Mary Tuma : Family Planning Cuts Force Texas Clinic Closures

Image from Austinist.
New England Journal of Medicine:
Family planning cuts in
Texas force clinic closures

Low-income women are being hit hardest by the legislative cutbacks, the study’s authors note.

By Mary Tuma / The American Independent / October 2, 2012

Deep slashes to family planning funds made during Texas’ last legislative session have caused 53 clinics that provide family planning services to shutter their doors, according to a new article in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Additionally, 38 clinics reduced their hours, and many of the existing clinics have been forced to lay off staff and cut back basic services as a result of “the most radical” legislative effort to curb reproductive health funding in the nation, the study finds.

These findings mark the first stage in an ongoing three-year analysis -- conducted by the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin -- of the short- and long-term effects of Texas’ budget cuts to family planning services and reproductive health care.

During the 2011 legislative session, lawmakers decreased family planning dollars from $111 million to $38 million over two years and created a three-tiered funding system, which granted priority funding to “comprehensive” primary care providers (known as “federally qualified health centers“) and placed clinics that primarily provide family planning services, like Planned Parenthood, at the bottom of the funding pyramid.

In response to the legislative cuts, the Texas Department of State Health Services reduced the number of funded family planning agencies from 76 to 41, as noted in the study. DSHS spokesperson Chris Van Deusen told The American Independent in an email that there were 300 state-supported family planning clinics in 2011, and this year there are 143.

Until now, there was little information about the status of the defunded clinics, as the department does not track clinic closures. Van Deusen said the department doesn’t have information on the status of providers they are no longer funding and only keeps up with providers they contract with.

To get those numbers, the sociologists conducting this research surveyed 56 reproductive health service directors, who shared on-the-ground realities of the drastic cuts. Researchers were told that many clinics reduced their services in response to the budget cuts.

“Facing severe budget cuts, most clinics have restricted access to the most effective contraceptive methods because of their higher up-front costs,” the report says.

For instance, methods such as the intrauterine device (IUD), typically costing clinics around $250 each, are now rarely offered. Patients are being directed toward birth control pills as a result, but even then, fewer packs of pills are disbursed per visit, which can end up decreasing the likelihood that women will actually continue the drug. In turn, that can potentially lead to higher rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion, the report says.

The projection falls in line with estimates from the bipartisan Legislative Budget Board, which -- in an analysis obtained last year by The Texas Observer -- predicted that family planning budget cuts could lead to more than 20,000 additional births for women eligible for Medicaid.

“The health community is raving about how the most promising opportunity to decrease the rate of unintended pregnancy in the future is in these long-acting methods, like IUDs,” University of Texas at Austin professor Joseph Potter, who co-authored the study, told TAI. “And here we are, pretty clearly going backward, not forward.”

The extensive cuts are also forcing providers to charge women for services once covered by public funds. According to the study, those who are unable to pay the newly adopted fees for services like preventative well-woman exams are turned away, and those who can pay are opting for less effective methods of contraception, buying fewer pill packs, and forgoing sexually transmitted infection testing.

In addition, out of those surveyed, 35 organizations can no longer provide discounted contraceptives and are no longer exempt from parental consent laws for teens seeking access to birth control. As a result, teens must travel farther to get contraceptives. Texas has one of the highest rates of teen births in the nation, ranking fourth overall in 2010, with 52.2 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As funding is slashed, surviving clinics are increasingly dependent on the Medicaid-based Women’s Health Program for service reimbursements, Potter said, but 90 percent of the federal-state program is slated to be cut due to objections raised by conservative lawmakers over Planned Parenthood’s inclusion in the funding stream, signifying an even greater burden on the already fragile network.

To offset the shortage of providers in the ragged landscape, researchers found, local hospitals in some communities are offering their space and services to help care for women, but they too are strained.

“We are witnessing the dismantling of a safety net that took decades to build and could not easily be recreated even if funding were restored soon,” the report says.

Potter cast serious doubt on the ability of the network to absorb displaced WHP patients.

“It’s very hard to imagine how a whole new infrastructure is somehow going to take over that volume of services,” he said. “Jeopardizing the interdependence between the clinics and the program may well cause the leaky ship to sink.”

Low-income women are being hit hardest by the legislative cutbacks, the study’s authors note, writing: “Disadvantaged women must choose between obtaining contraception and meeting other immediate economic needs. And, as one of our interviewees pointed out, providers are put in the position of ‘trying to decide, out of the most vulnerable, who is the most, most vulnerable.’”

