Ed Felien : Komen and Cancer: Cause and Effect?

These women are protesting the Komen Foundation's defunding of Planned Parenthod -- later retracted -- at headquarters in Dallas,  February 7, 2012. But there may be other reasons to say "Shame on Komen!" Photo by Rex C. Curry / AP. Image from PBS.

Komen Foundation:
Is the 'Race for the Cure'
actually a 'Race to Obscure'?

Even more troubling than the revelation of their right-wing anti-choice agenda was the realization among many critics that principal sponsors of the Race for the Cure produce or use products that actually cause cancer.

By Ed Felien / The Rag Blog / April 18, 2013

MINNEAPOLIS -- Last year the Komen Foundation, the chief sponsor of Race for the Cure, pulled $700,000 in funding from Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screening and service grants as part of the right-wing attempts to defund and destroy Planned Parenthood. A storm of protest forced them to retract their move and apologize to Planned Parenthood, but damage to their brand may have already been done.

But, even more troubling than the revelation of their right-wing anti-choice agenda was the realization among many critics that principal sponsors of the Race for the Cure produce or use products that actually cause cancer. A race for the cure might be a way to run away from an honest disclosure of the causes of cancer. A Race for the Cure might just be a Race to Obscure.

The national Komen Foundation Partners include American Airlines, BMW, and Ford Motor Company. In an article, “Relationship Between Genetic Damage from PAH in Breast Tissue and Breast Cancer,” F. Perera and others in Carcinogenesis, July 2000, say Polcyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) are widespread environmental contaminants that are generated by gasoline and oil combustion and also are found in cigarette smoke and broiled meat. In lab experiments, PAH cause mammary cancer in animals.

Another Komen Foundation Partner is OxyChem. They manufacture bonding resins, chlorine, polyuerethane chain extenders, and solvents. The American Journal of Industrial Medicine in 1991 noted that breast cancer mortality was 1.64 times higher among pharmaceutical workers and 1.51 times higher among electrical equipment manufacturing workers who are often exposed to high levels of solvents.

Last year one of the local platinum sponsors was C. H. Robinson, a freight forwarder that used mostly diesel powered 16-wheelers to transport 11.5 million shipments. But diesel fumes cause lung cancer, the World Health Organization declared in June of 2012, and experts said they are more carcinogenic than secondhand cigarette smoke. “There is a clear association, a causal role, of diesel engine exhaust, particularly with lung cancer in humans,” according to Dr Kurt Straif.

Over 10 years ago, the Minneapolis Women’s Cancer Resource Center sponsored "The Toxic Industry Tour -- Stop Cancer Where it Starts." Their first stop was the downtown garbage burner because of its dioxin emissions. From their report:

The Hennepin County Incinerator located in downtown Minneapolis emits dioxin, which causes cancer. Dioxin is a by-product of burning chlorine-based products such as #3 polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic in children’s toys, bottles, and paper and wood products. Plastic wraps such as Saran Wrap are particularly toxic.

Dioxin is a known carcinogen as classified by the U. S. EPA. Dioxin is the most harmful substance known to humankind. The U. S. EPA Dioxin Reassessment Report issued after years of study found dioxin to be 10 times more harmful to human health than originally reported.

Municipal incinerators like HERC are the major air polluters emitting dioxin, followed by hospital incinerators. The pulp and paper making industry is another major polluter of the air and rivers and ultimately fish and humans.

The most common form of dioxin is a byproduct of the bleach used to make paper white. When that paper is burned, dioxin is released. Winona LaDuke wrote in The Circle, in August 2001, “With the help of new sophisticated tracking mechanisms, it is found that the residue of our own garbage is what is in the breast milk of Alaskan women.” Of the top 10 sources of dioxin in the breast milk of Inuit women in a remote Canadian village, two came from Minnesota.

In their pamphlet “Dioxin Phase-out -- Why we can’t wait,” the Women’s Cancer Resource Center says,

Most Americans get 280 times the EPA’s "safe" amount of dioxin daily. We’re exposed to 95% of the dioxin through meat and dairy products. That’s because airborne dioxin coming from incinerators or factories can travel 1,000 miles, settling onto plants, soil and water. Grazing animals eat the plants and store the dioxin in their fats and internal organs. As we eat full-fat milk, cheese, or fatty meats or fish, we take in dioxin.

