and in tradition of my idol Molly Ivins, I’m going to start a new group, Texas Women Enraged by Rick Perry—TWERP for short.
As TWERP’s organizer, I feel obliged to point out that on a practical level, Rick Perry has made it pretty lousy for women in Texas, especially for women at the bottom of the economic ladder. He’s also made it pretty lousy for anybody who doesn’t look like him. As Eileen Smith wrote in the Texas Observer, “In just one session, Republicans managed to screw children, women, gays, immigrants, teachers, the elderly, Hispanics, the unemployed and the uninsured. The only people who got off easy were white guys. Can’t imagine why.”
The numbers tell the tale. Texas is dead last in the number of non-elderly women without health insurance, and 6th nationally in the percentage of women in poverty, according to the Texas Legislative Study Group. One in five Texas children lack health insurance, the highest rate in the nation. And if that weren’t bad enough, Perry tried to opt out of Medicaid, which provides healthcare to the most vulnerable Texas populations, including pregnant women and children.
When it comes to reproductive healthcare, the state budget guts family planning, leaving 284,000 Texas women without birth control or access to basic reproductive healthcare. This will also likely increase the abortion rate, sonograms or no sonograms. And of course there’s the standard right wing assault on Planned Parenthood. Women needing prenatal care fare no better.
As reported in the Texas Tribune, “Texas has the worst rate of pregnant women receiving prenatal care in the first trimester, according to the report commissioned by the Legislative Study Group…And though Texas has the highest percent of its population without health insurance, the state is 49th in per capita spending on Medicaid, and dead last in per capita spending on mental health, according to the report.”
So if you’re a working class Texas woman, Rick Perry doesn’t want you to have access to birth control or reproductive healthcare to prevent unintended pregnancy, but once you’re pregnant the state mandates a sonogram and a lecture to convince you of the error of your ways. After that sonogram and lecture, if you need prenatal care, you’re SOL. And once the baby is born, Texas is 47th in monthly benefit payments under the Women, Infants, & Children program, which provides nutrition assistance.
This is Rick Perry’s vision for women in the United States. Limited healthcare, little birth control, low income women and kids left to fend for themselves, a bunch of bureaucrats telling you what to do—and the very real human suffering that goes along with it. TWERP might be an understatement.
By: Laura Chapin, U. S. News and World Report, August 11, 2011
The GOP Health Care Assault On Planned Parenthood Exposes The Hypocrisy Of The Pro-Life Movement
I tend not to get involved in discussions on abortion because I have never been able to resolve the conflict which comes from understanding both sides of this difficult issue. I understand those who believe in the pro-choice approach. Certainly, a woman wants, needs and deserves to be in control of her own body and make the decisions that she believes are best.
But I also get the pro-life movement. If an individual believes that a life is ‘in being’ at the moment of conception, I can well appreciate the distress such a person would feel over such a life being terminated.
What I cannot understand is how the very people who are so profoundly committed to the pro-life movement seem to lose all care, concern and compassion for that life once the child is born into the world.
Nowhere is this hypocrisy more prominently on display than in the current war being waged by the GOP on Planned Parenthood – the organization that spends 97% of their efforts and money providing millions of impoverished American women with critical front-line health care, essential medical testing to discover disease before it is too late to successfully treat a patient, and the very family planning and sex education services that might help women avoid an unwanted pregnancy and thus moot the question of abortion.
Yes, the remaining 3% of the Planned Parenthood budget is dedicated to providing abortion services but, contrary to what the anti-abortion forces would have you believe, not one cent of taxpayer money – federal or state – pays for so much as an IV needle used in an abortion procedure. The legal prohibition against taxpayer money being spent on abortions is as clearly enforced as the Roe v. Wade decision that confirms a woman’s right to choose in the United States.
Despite the important work done by Planned Parenthood – and the lives they save – the GOP has made it a cornerstone of their social agenda to put this vital service to the working and non-working poor out of business.
Should you doubt that the organization does, in fact, save lives, take a look at this letter written by Maggie Davis of Saratoga Springs in response to her Congressman’s voting to defund Planned Parenthood.