Potter testified at a recent Department of State Health Services public hearing on the exclusion of Planned Parenthood from the Women’s Health Program. He described family planning clinics as being on the “edge of survival.” The clinics’ legs have been severely weakened, he said at the time, and the network is stressed overall, leading to deeper reductions in contraception access.

Potter told TAI that his next step is conducting focus groups across eight regions in the state to evaluate how women are reacting to the changes in reproductive health care. Ideally, the data collected thus far will aid in the decision-making process during the upcoming 2013 legislative session, but the full impact won’t be felt until the following session, he said.

While the study says that “[t]ime will reveal the full effects of these budget cuts on the rates of unintended pregnancies and induced abortions and on state and federal health care costs,” current damage is apparent.

“Already, the legislation has created circumstances that force clinics and women in Texas to make sacrifices that jeopardize reproductive health and well-being,” the study says.

The study’s authors suggest the landscape in the Texas may serves as a cautionary tale to other states seeking to curb family planning funds.

“Texas’s experience may be a harbinger of the broader impact of eliminating public funding for family planning,” the report says.

The report concludes that members of Congress and state lawmakers “should consider the results of such research and take a hard look at the implications for women, families, and communities of restricting access to contraception.”

[Mary Tuma is a reporter for The American Independent. She has worked for The Houston Chronicle and Community Impact Newspaper, and interned at The Texas Observer. Tuma graduated from The University of Texas’ School of Journalism where she served as an associate editor at The Daily Texan and was president of the Society of Professional Journalists. Read more articles by Mary Tuma on The Rag Blog.]

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Marilyn Katz : Our Bodies, Their Politics

Image from The Raw Story.
Our bodies, their politics

The last few months have made abundantly clear what women must do: rid America’s capitols of misogynists.

By Marilyn Katz / The Rag Blog / April 24, 2012

In the first half of 2011, close to 1,000 measures related to reproductive health and rights were introduced into state legislatures.

The first “women’s group” that I was involved in was not born out of feminist theory or organized by intellectual women on campus. Rather it was in 1966 in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, and its members were poor African-American moms on welfare and thirtysomething (looking 50) Appalachian women, newly arrived from Kentucky and West Virginia.

Not much older than me, many of the women in the group provided physical testament to the possible effects of multiple childbirths while young and poor. The work of the group ranged from food co-ops to welfare reform, from rent strikes to learning to read.

The impetus for the group, however, was a clear-eyed view that welfare was a “women’s issue,” and the need -- among the Appalachian women in particular -- for protection and camaraderie in the face of their husbands’ explosive anger upon learning that “their” women were seeking information about birth control from government VISTA volunteers.

Back then the outraged cry from men was not about “religious freedom,” but about male prerogative and the duties of women.

I have been reminded of those meetings in recent months by the series of controversies surrounding the contraception mandate in the federal healthcare reform law -- from the exclusion of Sandra Fluke’s testimony at congressional hearings (GOP Rep. Joe Walsh said the birth control debate is “not about women”) to Rush Limbaugh’s virulent rant (and limp apology), to the barely audible denouncements of his statement by the Republican presidential candidates.

Contrary to the posturing of politicians and bishops alike, religious freedom is not the core issue. Consider, for example, the Catholic hospitals, schools and universities that have, for many years and with little fuss, provided insurance that covers birth control in the states that require them to do so.

The reality is, as it was 40 years ago in Uptown, that the debate about birth control is firstly and fundamentally about women -- their rights and their lives. From Biblical times on, women -- who bear the brunt as well as the joy of childbearing -- have struggled to curtail unwanted pregnancies, often resorting to extreme measures in the face of possible death or the poverty that another child might bring.

More than 500,000 women die around the world each year from pregnancy-related causes, according to the World Health Organization. A majority of those deaths occur in developing countries, but only a century ago American women faced similar fates.

It was not until the 20th century that pregnancy-related death rates in the United States declined -- a result of modern medicine, better sanitation and the advent of modern female contraception. According to a 2011 study, more than 99 percent of “sexually experienced” American women, including 98 percent of such Catholic women, use or have used non-natural (i.e., not abstinence or the “rhythm method”) birth control.

In the past year, as elected Tea Partiers have aligned themselves with religious fundamentalists, Republicans in the House have introduced eight anti-choice bills, each of which received the support of the same 225 GOP representatives. In the first half of 2011, close to 1,000 measures related to reproductive health and rights -- from those curtailing contraception to those mandating transvaginal ultrasounds -- were introduced into state legislatures.

