Reproductive Health
Trading in “Barefoot and Pregnant” for Economic and Reproductive Justice
As Congress works through the economic stimulus package, representatives need to keep in mind the connection between a woman’s need to determine her reproductive life and her ability to benefit from and contribute to economic recovery and growth. (This is an exclusive commentary I wrote for the Women’s Media Center.)
Arkansas State Senator Paul Van Dalsem got a roaring laugh in 1963 at the then all-male Optimist Club when he railed at 
women lobbying to improve educational opportunities for African Americans. He said his home county’s solution would be to get an uppity woman an extra milk cow. “And if that’s not enough, we get her pregnant and keep her barefoot.”
Fast forward to January 2009. The relevance of barefoot and pregnant remains central to an inclusive and just America. Economic parity and reproductive justice are still intertwined, not only in the lives of individual women; they are indivisibly connected to our economic recovery as well.
While the 111th Congress awaits President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration for action on his proposed $775-billion stimulus plan, it’s considering two important pieces of legislation not included in the recovery package. Each is treated in isolation as “women’s issues.” Yet both are integral to the success of Obama’s economic stimulus.
The Prevention First Act, sponsored by Representative Louise Slaughter and others to expand access to family planning and reproductive health care, was introduced January 13 to virtually no fanfare and little media coverage. Two gender pay equity bills—the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act—passed the House of Representatives with a bit more hoopla a few days earlier. Here’s how they work together and with the economic recovery.
Read MoreWhat Are You Looking Forward to in 2009?
Heartland and host of NPR station KALW talk show “Your Call”, to a diverse (except for shared relief that George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency is almost over) panel of guests, with global to local expertise ranging from bugs to books, health to wealth, the arts to politics, war, peace, and everything in between. I was privileged to be among the large lineup that included Marian Wright Edelman, Founder & President of the Children’s Defense Fund, Antonia Juhasz, Author of “The Tyranny of Oil” & “The Bush Agenda”, David Kipen, Director, National Reading Initiatives, National Endowment of the Art, and David Cay Johnston, former NY Times tax reporter and author of Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill).
You can listen to the program in full.
Then tell how you’d answer the question, “What Are You Looking Forward to in 2009?” by posting your comments here.
Here’s what I’m looking forward to
Read MoreBeyond Roe: Toward Human Rights for Women
With a new Obama administration about to begin, timing couldn’t be more perfect for a fresh look at reproductive rights, health, and justice policies. I reviewed the book Our Bodies, Our Crimes, by Fordham sociology Professor Jeanne Flavin, for Democracy: a Journal of Ideas. DJ asked me to write the review as an essay about…
Read MoreIf Bush Decides Contraception is Abortion, it Must Be True, Right?
Why would anybody be surprised that the Bush administration plans to propose new federal regulations allowing health care providers to run roughshod over established scientific and medical principles, even when they are doing it with your taxpayer money?
After all, Bush’s first official act after taking office was to issue an executive order reinstating the global gag rule, which prevents international family planning programs receiving U. S. Funding from even uttering the word abortion. Why would anybody be surprised that an administration willing to breach medical ethics by preventing doctors from giving patients full information about their health care options is also willing in its waning days to go the second mile for its zealous anti-choice base and redefine medical ethics to suit their ideology? Even to redefine important forms of contraception as abortion?
The right has made sexual matters unspeakable while the left and center have made it a central tenet to keep these matters private. No wonder that even the public discussion of reproductive issues so often gets giggles and Bush’s minions get a free ride as they go about their merry way to steamroller science with their ideology.
Here’s some of the text of the proposed regulations, explained by Cristina Page’s excellent analysis on RHRealityCheck:
Read MoreReality Checking Ignorance Only Education
If the excellent website RH Reality Check isn’t on your bookmark or Google Reader list, it should be. Every day it brings me up to date on the good news, bad news, and interesting takes people are talking about concerning the big picture of reproductive health, rights, and justice. Not to mention handy information about things like how to knit a condom amulet, which would be much more useful than the abstinence only (non) sex (non) education that has been promoted by the (non) religious (non) right for the past decade or two.