I am writing this in answer to Congressman Gibson’s vote against the funding for Planned Parenthood. I have no idea why he did this. Regardless of the pro and con of Planned Parenthood, they do save lives. I speak from experience.In the early ’70s I went to Planned Parenthood here for a checkup and they found something that was wrong and advised me to see my doctor right away. I did and within one month I had to have surgery to save my life. I would not be here today writing this letter. If it were not for Planned Parenthood and Dr. Streit of Saratoga, I would be dead. I will always be thankful to Planned Parenthood for discovering something and telling me to go to my doctor.
Mr. Gibson, I think you should take another look at how many lives Planned Parenthood does save. When we voted for you, we expected you to work for the taxpayers who pay you.
Maggie Davis, Saratoga Springs
So, how do the pro-life forces defend their position that Planned Parenthood must go because, on occasion, they perform medical procedures that end what these folks perceive to be lives in being while fully understanding that closing the organization’s doors will result in the loss of lives of women we know are in being?
How did the 240 Members of the House of Representatives (a total which included 10 Democrats) justify their votes when they passed a bill in February to defund Planned Parenthood knowing that while their vote may or may not have resulted in a few less abortions had the Senate agreed (they did not), that same vote would also take the lives of people like Maggie Davis as a result of the legislation?
Had the House had their way, how many additional abortions would result – under conditions one shudders to contemplate – due to the loss of the counseling services designed to help women avoid unwanted pregnancies?
Now, as we watch the GOP assault on Medicaid – the federal and state funded health program relied on by over 40% of women who visit Planned Parenthood – one is left to wonder just how much of this drive to destroy the state-based medical safety net is based on actual budgetary concerns or whether budget difficulties are simply a cover for the effort to win the battle against legal abortion.
And while we are looking at the questions, maybe someone can answer how the eleven states that have either passed or introduced legislation this year designed to ban groups like Planned Parenthood from receiving family-planning funding or prevent them from contracting with the state for payment for services provided by these organizations, justify their own actions?
The simple truth is that there is no rational way to conclude that these alleged pro-life forces are, in fact, pro-life as it is difficult to fathom how one can desire to protect the life of the unborn by sacrificing the life of the already born. If you believe in protecting the unborn, does it not necessarily follow that you are equally as concerned about protecting the lives of those already here in the flesh.
What I can work out is how pro-life politicians are, in reality, ‘pro’ their political careers and are more than willing to sacrifice the lives of the poor who rely on the services of Planned Parenthood to burnish their anti-abortion credentials.
Seriously, does it get any worse than that? Making the matter even more despicable is the reliance upon religion as the basis for the pro-life consciousness. I fully understand and respect that religions teach that taking the lives of the unborn is morally wrong just as I understand and respect that it is up to each individual to hear those teachings or not. This is the way we roll in America.
Yet, I am aware of nothing in any of the competing religious tomes suggesting that while is it essential to protect the unborn so that they may have life, protecting those currently here so that they might continue life is no big deal. I’m also pretty sure that the Bible does not endorse allowing people to get sick and die because ‘we can’t afford it.’
Here’s a thought for those dedicated GOP ‘fighters for life’ – show a little consistency and maybe you’ll have more success in convincing the public that your closely held religious beliefs are something more than just the worst kind of cynical and despicable politics.
Show you are as concerned for the lives and health of those already walking the planet as you profess to be for those who have not yet arrived. Then, and only then, can any one willing to scrutinize your motives view you as the God fearing, compassionate human beings you pretend to be.
Failing the same, even the most religious and zealous among us should not, in good conscious, avoid the fact that our elected officials are picking and choosing between the lives they save and the lives they sacrifice in the name of good politics.
If your beliefs lie with the pro-life side of the abortion issue, I respect that. I encourage you to continue your fight just as I heartily support both your right and need to do so.
But don’t effectuate that fight by requiring the taking of the lives and health of others because you have not yet won your battle.