Of the 28 states controlled by Republicans, 26 have passed laws that limit women’s reproductive choices. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 55 percent of American women of reproductive age lived in states characterized as “hostile” to abortion in 2011 -- up from 31 percent in 2000.

The danger is to women, but among us also lies the remedy. Perhaps we owe a debt of gratitude to the Limbaughs of the world -- they have brought to public view and hopefully to public attention the attack on women’s reproductive health and rights that has been steadily building over the past years.

And while it would be uplifting to get Limbaugh off the air, the real task is ridding our nation’s legislative bodies of misogynists. Women fought for and won a great deal in the last century. It’s time to say on the Web, in the streets, and of most importance and effect, in the ballot box: We’re not going back.

[An anti-war and civil rights organizer during the Vietnam War, Marilyn Katz helped organize security during the August 1968 protests at the Democratic National Convention. Katz has founded and led groups like the Chicago Women’s Union, Reproductive Rights National Network, and Chicago Women Organized for Reproductive Choice in the 1960s and 1970s, and Chicagoans Against War in Iraq in 2002. The founder and president of Chicago-based MK Communications, Katz can be contacted at mkatz@mkcpr.com. This article was also published at In These Times. Read more articles by Marilyn Katz on The Rag Blog.]

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Lamar W. Hankins : A Week of Invective over Birth Control and Women's Health

New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The group was infuriated by Obama's decision. Photo by Seth Wenig / AP.
A week of invective:
The Catholic bishops, women’s health,
and American politics

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / February 14, 2012

"If a survey found that 98 percent of people had lied, cheated on their taxes, or had sex outside of marriage, would the government claim it can force everyone to do so?" -- U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops

An issue that could benefit from some cool reflection has instead gone toxic virtually overnight. It is the proposed rule about which employers must cover contraceptive health services under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

A trifecta of circumstances has melded into a cesspool of invective toward President Obama: a long-running Republican race for a presidential nomination, the false claims by evangelicals that the government is at war against religion, and the hatred of Obama by a large group of people from right-wing loonies and racists to ordinary Republican politicians.

I haven’t seen so much hate directed at a politician since the anti-communism of Sen. Joe McCarthy.

Out of the past week of invective, I’ve tried to cull a few points that I hope people of all persuasions are willing to consider, though I’m not holding my breath. Health insurance is an employee benefit, which is one thing that opponents have against the Affordable Care Act (ACA). These opponents don’t want all Americans to have access to affordable health insurance.

Unfortunately, they got their way in 2009 when the ACA was passed. Not everyone will have affordable coverage, but for those who are employees, the Act seeks to assure that they all get the same benefit opportunities. Such equality offends many people.

What has been much-debated this past week is the requirement that all employers -- except for religious institutions like churches and synagogues, whose primary business is promoting their religious beliefs -- should afford all of their employees the same level of health insurance coverage, including access to birth control. For all other employers, including hospitals, universities, and other institutions engaged in mostly non-religious activities, the rules about health insurance apply.

This rule has infuriated the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which opposes the use of contraception based on Catholic religious doctrine. Conservatives and evangelicals have piled on for their own political reasons. The bishops want to expand the exemption from the rules so that the exemptions include religiously-affiliated hospitals, universities, and other institutions engaged in mostly non-religious activities offered without regard to a person’s religion or lack thereof.

If the bishops get their way, millions of women who work at such institutions could have inferior health insurance -- insurance that will not cover birth control, which has been recognized by the Institute of Medicine as preventative healthcare.

Should a Baptist female English teacher who works for a university owned by Christian Scientists be offered health insurance that covers only services provided by Christian Science Practitioners, who eschew modern medicine in favor of prayer? Should a Jewish female nurse’s aide who works for a Jehovah’s Witnesses hospital be denied health insurance that covers blood transfusions because that denomination opposes them?

If the law is attempting to bring equality and fairness to the health insurance market, women who perform jobs which do not involve teaching religious doctrine or promoting it should not be disadvantaged by those religious doctrines unless they choose to be.

The bishops, reacting to the fact that at least 98% of Catholic women have used contraception sometime during their lifetimes, responded with an illogical statement: "If a survey found that 98 percent of people had lied, cheated on their taxes, or had sex outside of marriage, would the government claim it can force everyone to do so?"

The point is not that the government is forcing employees to violate the law or their personal moral beliefs. Catholic hospitals, universities, and charities are not people. They are institutions doing the same kind of work done by secular institutions. The law merely attempts to assure that all of their women employees are offered the same health insurance coverage offered to women working in similar jobs elsewhere.