Hennepin County Environmental Services says it does the following with:

• Poison, such as pesticides, insecticides, etc.  ("incinerate them at very high temperatures")
• Corrosive products (acids and bases), such as lime remover, oven cleaner, etc.("these wastes are incinerated")
• Flammable solids, such as adhesives, driveway sealer, roofing tars, etc. ("high temperature incineration")
• Oxidizers, such as bleach, hardeners, etc. ("high temperature incineration")

Incineration doesn’t get rid of the problem, it just puts it into the air.

The Toxic Industry Tour made two other stops.

They stopped at the corporate offices of TruGreen-Chemlawn because the company uses dicamba, a known carcinogen, the organochlorine 2,4-D (the same compound as Agent Orange sold as Trimec). The National Cancer Institute found children are 6.5 times more likely to develop leukemia if their parents used pesticides.

They stopped at Koch Refinery because they emit benzene. Benzene is the same carcinogen in cigarettes. The company has since seen fit to comply with Minnesota Pollution Control Agency regulations and stop their emissions.

Carol Johnson, the environmental program coordinator at the Women’s Cancer Resource Center, said in 2006, “In 1940 1 in 20 women had breast cancer; in 1972 it was 1 in 14; today it is 1 in 8. Are we willing to accept 1 in 4? Because that’s where we’re headed.”

Barbara Ehrenreich, speaking about the Komen Foundation and Race for the Cure in a speech at the 2002 Breast Cancer Action Town Meeting, said: “While they want a cure -- we ALL do -- they say almost nothing about the need to find the CAUSE of breast cancer, which is very likely environmental. This omission makes sense: Breast cancer would hardly be the darling of corporate charities if its complexion changed from pink to green.”

[Ed Felien is publisher and editor of Southside Pride, a South Minneapolis monthly where this article was also published. Read more articles by Ed Felien on The Rag Blog.]

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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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Harry Targ : Social Movements and the Forces of Reaction

Image from KXL.com.
Progressive social movements and
the reactionary forces that oppose them

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / February 29, 2012

“Of course, Big Labor's coercion of employees into paying union dues to subsidize its political agenda isn't new, since this practice is as old as the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). But with AFL-CIO president John Sweeney beating his chest about the Federation's political spending, the coercion of workers to fund the AFL-CIO's political operations became news.” -- National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, Inc, September 9, 1997

“A source with direct knowledge of decision-making at Komen's headquarters in Dallas said the grant-making criteria were adopted with the deliberate intention of targeting Planned Parenthood. The criteria's impact on Planned Parenthood and its status as the focus of government investigations were highlighted in a memo distributed to Komen affiliates in December.” -- Associated Press, February 7, 2012

"WHEREAS, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) was founded in 1970 with the mission of increasing voter participation, delivering services to inner-city neighborhoods, community organizing, and carrying out issue campaigns; (followed by a list of financial and other transgressions)

THEREFORE BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that ALEC calls on all states to immediately end support for ACORN and groups linked to ACORN." -- From the website of the American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC)

Academics define social movements in different ways and believe they arise for a variety of reasons. They can come from groups that already exist, a growing availability of resources, the rise of crises of one sort or another, and/or from specific issues.

Such movements may take a long time to gestate and grow, or emerge in moments of spontaneity, sometimes rising from inspirational examples. Often they have their roots in the need to react to powerful and negative initiatives by opposing political or economic groups.

The forces of reaction may have as their project immediate efforts to destroy existing rights or prerogatives embedded in public policies. In addition they may see in the policies and groups they oppose the seeds of new ideas that could lead to fundamental social changes that must be challenged.

While reactionary forces may arise to oppose specific changes in policy, their most important legacy is the long-term efforts they employ to crush organizations of people that could see the need for fundamental social change. Therefore, as in the cases of labor, women’s rights, and people’s movements, reactionary forces are fundamentally committed to long-term organizing, rolling back the very forces that have provided some services to those not part of the ruling class.

We can see examples of the rise of social movements out of reactionary programs in the recent battles over “Right-to-Work for less” legislation in the state of Indiana and the spreading campaigns to bring similar legislation to states throughout the industrial heartland. Right-to-Work campaigns have followed on efforts to diminish worker power to destroy rights of public employees to organize and to make difficult worker organizing in any venue.

