7 Ways You’re Hurting Your Daughter’s Future, Forbes.com
New Mass. Law Backs Transgender Residents, Boston Globe
Mississippi Abortion Law Temporarily Blocked by Federal Judge, Associated Press
When Keeping Your Child is No Longer Your Choice, FeministsForChoice
“Conscience Clause” Gone AMOK: Rape Victim Denied Morning After Pill by Prison Guard, RH Reality Check
Women, This Election is About You, Huffington Post
If you’re anything like me, you might be wondering if somehow you’ve been transported back in time, to when family planning was inaccessible and abortion was illegal. Incredulously, it is 2011 – not 1950 – and here we are, fighting for reproductive rights as if we never even had them. If Congress has its way, that’s exactly what 2012 will bring: a complete reversal of these rights. From the proposed 2012 budget that cuts funding for family planning services to a bill that outright denies women lifesaving abortions, we are in the midst of the biggest uphill battle in recent history.
H.R. 358, the “Protect Life Act” (or as I like to call it, the “Let Women Die Act”), which allows hospitals to deny women abortion care even if it means they will die without it, passed in the House this October. This reverses decades of precedent. Under current law, all patients are protected by the Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act, which requires hospitals to provide treatment to any patient in an emergency, regardless of ability to pay. This new bill creates an exception for pregnant women. If that isn’t discriminating against a specific class of people, I don’t know what is.
The bill also sets out to ban all insurance coverage for abortion by denying federal subsidies to plans that cover abortion, even though private funds must already be segregated to cover any abortion care. This will ultimately result in a ban on abortion coverage for individuals and small businesses accessing coverage through the health care exchanges, and threatens all private insurance coverage of abortion.
It doesn’t end there, either. H.R. 358 vastly expands conscience clause protections so that anyone involved in the provision of abortion services – from receptionists who make appointments to insurance company employees that process claims – can refuse to provide services on any grounds. So much for being able to make private medical decisions with your doctor; any anti-choice cog in the health care wheel can obstruct you from obtaining an abortion.
Every single Republican voted in favor of H.R. 358, as did 11 Democrats. While the bill is not likely to pass in the Senate, it serves as a stark reminder that to many elected officials, women’s health is nothing more than a political bargaining chip. This bill is not about funding or protecting life. It is about cutting abortion access so that only a small, privileged percent of Americans can afford it. These politicians are willing to do whatever it takes to keep abortion out of reach, even if it means women must forfeit their lives. Call me crazy, but I don’t see how letting women die is in any way, shape, or form “pro-life.”
Keeping true to form, the House leadership’s draft Fiscal Year 2012 Labor, Health and Human Services appropriation bill also takes a stab at abortion and family planning, in complete defiance of the thousands who protested across the country and descended on the Capitol to save family planning funding in the 2011 budget. The proposed budget rehashes a lot of what the House has already tried to accomplish through extreme bills and budget cuts. According to RH Reality Check, the new budget would prohibit federal funding for Planned Parenthood through programs such as Medicaid, which provides low-income women with preventative health care; eliminate funding for the Title X Family Planning Program, which provides access to family planning that helps millions of low-income women avoid unintended pregnancies; ban insurance coverage of abortion in the new health exchanges under the Affordable Care Act; eliminate new benefits in the Affordable Care Act that cover women’s preventative services like mammograms, cancer screenings, and birth control; and cut the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative by $65 million, stipulating that $20 million of that money must be used to provide abstinence-only education, which was proven ineffective in a Congressionally mandated nine-year study in 2007.
Once again, the House leadership defies common logic. If you want to reduce the rate of abortion, decimating access to family planning and culling resources for abstinence-only education is not going to help achieve that goal. Conservatives are finally showing their cards: it’s not just about abortion. It’s about fundamentally controlling women’s lives, from the bedroom to the doctor’s office. What else could explain the attacks on birth control (which 99% of women use at some point in their lives), comprehensive sex education, and even general preventative health care?
It is a sad and revolting time when ideological agendas trump medicine and basic human decency. If our current Congress’s record doesn’t provide a compelling example of why it’s important to vote for pro-choice and pro-women candidates, I don’t know what does. With the 2012 Presidential election on the horizon, it’s absolutely critical that we shout our demands:
We demand access to comprehensive health care, including preventive services, family planning, and abortion. We demand the best available medical care, especially if our lives are at stake. We demand that our concerns be heeded by the politicians elected to serve us. And we demand that women’s lives be at least as valued as much as the life of a fetus.
This article originally appeared in NOW-NYC’s Winter 2011 newsletter.
Obama ran as a pro-woman presidential candidate. Now we will see whether it was all lip service or if he will stand up for women’s health.
Despite the fact that birth control constitutes “preventive care” under the Affordable Care Act — meaning it is covered at no cost by insurance plans — it looks as though Obama may expand the religious conscience clause concerning contraceptives. Catholic Bishops have been pressuring the Administration to do just this, which would allow religiously affiliated institutions that are not churches—such as hospitals, universities, and others—to refuse to cover birth control without co-pays for their students and employees.