Today, there’s Scott Swenson’s report on the encouraging trend by states to turn down funding for the now-discredited Federal abstinence only program, which never made any sense. I mean, ignorance has never really been bliss. That’s especially so when silence about sexual health and decision making is exacerbated by inaccurate teaching concerning the consequences of not just saying “no”, while failing to tell young people what “yes” means. Here’s Scott’s summary:
The Associated Press is just out with a major story about how in tough economic times, cash-strapped states are refusing federal tax dollars for abstinence-only programs. The story is one more in a long line of damning pieces of evidence about the failures of abstinence-only programs, the waste of tax dollars they represent, and should be a wake up call to Congress.
AP reporter Kevin Freking writes:
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A DOCTOR WHO WAS THERE DESCRIBES ABORTION PRE-ROE
Repairing the Damage, Before Roe by Waldo Fielding M.D., in today’s New York Times is a must read and must share. Fielding is 80; his generation of doctors knows the real stories about the injustices of illegal abortion. An excerpt:
With the Supreme Court becoming more conservative, many people who support women’s right to choose an abortion fear that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that gave them that right, is in danger of being swept aside. When such fears arise, we often hear about the pre-Roe “bad old days.” Yet there are few physicians today who can relate to them from personal experience. I can.
I am a retired gynecologist, in my mid-80s. My early formal training in my specialty was spent in New York City, from 1948 to 1953, in two of the city’s large municipal hospitals. There I saw and treated almost every complication of illegal abortion…
Now it’s up to the generation now present to make the coat hanger (photos of which accompnied the article) a symbol of women’s empowerment rather than victimization.
Read MorePicture Worth 1001 Words: Bush’s Legacy on Reproductive Rights
This impromptu collage just happened to be on the desk of Dr. Jim Hill, director of the Honors and Centralis Scholarship Programs at Central Michigan University when I spoke there on March 17 with the WomenGirlsLadies panel. Could there be a more perfect representation of where politics gets personal?
Read MoreRoe’s Midlife Crisis
Today, January 22, 2008, marks the 35th anniversary of Roe v Wade. If you’re reading my blog, you almost certainly know that’s the U.S. Supreme Court case that legalized abortion based on the right to privacy in matters as personal as childbearing.
We’ve kept Roe alive despite a constant tack backward by courts, state laws, and a federal abortion ban that’s been upheld by the Supremes. Meanwhile, in pop culture–movies like Juno and Knocked Up for example–abortion has become increasingly cast, if at all, as some clandestine act that nice people would never engage in.
If this trend continues, then life will imitate art and abortion will become clandestine again.
Read MoreWhen Sex and Politics Collide
My goodness, I go away for a week and miss all sorts of happenings in the world where sex and politics collide.
I returned from my high school reunion, then a week with family in Arizona without my computer or New York Times subscription, and found messages asking for comment on the Portland, ME, middle school that has added prescription contraceptives to its health clinic services. You can imagine the twitter from the self-righteous right who believe no one would ever think about sex if we pro-sex education and pro-contraception people didn’t call it to their attention. They have apparently forgotten their own adolescence (I suggest they attend their high school reunions to revive those repressed memories).
Fortunately, many parents spoke up with exactly what needed to be said: while they rightly prefer that their kids abstain from sexual activity at such a tender age, they want even more for the school to help them keep their kids safe from disease and pregnancy if and when they do become sexually active. The school board voted to keep its policy of providing the full range of contraceptives in its health care formulary.
Read MoreAppeasement is Lethal
Rosaura “Rosie” Jiménez died bleeding and doubled over in excruciating pain from infection caused by the botched illegal abortion she sought in desperation. She was 27, a scholarship student in McAllen, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border, six months shy of getting her teaching credential and struggling to make a better life for herself and her 5-year-old daughter when she was caught in a vise called the Hyde Amendment. This law denied her, as it has denied millions of low income women who depend on Medicaid for their health care, financial access to a safe abortion.
Rosie’s life was sacrificed on the altar of politically expedient appeasement.
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