While you may be right that compassion for life must begin with conception, there is no logical or emotional basis that suggests that the same compassion should end with birth.
Tell your elected representatives to back off on Planned Parenthood. Then, and only then can you truly be among those who are pro-life.
By: Rick Ungar, The Policy Page, Forbes, June 13, 2011
Gov. Chris Christie: Earn $6,000 A Year? No Medicaid For You!
If you live in the state of New Jersey and are earning $118 a week, congratulations!
According to Gov. Chris Christie, you have escaped the bonds of poverty and no longer are in need of the state’s Medicaid program.
Never mind that $118 a week is but a fraction of the poverty line as defined by the United States of America. Pay no attention to the fact that New Jersey battles California for the mantle of having the highest cost of living of any state in the nation.
Chris Christie, everyone’s favorite no-nonsense, “tell it like it is” governor, has decided that you can manage quite nicely on this paltry sum while remaining fully capable of paying for your own medical care.
Sound like a joke?
It’s not. And it is difficult to imagine anything less humorous. Under the Christie plan, adults with a family of four who earn more than $6,000 a year would no longer qualify for the state’s Medicaid program. Currently, the cut-off to qualify is $30,000.
Think about that for a moment.
A single mother raising three kids on a weekly salary of $118 will no longer be eligible to take advantage of the medical social safety net should she fall ill.
I can hear my conservative friends rising in chorus – mom should have thought about that before having all those kids she couldn’t afford! Maybe she should have. If only there were some place these women could turn to for family planning advice so that they might avoid this problem.
But wait – there is such a program in New Jersey. Or, to be more precise, there was such a program in New Jersey. It turns out that women’s clinics are disappearing from the New Jersey landscape as Governor Christie uses the budget pen to wipe out women’s health programs that might also provide abortion services as a small part of what they make available to women so badly in need of their health care and counseling services. This, despite the fact that no state or federal taxpayer money went towards paying for any such abortion services long before Christie began his assault on women’s health.
In his last budget, Christy sliced $7.5 million from family planning clinics – a cut his new budget proudly continues. As a result, health and planning services so vital to low income women are becoming very hard to find in New Jersey- not to mention the many other states where Governors are using the budget to enact their social, anti-abortion agenda’s.
What do we call powerful people when they pick on the weakest among us?
We call them bullies. And Governor Chris Christie exemplifies the modern-day bully. Is it any wonder, then, that the GOP sees Christie as the man they would so gladly follow into the 2012 election battle?
Christie’s proposal to cut over $500 million from the state’s Medicaid program would not only affect parents earning far too little to support their families. Some of the deepest cuts would leave seniors, who require full-time, in-facility nursing home care, literally out in the cold as the funding that supports their ability to get the medical attention they need disappears.
I suppose these elderly can move back into the homes of their children – many of whom are the ones earning over $6,000 a year, but well below the national poverty line, who will no longer be able to care for their own health needs let another find a way to pay for the care of their sick parents.
There is some good news in this otherwise bleak story.
Come 2014, when the federal government steps in to play a larger role in financing the state Medicaid programs (they already pay for about half of the costs), it will be illegal for these people to be denied care. Accordingly, all these folks need do is see to it they do not get sick between now and 2014.
How hard can this be?
As New Jersey U.S. Senator Robert Menendez put it, “The state is effectively telling these families to wait until 2014 to get coverage again. Unfortunately, there is no
such thing as a waiver for getting cancer.” Certainly, some deal can be cut between man, woman and God resulting in that cancer scheduled to show up next year holding off until 2014 when care will be available.
And how much damage can uncontrolled diabetes really do when untreated for a three year period? So, maybe you lose a couple of toes as the diabetes ravages your body.
As Chris Christie would no doubt remind you, forfeiting a few digits for the common good of wealthy millionaires for whom Christie continues to cut taxes, is a small price to pay.
After all, those tax cuts might just result in your getting a better job in the future – assuming you’re still alive.
And if you aren’t, at least you will die in the knowledge that you will have given your life to improve Chris Christie’s chances of becoming President of these United States some day.