The data comparing the conditions of workers in Right-to-Work states with others clearly shows that the former experience lower wages, health benefits, ashop-floor safety, and their families fewer rights to health care and retirement security.

More generally, in a thorough recent report on the role of unions in American life, the authors of a Center for American Progress Action Fund study (David Madland and Nick Bunker) point out that virtually every positive social change in the United States has received strong support from organized labor. Historically, during periods of high union density (high percentages of workers in unions), all American workers have benefited in terms of wages, benefits, and workplace rights.

In addition, organized labor has been among the strongest institutional supporters of the Democratic Party, and on occasion, some trade unionists have supported progressive third party campaigns (from the Henry Wallace campaign for president in 1948 to Green Party campaigns by candidate Ralph Nader).

Further, the existence of a vibrant labor movement is vital for workers everywhere. Those who oppose organized labor, such as the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation quoted above, do so for reasons of short term gain. Right-to-Work laws may weaken unions, lead to declining wages, and create larger profits.

But more important, destroying the labor movement and the very idea that workers have rights and those rights have the potential of being realized in strong organizations of their making seems vital to economic and political elites who are always striving to create a society dominated even more by industrial and finance capital.

Trade unions, while driven by the defense of basic interests today, imply the possibility of creating a society that privileges worker rights and democracy. From the standpoint of big capital, this remains the ultimate danger that must be stamped out.

Just as trade unions embody the possibility of real democracy for workers, women’s rights to make choices about their own bodies constitute the same kind of immediate and long-term reality. The signature target of the reactionary right is Planned Parenthood of America. Planned Parenthood provides a broad array of reproductive health services for women, particularly poor women. Only a small percentage of their resources are allocated for abortions.

In addition the mission of Planned Parenthood is to create the conditions in which each individual can manage his/her own fertility, what they refer to as “reproductive self-determination.” To achieve this goal Planned Parenthood works to provide reproductive and comprehensive health care, including advocating public policies to achieve the mission.

Reactionary forces, from the American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC) to various national anti-abortion groups, and most recently Susan Komen for the Cure (ostensibly apolitical) have mobilized not only to shrink Planned Parenthood services to women but to eliminate the organization itself.

For some, abortion is anathema for theological reasons. But for most, Planned Parenthood represents institutionally the basic rights of women to control their own bodies and by implication the provision of accessible and comprehensive health care.

The rising of the poor, women and men, black and white, employed and unemployed, the young and old, constitutes another fundamental challenge to the economic and political power of reactionary forces in America.

Organizations such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), until it was destroyed by an orchestrated campaign of lies in 2010, received public funding to support programs for low and moderate income families. It promoted voter registration in communities, and advocated for health care reform, public housing, and living wage legislation.

From the vantage point of economic and political elites, power and privilege could be challenged in cities and towns across America if community organizations such as ACORN developed programs of action and service.

These three organizations together represent labor, women, and grassroots poor people’s campaigns. They are the embodiment of popular forces which seek to end exploitation, sexism, and racism. Implicitly they stand for the construction of a different kind of society in which these pathologies do not exist.

That is why all three -- organized labor, Planned Parenthood, and ACORN -- have been and continue to be under assault. And that is why progressive campaigns need to be organized around the fundamental connections between class, gender, and race and to defend labor, women’s, and community organizations.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his new book which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Targ : Fundamentalism and the Attack on Planned Parenthood

Image from Feministe.
In the fundamentalist tradition:
The attack on Planned Parenthood

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / February 24, 2011

Often politicians using religious dogma as their rhetorical tool, support public policies that punish poor women, women of color, and progressive women in general.

Vivay Prashad, in his fascinating book, The Darker Nations, traced the rise and subsequent demise of the Third World Project from the 1950s to the 1980s. The Third World Project, mainly the mobilization of poor and marginalized peoples around the world, envisioned the construction of progressive governments that would provide for basic social and economic needs and institutionalize democratic participation in political life.

This project was derailed for several reasons. One of the most significant was the willful construction by threatened elites of fundamentalist religious institutions.

In the Middle East, the tottering dictatorships plowed financial resources into the creation of fundamentalist Islamic organizations. “Political Islam” was introduced into global political culture to divert and divide social movements for fundamental change.

