Restrictions On Birth Control Hurt Everyone
Restricting women’s access to birth control hurts everyone. It hurts women by limiting their ability to get an education or become self-sufficient, and risks their health when they can’t plan or space their pregnancies. It hurts children born into families not ready or able to care for them. And it hurts families by robbing them of the ability to decide whether and when to have a child.
That is why independent physicians, nurses, and other health professionals agree that providing access to contraception is good medical and economic policy. And yet – surprisingly – birth control is under attack. Anti-women groups, and some members of Congress, are pressuring the Administration to roll back some of provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The ACA guarantees access to important preventive health services without expensive co-pays. This includes contraception for women. But if anti-women forces get their way, thousands of employers will be allowed to refuse to cover contraceptives in their employer-sponsored health plans. These forces are attempting to directly interfere with the individual health needs of millions of women by limiting the type of care they can get.
A woman already knows how important family planning is to her health and well-being. She knows that the decision of whether and when to have a child is extremely personal, and she makes that decision based on many factors, including: her age, the presence of a partner, the size of her family, her physical and mental health, and her personal values.
A woman knows that if she has a chronic disease, pregnancy prevention is critical in reducing poor birth outcomes. She knows, for example, that she risks her health and the health of her fetus if she has diabetes and becomes pregnant before getting her glucose levels under control. She knows that if her blood pressure is uncontrolled during pregnancy, she could develop Pre-Eclampsia, a condition that can require immediate delivery even if the fetus is not full-term. And she knows that if she becomes pregnant while taking any number of commonly prescribed medications contra-indicated for pregnancy, fetal development may be impaired.
That’s why women overwhelmingly support birth control. Indeed, contraceptive use is nearly universal: 99 percent of women 15-44 years of age who have ever had sexual intercourse with a male have used at least one contraceptive method. The overwhelming majority of sexually active women of all religious denominations who do not want to become pregnant are using a contraceptive method.
Refusal clauses fly in the face of women’s needs, scientific evidence, and medical standards of care. Refusal clauses undermine and ignore the personalized decisions that all people make about their health.
The Administration should respect the decisions of women and their families, and hold firm on its commitment to improve the health of all Americans by basing its health care decisions on science and medical practice – not politics.
By: Emily Spitzer, National Health Law Program, The Hill Congress Blog, November 24, 2011
Women, Watch Your Back: Anti-Choicers Are Gambling With Your Life
In a medical emergency, the last thing we should be worried about is whether a hospital is going to put ideology ahead of the care we need to protect our lives and health. But if anti-choice lawmakers get their way, women and their loved ones will have to watch their backs.
Yesterday the House passed an unprecedented bill that would allow hospitals to let women die at their doorsteps. It sounds almost unbelievable — but utter disregard for the well-being of women who need abortion care has tragically reached new levels in the House.
The bill, the so-called “Protect Life Act” does anything but. Indeed, it gambles with women’s lives. It could allow hospitals to ignore the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) which requires that patients in medical emergencies receive appropriate medical treatment, including abortion care if that’s what’s medically indicated.
The bill’s proponents will first tell you that this is necessary to protect religiously affiliated hospitals, and then claim that there’s no such thing as emergency abortion care (which begs the question of why they’re so intent on overriding it). They’re wrong on both fronts.
First, the denial of appropriate medical care to a woman suffering from emergency pregnancy complications can be devastating. The following story recorded in the American Journal of Public Health is just one example:
A woman with a condition that prevented her blood from clotting was in the process of miscarrying at a Catholic-owned hospital. According to her doctor, she was dying before his eyes, her eyes filling with blood. But even though her life was in danger, and the fetus had no chance of survival, the hospital wouldn’t let the doctor treat her by terminating the pregnancy until the fetal heartbeat ceased of its own accord. She ended up in the I.C.U.