And church funds needn’t be used to pay for the health insurance of employees. The earnings of the institutions can pay those costs. The earnings come from the people who use the services, as well as the government.

All of us, including Catholic bishops, pay taxes that are spent for a host of things we disapprove of. As much as I might dislike paying for war, for instance, if taxpayers could choose what their taxes can be used for based on conscience, the entire structure of government would fail.

The Bishops seem to believe that it is fine to engage in activities supported in large part by private individuals and the government without treating all of their female employees, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, with the equality guaranteed by law. The Bishops want to force their religious beliefs on non-Catholics who work for Catholic institutions. Understanding that 98% of Catholic women don’t follow that religious doctrine makes their position hypocritical at best.

The Bishops are not compelled to provide birth control at their hospitals. They are required by this ACA rule only to provide full health insurance benefits to female hospital employees, who are then free to choose which of those benefits to use.

It seems that since the bishops have lost their argument about birth control with Catholic women, they want the opportunity to force their views on non-Catholic women, or to punish them by forcing them to pay extra for contraception.

If this were a completely new rule, the bishops’ response might be more understandable, but the basic rule has been in place for 12 years, based on an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruling that employers who provide prescription drugs must provide birth control. The decision was later upheld by the courts.

The bishops had all eight years of the Bush administration to raise objection to the rule, but they did not do so. Instead, they have been planning this attack on the Obama administration for at least the past seven months.

This situation reminds me of the position taken by some pharmacists who refused to fill prescriptions for the morning after pill because it violated their consciences. Such a position is as foolish as mine would be if I decided that I wouldn’t represent thieves, murderers, and rapists because their alleged behavior offends my moral sensibilities.

The job of a pharmacist is to dispense prescriptions. The job of a criminal defense attorney is to represent those accused of crime. If such professionals don’t want to do their jobs, they need to find other kinds of work.

There are two minor differences in this latest rule that extend the old rule slightly. In the current proposed rule, contraceptives must be provided without a co-payment. This doesn’t mean that insured women pay nothing for their coverage. Like virtually everyone who has health insurance, they pay premiums each month, to supplement the amounts paid by their employer. And the new rule does not exempt small employers as the old rule did. Employers with fewer than 15 employees will be covered under the new rule.

The Bishops should forthrightly acknowledge that, in pursuing Catholic doctrine, they have never been concerned about women’s health, especially when it comes to life-threatening pregnancies and pregnancy caused by rape. They have always put doctrine above conscience.

If the Bishops are so concerned about their own consciences, perhaps they should be more sensitive to the consciences of others, and make it possible for such women to make their own decisions, exercising their own free will, when faced with such circumstances.

They might also be sensitive to women’s efforts to lift their families out of poverty by limiting the number of children they bring into the world. But for the bishops, such sensitivities would intrude too far into their own patriarchal mindset and behavior.

Early in this controversy, I thought that perhaps the bishops could rid themselves of this dilemma by contracting out to a third party all decisions about employee health benefits at Catholic-run universities, hospitals, and charities, thus not participating in health insurance decisions.

Now, the Obama administration has decided to direct insurance companies to provide, without exception, the coverage needed to afford women who do non-religious work at Catholic-run institutions full health care services, insulating the bishops from having to make a decision on the matter.

But even this has not mollified the bishops, who have rejected this new approach. The bishops’ position leads me to wonder whether they will be satisfied only when all women are once again denied birth control, as was the case 50 years ago in some states.

For the sake of honesty and integrity, the time has come for the bishops to admit their contempt for women’s self-determination and the exercise of their free will in matters that concern Catholic doctrine. Such an admission may clear the air enough so that the bishops’ consciences can focus on the other things the government does that violate Catholic doctrine -- like war, torture, and capital punishment.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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IDEAS / Bill Meacham : Birth Control and the 'Goodness' Paradigm

Image from Dippity.
'Goodness' Vs. 'Rightness':
The ethics of birth control

There is a systematic way to find out what the benefits and harms are: observe reality carefully.

By Bill Meacham / The Rag Blog / January 31, 2012

A current New York Times article describes controversy over birth control pills at Roman Catholic colleges.(1) The difference between two ways of thinking about ethics, the Goodness paradigm and the Rightness paradigm, could not be illustrated more starkly.

The U.S. Health Care Reform legislation mandates that employer-funded insurance plans cover birth control for employees, including students at Catholic colleges, according to a recent ruling from the Obama administration. Catholic institutions are howling in protest, claiming that to do so would force them to violate their religious beliefs.