Political Islam called for a return to the past and a rejection of modern secular ideas about social and political institutions. Religious dogma worked to replace visions of egalitarian societies. Ironically, in order to maintain stability, United States foreign policy supported insurgent Islamic fundamentalist movements in various places such as Afghanistan.

In Latin America, religious fundamentalism took a variety of forms. The leadership of the Catholic Church launched a frontal assault on newly created radical regimes, such as in Nicaragua, that based their political principles on a theology of “liberation.” Also, evangelical Christian organizations, with funding from worldwide economic elites, infiltrated Latin American countries experiencing revolutionary ferment, urging the poor to reject earthly solutions to their problems.

In North America, the religious right mobilized financial resources to appeal to an electorate frustrated by challenges to U.S. hegemony overseas and economic stagnation at home. In each political venue, whether dominated by Islam, Christianity, or Judaism in the case of Israel, religion was used to divide and conquer.

The sector of the population most impacted by fundamentalisms of every kind is women. Women are forced out of the political process as patriarchies reinstitute top-down control of their political, economic, and cultural lives and their bodies. Women’s institutions, particularly ones that encourage progressive public policies, are marginalized.

Often politicians using religious dogma as their rhetorical tool, support public policies that punish poor women, women of color, and progressive women in general. In sum, the resurgence of religious fundamentalism has been used to divide majorities of people along various lines that defuse their solidarity and the targets of such assaults are most often women.

A current example of this strategy of attacking women by raising the specter of religious orthodoxy occured Friday, February 18, when the House of Representatives approved an amendment to budgetary legislation that would end all funding of Planned Parenthood, a national organization that provides vital reproductive health services to low-income women.

Congressman Mike Pence (R-IN), who introduced the proposal, declared that American taxpayers should not have to pay for abortions. He failed to mention that they don’t because the government currently forbids the use of federal dollars for most abortions. Consequently, that could not have been the motivation for this legislation.

Rather, most of the 240 House members who voted to cut all allocations to Planned Parenthood wished to raise the religious issue to justify their general goal of ending public health care and guarantees for basic public health services for all. Pence failed to make note of the fact that Planned Parenthood gives contraceptive assistance to poor women, does HIV tests, screens women for cancer, and provides reproductive health care for women.

Planned Parenthood, like ACORN the community organization that was victimized last year, is under assault to achieve political goals. The attacks serve to divide the electorate in order to destroy another organization that serves the needs of the working class, in this case working class women.

Data from the Guttmacher Institute points out that in recent years almost half of women who need reproductive health care are not able to afford it. Four in 10 women of reproductive age have no health insurance.

The health care reform legislation of 2010 opens the door for expanded insurance coverage for reproductive health and family planning. Among those without health care as of 2009 were 14 million women of reproductive age. According to the new health care law, if not defied by state governments, Medicaid programs will expand family planning services to lower income families in years ahead.

As the Pence amendment suggests, existing health services for women and prospective new ones are under threat from health care opponents. They want to destroy major providers of health care for women such as Planned Parenthood. And, in the end, they want to destroy any form of public health for people.

How to do it? Transform the discourse from providing health care for the people, a broadly accepted idea, to religious dogma, in this case anti-abortion dogma.

It is time for progressives to respond. Attacks on Planned Parenthood are attacks on the working class, especially people of color, and women, and the very idea that governments are created to serve the needs of the people.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical.]

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Lest We Forget the Beauty of the Actions We Take

Sarah Palin Raises Over $1 Million for Planned Parenthood
By David Knowles / February 13, 2009

Via today's Miami Herald comes a story that might be filed under "the law of unintended political consequences." Way back in September, when Sarah Palin was campaigning alongside John McCain a curious anonymous e-mail started making the rounds. It urged women to donate to Planned Parenthood in Palin's name. Here's some video of Palin answering a reporter's question yesterday on the windfall of donations she has unwittingly helped bring to Planned Parenthood.

And here's the full text of the original e-mail:

Dear Friends:

We may have thought we wanted a woman on a national political ticket, but the joke has really been on us, hasn't it? Are you as sick in your stomach as I am at the thought of Sarah Palin as Vice President of the United States?