Second, even the Catholic Health Association, the leadership organization for Catholic hospitals — hardly an anti-religious or pro-choice lobby — has told Congress that they don’t “believe that there is a need for the [refusal] section to apply to EMTALA.” The very institutions on whose behalf this heinous provision has been proposed are saying “don’t do this.” But so far, the bill’s sponsors remain unmoved.
Every representative who voted for this bill should hear from you and be made to think about the woman, mid-miscarriage, bleeding and scared out of her wits, who rushes to the nearest hospital only to be told by her doctor that he’s not allowed to treat her. Think about that woman, and then tell us — what are you going to do?
By: Sarah Lipton-Lubet, Policy Counsel, ACLU Legislative Office, Published in RH Reality Check, October 14, 2011
With HPV Vaccine Rumors, Michele Bachmann Is The New Joe McCarthy
Joe McCarthy knew how to rile up the base. He knew his political hot buttons. He knew how to stoke fear and create a movement. He knew how to build a following by ratcheting up the rhetoric, the facts be damned.
Sadly, Rep. Michele Bachmann has followed in his mold: questioning the patriotism of members of Congress, fanning the flames of hatred of gays and lesbians and, now, attacking the vaccine to prevent cervical cancer.
This HPV political maneuver may be her last. This should be her “have you no sense of decency” moment, just as the Army-McCarthy hearing was in the 1950s.
Somehow, the anti-vaccine movement has gained steam in the United States. Rumors that traditional vaccines caused autism began to spread. They were disproved but not before many parents declined to vaccinate their children.
A Science Times article in the New York Times (“Remark on Vaccine Could Ripple for Years”) points to a three to four year drop in vaccination rates after such publicity. Diseases such as measles and whooping cough, supposedly under control, have seen outbreaks. According to the Times, “measles cases in the United States reached a 15-year high last spring. ”
The HPV virus is, unfortunately, far too common. More than 25 percent of women 14 to 49 have been infected, 44 percent in the 20 to 24 age range. Not only can HPV cause cervical cancer but it can cause other cancers as well.
Last year only 32 percent of teenage girls had been given the vaccine.
If Michele Bachmann’s scare tactics prove true to form, there will be a drop in the number of girls and women protected. By putting out false information, by repeating the statement of someone at the debate that the vaccine caused mental retardation, she set back the effort to save women’s lives. Hardly a pro-life position.
In fact, the vaccine can prevent unnecessary surgery for several hundred thousand women a year and even allow women to successfully carry a pregnancy to term.
Over 35 million doses have been distributed without any serious side effects. Thank goodness doctors and clinics and reputable research organizations moved quickly to take on Michele Bachmann.
But, make no mistake, she even stayed on the issue in Thursday’s debate. This woman won’t quit, no matter the facts or the implications of her actions.
She sees a political opening and she takes it, she sees a chance to rile the base and she seizes it, she sees a good sound bite and off she goes.
If, in fact, the experts are correct and this will set back vaccinations for years, Bachmann will need to do more than apologize for her McCarthy-like tactics. As he ruined innocent lives, she may responsible for doing the same. She will have to look herself in the mirror and know that her actions led to more women losing their lives.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, September 23, 2011
Toilets, Light Bulbs and Reproductive Rights: Rand Paul Is Pro-Choice For Toilets
The senator gives a stunning rant against energy efficiency — and reproductive choice
Ladies and gentlemen, this is what we are up against. In a diatribe as bizarre and petulant as anything out of Charlie Sheen’s or any recent star of “The Bachelor’s” mouth, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul went on a tear Thursday about how abortion is somehow interfering with his God-given right to incandescent light bulbs. Clearly, there wasn’t one illuminating over his head when he started down the crazy path.