The ruling is based on recommendations of the Institute of Medicine, an independent group of doctors and researchers that concluded that birth control is not just a convenience but is medically necessary to ensure women’s health and well-being.

Providing birth control would likely lower both pregnancy and abortion rates. And women with unintended pregnancies are more likely to be depressed and to smoke, drink, and delay or skip prenatal care, potentially harming fetuses and putting babies at increased risk of being born prematurely and having low birth weight.(2)

In other words, providing birth control provides unmistakable benefits to women and avoids harm to infants. This way of thinking is the hallmark of the Goodness paradigm, evaluating choices on the basis of the benefits and harms expected from the various alternatives.

If you allow birth control, you increase the chances for women’s health and reduce the chances for the depressing consequences of unintended pregnancy. If you forbid it, you do the opposite. In the former case, more good ensues; in the latter, more harm.

Opposed to this is the Rightness paradigm, evaluating choices on the basis of moral rules regardless of consequences. The Catholic Church considers it morally wrong to prevent conception by any artificial means, including condoms, IUDs, birth control pills, and sterilization. So Catholic college administrators don’t want to prescribe birth control pills even though according to Catholic doctrine itself abortion is a graver sin than contraception, and banning contraceptives would most likely increase abortions.

So how should we adjudicate this? I am thoroughly in the Goodness camp here. There is no systematic way to find out what the moral rules are. In the case of the Catholic church, all it can do is appeal to authority. But there is a systematic way to find out what the benefits and harms are: observe reality carefully. So I find the Goodness paradigm far preferable. for this and several other reasons outlined in my paper on the subject, “The Good and the Right.”(3)

The Catholic Church is being obstructionist. The law already exempts churches and other religious institutions from having to provide contraceptive coverage for their employees.(4) The issue here is Catholic schools. You can make the case that if someone joins the church they are agreeing that the church’s moral rules apply to them. But you can’t make the same case for someone who merely attends a church college.

A lot of philosophical controversy is rightly regarded as abstruse, theoretical, and of little practical import. But not this one. Where you come down on the Goodness vs. Rightness question has profound consequences not only for your own actions but for societal policies that impact millions of people.

[Bill Meacham is an independent scholar in philosophy. A former staffer at Austin's 60s underground paper, The Rag, Bill received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. Meacham spent many years working as a computer programmer, systems analyst, and project manager. He posts at Philosophy for Real Life, where this article also appears. Read more articles by Bill Meacham on The Rag Blog.]


References:

(1) Grady, Denise, “Ruling on Contraception Draws Battle Lines at Catholic Colleges.” New York Times, 29 January 2012. On-line publication, URL = http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/health/policy/law-fuels-contraception-controversy-on-catholic-campuses.html.

(2) “Excerpts From a Report on Women’s Health.” New York Times, 29 January 2012. On-line publication, URL = http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/health/policy/excerpts-from-a-report-on-womens-health.html.

(3) Meacham, Bill. “The Good and the Right.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.bmeacham.com/whatswhat/GoodAndRight.html.

(4) “A New Battle Over Contraception.” New York Times, 5 November 2011. On-line publication, URL = http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/opinion/sunday/a-new-battle-over-contraception.html as of 29 January 2012.

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Larry Ray : Cellular Civil Rights in Mississippi?

Graphic by Larry Ray / The Rag Blog.
Civil rights for diploid cells?
Legal 'personhood' in Mississippi

The draconian redefinition of abortion and commonly used methods of contraception as murder would do away with a woman’s right to make her own decisions about childbearing.

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / November 1, 2011

GULFPORT, Mississippi -- On Tuesday, November 8th, Mississippi voters will either support or defeat a proposition that would give a fertilized human egg the same legal rights and protections under the State’s Constitution that apply to living, breathing people.

Few voters in Mississippi would bother to turn out to support particulars of defining the legal status of the fusion of two haploid gametes. Most folks might think that was a pair of some new deer species and the vote would regulate its hunting season.

But clarification of those biological terms quickly spread in evangelical conservative code for anti-abortion, suddenly making zygotes, diploid cells, and gametes candidates for legal "personhood" among the fervent and zealous.

The Mississippi proposition’s draconian redefinition of abortion and commonly used methods of contraception as murder would do away with a woman’s right to make her own decisions about childbearing. The so-called "personhood" measure seeks to do away with those rights guaranteed under the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

Such a state constitutional change would not only ban all abortion care but could also outlaw many common forms of birth control, limit medical treatment options for pregnant women, and ban reproductive technologies such as in-vitro fertilization.