Since Palin gave her speech accepting the Republican nomination for the Vice Presidency, Barack Obama's campaign has raised over $10 million dollars. Some of you may already be supporting the Obama campaign financially; others of you may still be a little honked off over the primaries.

None of you, however, can be happy with Palin's selection, especially on her positions on women's issues. So, if you feel you can't support the Obama campaign financially, may I suggest the following fiendishly brilliant alternative?

Make a donation to Planned Parenthood. In Sarah Palin's name. And here's the good part: when you make a donation to PP in her name, they'll send her a card telling her that the donation has been made in her honor. Here's the link to the Planned Parenthood website:

www.plannedparenthood.org

You'll need to fill in the address to let PP know where to send the "in Sarah Palin's honor" card. I suggest you use the address for the McCain campaign headquarters, which is:

McCain for President
1235 S. Clark Street
1st Floor
Arlington, VA. 22202

Feel free to send this along to all of your women friends and urge them to do the same.

Planned Parenthood has now raised over $1 million on a campaign they had no part in orchestrating. A true fund-raising windfall, I doubt the organization is complaining much about all those thank you cards it has had to send out to the Alaska Governor.

Source / America On Line

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Planned Parenthood Is the Winner: Thanks, Sarah!

Parental discretionary donors
By Shuchi Saraswat / October 9, 2008

How Sarah Palin generated over $1 million in donations to Planned Parenthood

Polarizin’ Palin has people everywhere opening their pocketbooks to the pro-choice movement’s benefit. A viral e-mail, of unknown origin, urged people who disliked the Alaska governor’s under-no-circumstance view on abortion to donate to Planned Parenthood, in her honor. The e-mail has been circulating for more than a month and, as of October 6, has generated 38,000 donations — at least two-thirds of them from first-time givers — to the international organization, totaling more than $1 million.

The latest high-profile boost to the “In Honor of Palin” campaign comes from singer/songwriter Gretchen Peters, who was outraged when Palin was brought on stage at a rally after Thursday’s vice-presidential debate to the strains of Martina McBride’s 1994 recording of Peters’s “Independence Day,” whose lyric centers on a victim of domestic abuse. On her Web site, gretchenpeters.com, Peters pledges to donate future “Independence Day” royalties to Planned Parenthood, on behalf of, you guessed it, the GOP veep nominee, whom Peters refers to as “a candidate who would set women’s rights back decades.”

This will be a hard one for the McCain campaign to ignore. Planned Parenthood offers to acknowledge generosity by mailing a card to the person in whose name the donation is made. The cards noting the Palin donations will be mailed to “McCain for President” headquarters, as per donors’ requests, starting this week.

Thanks to Mariann Wizard / Read all of it here. / Boston Phoenix

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Telling Doctors What To Think

South Dakota's unbelievable new abortion law
By Emily Bazelon / July 2, 2008

In 2005, South Dakota passed an unprecedented abortion law. The statute purports to be about ensuring that patients give informed consent. Planned Parenthood characterizes it differently: as an intrusion on the doctor-patient relationship, forcing doctors to give inaccurate medical facts and to be the state's ideological mouthpiece. Now, following a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit, the law is about to go into effect for the first time. And the question is how it will change the experience of going to get an abortion—and whether it will open a new front in the abortion wars by encouraging other states to follow suit.

The South Dakota law requires doctors to give patients who come for an abortion a written statement telling them that "the abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being," and that they have "an existing relationship with that unborn human being" that is constitutionally protected. (What does the constitutionally protected part mean? Who knows.) In addition, doctors are ordered to describe "all known medical risks of the procedure and statistically significant risk factors," including "depression and related psychological distress" and "increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide."

The idea behind the statute is that if you force women to confront the implications of an abortion, they'll be less likely to go through with it. That's what the "whole, separate, unique, living human being" language is about. In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruled that a fetus is not a person, in the legal sense of the word, which is to say it doesn't have the same rights. So South Dakota couldn't order doctors to tell women that to have an abortion is to kill a person. But human being is a different term that's up for grabs, the drafters of the legislation decided.