On Friday, Irin Carmon at Jezebel beautifully drilled down the essence of the rant — that “Rand Paul Thinks His Toilet Is More Important Than Your Abortion Rights.” In a mind-boggling display of foot stamping during an energy hearing, Paul asked deputy assistant energy secretary for efficiency Kathleen Hogan if she was “pro-choice,” leading the visibly puzzled Hogan to reply she’s pro-choice on light bulbs. Rand then launched into full cri de coeur mode, comparing the choice of abortion to being “anti-choice on every other consumer item, including light bulbs, refrigerators, toilets. You can’t go around your house without being told what to buy. You restrict my purchases. You don’t care about my choices.” Boo hoo hoooooo!
Who knew that reproductive choice was a consumer purchase? Who knew you could run out to Best Buy and pick up one of them late-term abortion thingies with an Energy Star rating? Paul then went on to overshare that “My toilets don’t work in my house. And I blame you and people like you.” We get it — Rand Paul has a fiber diet and a low flush toilet. “I can’t find a toilet that works!” he blurted angrily again later. So if you’re a pregnant teenage rape victim, maybe you should start thinking about how Rand Paul is suffering to get a little perspective.
Much of Paul’s speech doesn’t even make sense: If he’s so ticked about some perceived limitation of his “choice,” why does his Web page insist “I believe in a Human Life Amendment and a Life at Conception Act as federal solutions to the abortion issue.” You don’t like government regulation? The government regulates abortion. Where’s your free market now, Paul?
The whole piece is a truly remarkable piece of irony-rich rantitude, sure to be included in the next volume of Now That’s What I Call False Equivalencies and White Male Solipism! Paul said he finds it “troubling, this busybody nature that you want to come into my house — my bedroom, my bathroom …” But a woman’s womb, hey, that’s up for grabs.
Yet when he kvetched to Hogan that “I find it insulting … appalling and hypocritical,” it was clear the parallels to how he feels and the sentiments of many of us on the side of reproductive freedom are stunningly similar. Just because Rand Paul has problems with his plumbing, it’s astonishing that he believes he has the right to meddle in ours. But when he declared, “You busybodies are always trying to tell us how we can live our lives better — keep it to yourselves,” I had to admit, Rand Paul, you dismissive, whiny jerk, that I could not agree more.
By: Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon, March 11, 2011
The Tea Party’s Religious Inspiration
If American politics were a TV show, it would by now have jumped the shark. Then again, American politics is a sort of TV show, considering its surreal plot lines, its cast of kooky narcissists, and an epistemology that blithely combines absolutist religious convictions with post-modern relativism: belief that the Bible is literally true comfortably co-exists with disbelief in simple, verifiable matters of fact, like the President’s place of birth or the absence of an HCR death panel mandate. It’s not surprising that, under the influence of the Tea Party, freedom is just another word for no abortion rights (and no contraception or cancer screenings for poor women).
Not long ago, the Tea (taxed enough already) Party was often presumed to stand for what its name implies — low taxes and limited government services (or at least limits on programs and services not enjoyed by its members.) But a new Pew Forum survey offers some quantitative evidence that Tea Party members tend to be religiously inspired, social conservatives; the movement “draws disproportionate support from the ranks of white evangelical Protestants … most people who agree with the religious right also support the Tea Party.”
Pew’s findings are unsurprising. You might have inferred the Tea Party’s religious motivations from the statements and policies of its established or aspiring political leaders, at state and federal levels. I’ll refrain from offering an extended litany of their wacky assertions and legislative ideas. Just keep in mind a few examples.
One of the subtler but also most hysterical expressions of legislative sectarianism is the wave of state proposals aimed at banning the non-existent threat of Sharia law. At first glance, you might mistake this trend for an effort to keep religion out of government, but a law intended to impose special disadvantages on one religion is no less sectarian (and violative of the First Amendment) than a law intended to extend special advantages to another.