This was tried in Colorado twice, in 2008 and 2010, and voters overwhelmingly defeated the ballot measures each time.

But that that was Colorado and this is Mississippi, the state that tops the Gallup poll list of America's most frequent churchgoers with 63% of the population attending church weekly or almost every week. Vermont, incidentally, has the least churchgoers with only 23% attending regularly, but then they are a bunch of Yankees.

Mississippi's strong religious voice has long determined what folks can and can't do in the state. Alcohol was made illegal in 1907, and Mississippi was the last state to repeal Prohibition in 1966. When I moved here to the Gulf Coast in 1980, sale of alcohol was from state-controlled “package stores,” whose signs had to be flat against the building and in letters of a specified size. No neon and no hanging signs like other stores.

I stopped in one my first week here for a bottle of sour mash bourbon and after ringing up the purchase, the nice lady leaned over the counter and asked, sweetly and helpfully, if I “wanted a Baptist Bag.” I must have had a totally puzzled look so she pulled a regular large brown grocery bag from under the counter and mentioned that “lots of customers prefer to carry out their bottles in this kind of bag.” At the time, I found this all rather provincially colorful.

Thirty-one years later you still cannot buy hard liquor on a Sunday even in the "wet" counties, and Mississippi’s provincialism has a much darker hue today that is potentially much more dangerous. Many evangelical and fundamentalist believers now want to impose their narrow, extreme beliefs down to the human cellular level upon all who live in the State of Mississippi.

And with 63% of the population being steady church goers -- and voters -- both the Republican and Democratic candidates for governor are making it clear that legal human rights for a single fertilized human egg is just peachy with them.

Abortion foes piously proclaiming their belief in the sanctity of life seem to look at that sanctity differently regarding Mississippi’s death penalty. Their opposition to family planning, birth control, and contraception is loud and clear, but there seem to be no voices raised against the biblical evils of fornication. The libidinous Viagra and Cialis commercials still dominate the nightly news.

November the 8th will show if Mississippi’s reckless religious fundamentalists would, as The New York Times noted, “protect zygotes at the expense of all women while creating a legal quagmire -- at least until the courts rule it unconstitutional, as they should.”

I have to hope that Mississippi will ultimately not vote to support this attempt by a vocal segment of organized religion to limit the personal and civil rights of the women who live here.

But then again, as far as civil rights are concerned, from the cellular level on up, we have to realize that it was just one year ago that a federal judge ordered the Walthall County School District in Mississippi to halt policies that had allowed some of its district’s schools and classes to become segregated... again. Segregation was outlawed in 1970.

[Retired journalist Larry Ray is a Texas native and former Austin television news anchor who now lives in Gulfport, Mississippi. He also posts at The iHandbill. Read more articles by Larry Ray on The Rag Blog.]

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Preventing Abortion : Contraception More Successful than Laws

Sign in Katmandu, Nepal: "Safe Abortion Service avbailable. From 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday to Friday. Charge 1,000 rupees." The hospital is run by the government. Photo by Binod Joshi / AP.
Guttmacher survey of 197 countries:
Making abortion illegal doesn't mean fewer abortions

The way to lower (and someday hopefully eliminate) abortion is to teach real sex education and encourage the use of contraceptives.

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / October 14, 2009

Fundamentalists live in a very simple world. They believe they can prevent teens from having sex by refusing to provide them with real sex education. They also believe they can prevent abortions by simply banning legal abortions.

It has recently been shown that teaching "abstinence only" does not prevent teen sex, but it does increase the number of teen pregnancies by preventing the use of contraceptive methods. Now there is a new study that shows banning abortions does not decrease the number of abortions.

The Guttmacher Institute did a survey of 197 countries regarding abortion. They found "roughly equal rates" of women seeking abortions in both countries with legal abortion and countries that had banned abortions. In other words, banning abortion not only didn't eliminate abortions, it didn't even lower the number of abortions.

In countries without legal abortion, women just go to a country where it is legal (as Irish women go to Europe) or they seek illegal (and dangerous) abortions (as women in Africa and South America do). In fact, illegal abortions kill at least 70,000 women each year -- leaving nearly a quarter of a million children without mothers. Another 5 million women develop serious complications.

Oddly enough, there is a proven way to lower the rate of abortions -- contraception. The Guttmacher Institute found that there were 45.5 million abortions in 1995. By 2003, that number had dropped to 41.6 million in spite of an increase in population. The change is due to a wider use of contraceptive methods.