This was the insight of a smart New Jersey lawyer named Harold Cassidy, who has represented women who've accused abortion providers of malpractice, and who helped draft South Dakota's statute. Cassidy also helped persuade state lawmakers that women might be scared out of having abortions if doctors were forced to enumerate the procedure's medical risks. This is where the idea of linking abortion to depression and increased risk of suicide comes in. Never mind that the weight of the medical evidence tilts heavily against the increased-suicide tie or that there's more evidence of a link between depression and unintended pregnancy—or simply giving birth—than between depression and abortion, according to most of the literature.

If you care about doctors' freedom of speech, or their responsibility to give accurate information to patients, the South Dakota statute looks pretty alarming. And yet by a vote of seven judges to four, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit managed to weave its way around these concerns last week. After sitting on the case for more than a year, the court instructed abortion clinics (actually, clinic, since there's only one in South Dakota) to put the law into effect in mid-July.

In a majority opinion by Judge Raymond Gruender, the court ruled only on the "human being" part of the statute—a challenge to the suicide provision is still pending before a lower court. (Planned Parenthood decided it could live with the depression provision because the law doesn't claim that abortion increases that risk.) Planned Parenthood argued that the state is legislating morality because to call a fetus a "whole, separate, unique, living human being" is an ideological statement, not a medical one. The Supreme Court has told the states that it's not for them to resolve when life begins—and it should certainly follow from this that they can't force any such resolution on doctors. As the 8th Circuit dissent by Judge Diana Murphy points out, the question "in some sense encompass[es] the whole philosophical debate about abortion."

But none of this swayed the majority. They bought the state's argument that the statute circumvents ideology by defining "human being," elsewhere in the statute, as "an individual living member of the species Homo sapiens, including the unborn human being during the entire embryonic and fetal ages from fertilization to full gestation." Presto, said the majority—with that definition, the "truthfulness and relevance" of the provision "generates little dispute." Yes, this logic is as tautological as it sounds. The legislature basically defined "human being" to include unborn human beings.

The idea that a fetus is whole and separate will probably be news to a lot of women who have carried one. But what's more distressing, because the majority's reasoning is so strained, is the assertion that by defining a phrase one way, a state can erase its ambiguity and the variety of perceptions people bring to it. It's one thing to say—as the case law the majority relies on here does—that a statutory definition binds judges and their interpretation of language. It's another entirely to say that when doctors tell women they are carrying a human being, that women will think, Oh, right, that means only the long, convoluted thing that the state says it does. Most patients won't think that, because they won't necessarily define "human being" the way the statute does. As Yale law professor Robert Post says in a 2007 article (PDF) in the University of Illinois Law Review, "If South Dakota were to enact a statute requiring physicians to inform abortion patients that they were destroying the 'soul' of their unborn progeny, and if it were explicitly to provide in the statute that 'soul' is defined as 'human DNA,' the evasion would be obvious." Instead, South Dakota has co-opted human being and attached its own meaning to it.

The 8th Circuit's decision to uphold the South Dakota law, even though it compels doctors to say things they don't believe, is in part the fault of Justice Anthony Kennedy. In his 2007 decision banning a method of late-term abortion, Kennedy worried a lot about women who regret having abortions. With paternalistic abandon, he wrote about their "distress" in terms of their "lack of information" about abortion. Kennedy was talking, in graphic specifics, about lack of information on the way a so-called partial-birth abortion unfolds. Whether or not he's right, these details have nothing to do with philosophical musings about whether the fetus is a human being. But that didn't stop the 8th Circuit from quoting him at length in the very different context of the South Dakota law.

The fraught claim that abortion harms women, which I've written about before, was languishing in legal Nowheresville until Kennedy unexpectedly raised it up and blessed it. Now that notion, and the small minority of women who attest to it, are a handy new tool for abortion opponents. The 8th Circuit includes six other states—Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, and North Dakota. Laws that compel doctors' speech, as this one does, would now be legal in all those places, should state legislators adopt them. And if states in other regions want to try passing such laws, they'll have a great precedent to cite to the other circuit courts.

In the meantime, Planned Parenthood's lawyers and the state's lone abortion clinic in Sioux Falls have two more weeks to figure out what its doctors can legally and ethically say to the women they treat. "Our doctors are now being asked to say things they do not believe are true," says Sarah Stoesz, the head of Planned Parenthood in South Dakota, North Dakota, and Minnesota. Whatever you think about abortion, how is that a good thing?

Source. / Slate.com

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