So it’s not surprising to find proposed bans on Sharia law in conservative states, like South Dakota and Texas, alongside extreme anti-abortion proposals. (You can find atheists and agnostics who oppose abortion rights, but generally the anti-abortion movement is overwhelmingly religious and tends to divide along sectarian lines: according to Pew, “most religious traditions in the U.S. come down firmly on one side or the other.”) The notorious South Dakota bill that would arguably legalize the killing of abortion providers has been tabled; but a bill pending in Texas requires doctors to conduct pre-abortion sonograms for women and to impose on them a description of the fetus’s arms, legs and internal organs. Supporters of this bill insist that it is “pro-woman;” its purpose is empower them and “ensure there are no barriers preventing women from receiving the information to which they are entitled for such a life-changing decision” — barriers like a woman’s right to decline a sonogram or description of the fetus.
But the right wing’s aggressive sectarianism extends far beyond the usual battles over abortion and other culture-war casualties. Just listen to Mike Huckabee gush over Israel (biblical Zionists have been carrying on about Israel for years, but these days they have Tea Party stars on their side.) Michelle Bachmann claims that “if we reject Israel, then there is a curse that comes into play.” Note former Senator Rick Santorum’s defense of the Crusades, which, he laments, have been maligned by “the American left who hates Christendom.” Remember the Bible-based environmental policy of Illinois Congressman John Shimkus, now chair of the House Environment and Economy Sub-Committee. “The Earth will end when God declares it’s time to be over,” Shimkus famously declared in a 2009 hearing. Reading from the Bible and citing God’s promise to Noah not to destroy the earth (again), Shimkus said, “I believe that’s the infallible word of God and that’s the way it’s gonna be for his creation.”
Pay particular attention to Indiana congressman Mike Pence’s revealing declaration that the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a federal bill prohibiting workplace discrimination against gay people “wages war on freedom of religion in the workplace.” If religious beliefs legitimized workplace discrimination, as Pence advises, then Title Vll of the 1964 Civil Rights Act would be unconstitutional at least as applied to people with religious compunctions against hiring women or members of particular racial or religious groups: If you believe that God did not intend women to hold traditionally male jobs, for example, or if you simply don’t like Mormons, then, in Pence’s view of religious freedom, you have a constitutional defense to employment discrimination claims by female or Mormon job applicants. But I bet that Pence would hesitate to defend a constitutional right to discriminate categorically against women or Mormons in the workplace; and if I’m right, it means he recognizes religious biases as defenses to discrimination claims as long as they’re biases he shares. Pence’s position on ENDA demonstrates the confident, theocratic approach to governing enabled by the Tea Party’s electoral successes.
Of course, Pence and Shimkus, among others, are hardly the first theocrats to land in office. There’s nothing new about the religious right’s drive for political power, which helped sweep Ronald Reagan into the White House in 1980, when liberal stalwarts were swept out of the Senate. What does seem new is the increased dominance of the Republican Party by sectarian religious extremists and their acquisition of power during a prolonged economic crisis and even longer war — a period marked by national pessimism, fear of terror, and a bipartisan assault on civil liberty unprecedented in its scope (thanks to technology) if not its intentions. In other words, what’s worrisome is our vulnerability, susceptibility to demagoguery, and diminishing margin of error. We don’t have time for the unexamined certitudes of religious zealotry.
If only Tea Partiers and their legislative surrogates would take seriously the Constitution and the founding fathers they so frequently invoke. Then they’d respect the First Amendment’s prohibition on government-established religion, which codified the Founder’s belief in a secular, civil government that accommodates diverse religious practices and beliefs. They’d understand that the Establishment clause doesn’t merely bar the federal government from requiring us to attend a federal church; it bars Congress from turning sectarian religious beliefs into law (unless they coincide with practically universal moral codes, like prohibitions on murder.) “People place their hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution, they don’t put their hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible,” Maryland State Senator Jamie Raskin once said (to appropriate acclaim.) It’s an accurate statement of law and constitutional ideals, but, sad to say, an increasingly aspirational description of political practice.
By: Wendy Kaminer, The Atlantic, February 25, 2011
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