Just look at what contraception has done in the Netherlands -- where abortion is legal and contraceptive use is encouraged and taught. Worldwide, the abortion rate is about 29 per 1000 people, but in the Netherlands it is only 10 per 1000 people. Young people there commonly use two forms of contraception, and that has radically lowered the abortion rate.

The facts are clear. If you hate abortion and want to eliminate it, banning abortion will not do it. That will only kill and seriously injure many women. The way to lower (and someday hopefully eliminate) abortion is to teach real sex education and encourage the use of contraceptives.

No one likes abortion. It just can't be eliminated by simplistic thinking or laws.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

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The Righteous Mob : Like Talking to Children

Photo from registeredmedia.com.
KKK to Tea Parties:
Communicating with the ignorant and angry

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / September 15, 2009

If angry outbursts and placard waving protesters against health care reform seem heated today, the idea of planned parenthood and birth control in the early 1900's caused a raging bonfire.

Margaret Sanger, an activist way ahead of her time, is credited with starting the idea of planned parenthood. Over the years she was arrested more than eight times for expressing her ideas back when speaking out in public in favor of birth control was illegal. She did time in jail in 1916 nine days after opening America's first birth control and family planning clinic in Brooklyn.

But Margaret Sanger's message also supported "negative eugenics" saying, "It is a vicious cycle; ignorance breeds poverty and poverty breeds ignorance. There is only one cure for both, and that is to stop breeding these things."

So, like a modern day Sibyl, her pronouncements could be interpreted by opposing sides, each opting either to hear the positive germ of her message, or to embrace the radical edges of some of her statements as pillars of support for their views... including white supremacy.

In the mid 1920's she received more than a million letters requesting information on birth control. And she spoke from coast to coast to diverse groups including "cotton workers, churchmen, liberals, socialists, scientists, civic clubs, and fashionable, philanthropically minded women."

In 1926, she was invited to speak to the ladies axillary of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey. After being driven in a curtain shuttered car for almost an hour, way out into a country field, she gave a lecture to the robed and hooded ladies, as well as a smattering of male Klansmen. In her memoirs she described it as "one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing," noting that she was forced to use only "the most elementary terms, as though I were trying to make children understand." The KKK ladies and their male attendees were reportedly delighted with the idea of promoting birth control for 'the colored folks.'

Though she remains to this day a controversial figure it is interesting to note that as the nation became more enlightened, birth control and family planning became accepted, championed by the Rockefeller, Jr.'s Bureau of Social Hygiene. In spite of allegations of racism, she earned the respect and support of of civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and the American Humanist Association named her Humanist of the Year in 1957.

Today President Barack Obama has undertaken the tough task of renewing a demand for universal health insurance legislation for all Americans. For seventy years political manipulation, crass profit incentives of big business and a whipped up mistrust of "big government" as a convenient devil has blocked health care reform legislation.

Medicare health insurance for our senior citizens finally passed in 1965 after years of being protested and assailed as "socialist" and a "government takeover" by conservative Republicans adverse to any change. A high percentage of today's protesters have Medicare cards in their pockets.

The busloads of well fed white folks who angrily waved placards in the nation's capitol last week probably didn't pay for their bus tickets and their mental carry on baggage was not packed with reasoned ideology based upon clear fact. Rather, it was stuffed with anger, startling ignorance of the facts and, worse, their willingness to believe such political purée.

It is daily becoming more and more clear that much, but not all, of what we are seeing is driven by simmering racism, the idea that the most powerful man in the world, the President of the USA is not a white man. That a black skinned (his white half doesn't seem to count), calm, educated and persuasive man is deciding what will happen to THEM!

The busloads arriving in Washington D.C. and in the town hall meetings, were all for the most part provided a free ride and a sense of indignant importance, banding together to hate, vent frustration and spout utter nonsense. With Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and the endless babble of knee-jerk talking heads on cable TV, the ignorant are rewarded for their ignorance. They are delighted to hear what they want to hear fed to them daily.

Also, today's so-called "Tea Parties" which have no relationship whatsoever to the reasons for the Boston Tea Party are a sad testament in themselves to the ignorance of most of the shouting sign carriers of what the historic "Tea Party" actually was. Similarly, a large number of those screaming "Socialist" would, I will wager, be unable to define what a socialist is. But by God, they are mad!

Today's disgruntled race baiting demonstrators aren't wearing robes or hoods. Most also are not armed with facts or reasoned opposition. They are armed with anger, wild rumors and a sense of empowerment that harks back some 40 some odd years ago when this same mentality produced sneers and shouts of "Boy!" to make a black move off the sidewalk, or to those who carried "no nigger" placards outside public schools as police dogs strained at their leashes as small black children walked past. Fine law-abiding, church going folks then ... and now.