So, at least you’ve got that going for you.
By: Rick Ungar, The Policy Page, Forbes, June 12, 2011
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
Behind the Abortion War: Sen Jon Kyl And Other Things “Not Intended To Be Factual”
Part of the price of keeping the government operating this week is another debate over the financing of Planned Parenthood. Whoopee.
At least it’ll give us a chance to reminisce about Senator Jon Kyl, who gave that speech against federal support for Planned Parenthood last week that was noted for: A) its wild inaccuracy; and B) his staff’s explanation that the remarks were “not intended to be a factual statement.”
This is the most memorable statement to come out of politics since Newt Gingrich told the world that he was driven to commit serial adultery by excessive patriotism.
The speech in question was Kyl’s rejoinder to the argument that Planned Parenthood provides a critically important national network of women’s health services.
“You don’t have to go to Planned Parenthood to get your cholesterol or your blood pressure checked. If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does,” Kyl declared.
Planned Parenthood says that abortions, which are not paid for with federal money, constitute 3 percent of the services they provide. That’s quite a gap. But only if you’re planning on going factual.
Anyhow, that was definitely a high point. Next year, Kyl is retiring from the Senate and returning to the private sector, where he will have leisure to contemplate that this was the single moment of his public career for which he became nationally famous.
But there’s another part of Kyl’s speech that’s more significant. Take a look at the “good” nonabortion services he does mention. They don’t include contraception, which seems strange since Planned Parenthood has definitely gone public with its association with family planning.
And he’s not alone. Senator Patty Murray, one of the leaders of the defense of Planned Parenthood in the Senate, says that she doesn’t remember any of the lawmakers who wanted to strip Planned Parenthood’s funds mentioning that they supported contraception services. “They just lump everything into one big basket with the word ‘abortion,’ ” she said.
This is important because it speaks to a disconnect in the entire debate we’ve been having about women and reproduction. For eons now, people have been wondering why the two sides can’t just join hands and agree to work together to reduce the number of abortions by expanding the availability of family-planning services and contraception.
The answer is that a large part of the anti-abortion community is also anti-contraception.
“The fact is that 95 percent of the contraceptives on the market kill the baby in the womb,” said Jim Sedlak of the American Life League.
“Fertility and babies are not diseases,” said Jeanne Monahan of the Family Research Council’s Center for Human Dignity, which has been fighting against requiring insurance plans to cover contraceptives under the new health care law.
Many anti-abortion activists believe that human life and, therefore, pregnancy begin when the human egg is fertilized and that standard birth control pills cause abortions by keeping the fertilized egg from implanting in the womb. This isn’t the general theory on either count. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists defines pregnancy as beginning with the fertilized egg’s implantation. Dr. Vanessa Cullins of Planned Parenthood says that the pills inhibit the production of eggs or stop the sperm before they reach their destination. “There is absolutely no direct evidence that there is interference with implantation,” she said.
Beyond the science, there’s the fact that many social conservatives are simply opposed to giving women the ability to have sex without the possibility of procreation.
“Contraception helps reduce one’s sexual partner to just a sexual object since it renders sexual intercourse to be without any real commitments,” says Janet Smith, the author of “Contraception: Why Not.”
The reason this never comes up in the debates about reproductive rights in Washington is that it has no popular appeal. Abortion is controversial. Contraception isn’t. A new report by the Guttmacher Institute found that even women who are faithful Catholics or evangelicals are likely to rely on the pill, I.U.D.’s or sterilization to avoid pregnancy. Rachel Jones, a lead author of the report, said the researchers found “no indication whatsoever” that religious affiliation has any serious effect on contraception use.
What we have here is a wide-ranging attack on women’s right to control their reproductive lives that the women themselves would strongly object to if it was stated clearly. So the attempt to end federal financing for Planned Parenthood, which uses the money for contraceptive services but not abortion, is portrayed as an anti-abortion crusade. It makes sense, as long as you lay off the factual statements.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, April 13, 2011
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