This is not a surprising move on behalf of Catholic Bishops. What’s more surprising is how out of touch the Catholic hierarchy is with the lay Catholic population. According to Catholics for Choice, over 98% of sexually active Catholic women use birth control. Furthermore, 63% of Catholics believe that health insurance, whether private or government-run, should cover contraception. Right on.
Not to sound like a broken record, but religion has NO place in politics or health care whatsoever — especially a religion that has such little regard for women’s health and rights.
Do women a solid and call the White House to tell him to stand strong with us. He must not cave to extremist, religious pressures. Expanding refusal clauses to allow certain institutions and universities to refuse coverage for contraception is not what we want as a part of healthcare reform.
In the coming months, the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) is set to identify preventive health services that should be covered at no cost to patients, as required by the new health care law. For women, this would include mammograms and folic acid, as well as things like smoking cessation treatments.
But what about birth control?
Many advocates have been calling for birth control to be among the preventive services covered by insurance companies. There are many, many reasons why this makes sense. When you consider that birth control use is nearly universal among women in their reproductive years, it becomes even more clear how vital women consider family planning — for health and socioeconomic reasons. More specifically, as the NWLC points out,
Contraception is critical to helping women achieve healthy pregnancies. Women who wait for some time after delivery before conceiving their next child lower their risk of adverse perinatal outcomes, including low birth weight, preterm birth, and small-for-size gestational age. And a planned pregnancy affords women an opportunity to make behavioral changes that lead to better birth outcomes…Many contraceptives have significant preventive benefits beyond their contraceptive benefits. Oral contraceptives, for example, lower rates of pelvic inflammatory disease, cancers of the ovary and endometrium, recurrent ovarian cysts, benign breast cysts, and fibroadenomas.
Free birth control would also ease the burden of high health care costs for women, who on average earn less than men and pay more for health insurance:
On average, women earn only 78 cents for every dollar that men earn, and the median earnings of female workers working full time, year round, were $35,549 in 2009, compared to $45,485 for men. In addition, health insurance is often more expensive for women than it is for men and meets fewer of their needs. Before the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies could refuse to sell a woman coverage due to her history of health problems or could charge a woman a higher premium on the basis of her sex…
Women are more likely than men to avoid needed health care, including preventive care, because of cost. In 2007, for example, 52% of all nonelderly women reported a cost-related access barrier—not filling a prescription, skipping a recommended test or treatment, not getting needed basic or specialist care because of cost—compared to 39% of all nonelderly men. Preventive services are among those that women forgo because of cost; nearly half (45%) of women report delaying or not receiving a cancer screening or dental exam because of its cost, as compared to 36 percent of men. Evidence suggests that even moderate co-payments can cause individuals to forgo needed preventive care, particularly those with low and moderate incomes. (via NWLC)
Given the amount of change that will sweep through our health care system under the Affordable Care Act, the HHS asked the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to review what preventive services are important to women’s health and recommend which of these should be considered in the development of comprehensive guidelines. Earlier this week, the IOM recommended that women’s preventive services include improved cervical cancer & HIV screenings, at least one annual well-woman care visit, screening and counseling for all women and girls regarding interpersonal and domestic violence, AND (drum roll, please…..) “a fuller range of contraceptive education, counseling, methods, and services so that women can better avoid unwanted pregnancies and space their pregnancies to promote optimal birth outcomes.”
Ta-da! This is a very welcome development. There is a plethora of evidence — both anecdotal and clinical — supporting the need to make birth control available at no cost to patients. One can only hope that the HHS takes the IOM’s recommendations under consideration. Women’s well-being depends on it.
What can you do? Be sure to take a moment and sign the NWLC’s petition to make contraceptives available without co-pays…. and tell your friends to do the same!
I know, it feels like a nightmare replaying over and over again. HR3, one of the most anti-woman pieces of legislation in Congress right now, is up for a vote tomorrow.
As a refresher, here’s HR3 in a nutshell:
This bill is likely to pass the House; so likely in fact, that I’d bet my life savings on it. But, there may be a light at the end of the shitty conservative tunnel. If HR3 passes the House and went on to pass in the Senate, Obama’s senior advisors are recommending he veto it.
Here’s what the Office of Management and Budget had to say about it:
The Administration strongly opposes H.R. 3 because it: intrudes on women’s reproductive freedom and access to health care; increases the tax burden on many Americans; unnecessarily restricts the private insurance choices that consumers have today; and restricts the District of Columbia’s use of local funds, which undermines home rule. Longstanding Federal policy prohibits Federal funds from being used for abortions, except in cases of rape or incest, or when the life of the woman would be endangered. This prohibition is maintained in the Affordable Care Act and reinforced through the President’s Executive Order 13535. H.R. 3 goes well beyond these safeguards by interfering with consumers’ private health care choices. The Administration also strongly supports existing provider conscience laws that have protected the rights of health care providers and entities for over 30 years, and it recognizes and supports the rights of patients. The Administration will strongly oppose legislation that unnecessarily restricts women’s reproductive freedoms and consumers’ private insurance options.
If the President is presented with H.R. 3, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill. (Via RH Reality Check.)
Let’s hope Barry does the right thing.
While we wait, however, YOU can do the right thing by contacting your Congress representatives and telling them to vote NO on HR3!