This minority of our citizenry has long been hijacked for cynical purposes. They present a golden opportunity for the struggling, discredited conservative Republican base to recruit and inflame the bigoted and ignorant with poisoned misinformation.

Though this righteous mob is making the most noise and is getting the media coverage that would be bestowed on a fully grown two-headed mule, our elected representatives must hear the louder voice of reason from the overwhelmingly reasonable majority. Maybe it would help if we speak to them "in the most elementary terms, as though we were trying to make children understand."

[Retired journalist Larry Ray is a Texas native and former Austin television news anchor. He also posts at The iHandbill.]

The Rag Blog

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Rabbi Arthur Waskow : Murder is Murder and Abortion is Not

A sign commemorating George Tiller at a candlelight vigil in Wichita, Kansas, where Dr Tiller was murdered on Sunday. Photo by Joe Stumpe / AFP/Getty.

I recognize that some other religious traditions do claim it is murder, but I both disagree with their theology and think they have no right to impose it on mine, by state power or by murder.

By Rabbi Arthur Waskow / The Rag Blog / June 1, 2009

So another physician has been murdered for making it possible for women to actually use their constitutional right to choose an abortion.

All honor to Dr. Tiller, who joins the list of martyrs for ethical decency and human rights, killed for healing with compassion. In his case, a religious martyr in the fullest classical sense, killed in his own church as he arrived to worship, killed for acting in accord with his religious commitments and his moral and ethical choices.

And all dishonor to those vicious attackers like Bill O'Reilly who have egged on the kind of violence that finally murdered Dr. Tiller. And who have blasphemously invoked the name of God to justify these incitements to murder.

There are two real-life cases of abortion that have shaped my own judgment on the practice, in addition to the Torah's only comment on abortion –- which makes utterly clear that it it is not murder. (The Torah says that if someone causes an abortion but does no other harm to the mother, the agent owes a money recompense to the father for the loss of his potential offspring. And that's all.)

I recognize that some other religious traditions do claim it is murder, but I both disagree with their theology and think they have no right to impose it on mine, by state power or by murder.

One of these real-life cases of abortion that have shaped my views is that my father's mother had already birthed five young boys when she became pregnant again in 1914. She hoped to be able to concentrate her energy on raising those five instead of birthing more. Because abortions were illegal, she had a "back-alley" abortion –- and it killed her. So she was unable to raise any of them. Her early death cast a shadow over my father's life till his own dying day.

The second is that one of my friends and teachers, a great and eminent rabbi, was the child of a mother who fled Vienna after Hitler annexed Austria. His mother was pregnant again when the family needed to leave, and they knew that the underground "railroad" to freedom was bound to be too arduous for a pregnant woman. The choices were: staying in Austria, to die together; leaving her behind, to die alone; or aborting the fetus, so that all of the family had a chance to live. She had an abortion. Today my rabbi friend says they thought then and ever since that she had given birth to the whole family.

I wish the President, when he spoke at Notre Dame, had said explicitly what these stories teach me: that women are moral beings, possessed of moral agency and responsibility in this unique situation where their own bodies are intertwined with another's; and that the lives of women would be endangered once again if abortion were criminalized again.

He chose instead to say only that the choices are difficult and that unwanted pregnancies should be minimized.

On this point, I wish he had been specific -- that the US government should subsidize comprehensive sex education and the provision of free condoms, The Pill, and other contraceptives in all American high schools, and should require health insurance companies to cover the cost of birth control and abortion.

And I wish that religious communities would begin providing comprehensive sex education as their children reach adolescence (and probably for adults as well). In the Jewish community, for example, this should be part of the preparation for bar/bat mitzvah.

This would in fact be rooted in the ancient rabbinic tradition which defined the moment when a boy became an adult bound by the sacred commitments of mitzvot as the day when he had two pubic hairs. Then the rabbis said that instead of checking individuals, they would settle on 13 years and one day. But the point about puberty and sexual maturity was made. (Indeed, it is probably precisely because of the imperative need for ethical sexual behavior beginning with the onset of sexual maturity that the rabbis thought Jews should at that point be bound by the mitzvot.)

Unfortunately, in modern Jewish life this teaching is prudishly ignored. What rabbi have you heard ever address the new Jewish adult and the adult community about sexual ethics, as part of the public ceremony of welcoming him/ her as a bar/bat mitzvah? Time to renew this ancient teaching!

Shalom, Arthur

The Rag Blog

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