Posts tagged with 'contraception'
Weekly Pulse: The Religious Right vs. Birth Control
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by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Does health care reform’s promise of preventive care extend to free birth control? Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services have 18 months to decide whether to require insurers to provide oral contraceptives, IUDs, and other prescription birth control with no co-pay. With pro-choice Secretary Kathleen Sebelius at the helm, HHS is expected to say yes. [Update: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that birth control will not be on the White House's preliminary list of free preventive services, to be issued today. However, as Miriam Perez of feministing explains, HHS will ultimately have the final word. Observers, including Dana Goldstein who covers reproductive rights for the Daily Beast, are optimistic that the pro-choice side will carry the day at HHS.]
At this point in the process, social conservatives are shut out in the cold, quaking with impotent rage. Now that the reform bill is law, HHS has to interpret the rules—and the Obama administration officials at HHS can’t be swayed as easily as elected officials.
Religious right on the warpath
Predictably, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), the National Abstinence Education Association, and the Heritage Foundation are up in arms. They’ve picked a deeply unpopular battle. Abortion remains controversial in some circles, but birth control is as American as baseball. The vast majority of sexually active women in the U.S. tell pollsters that they are not trying to become pregnant, and 89% of them are using some form of birth control.
“Seriously,” writes Monica Potts of TAPPED, “a battle over contraceptives?” Over 15 million Americans currently use hormonal contraception. Studies show that the vast majority of Americans are morally comfortable with birth control.
Expanding access to birth control is smart policy because it reduces health care costs, as Suzi Khimm notes in Mother Jones. Birth control is a lot cheaper for insurers than pregnancy and childbirth. Free birth control could change women’s lives for the better. In this economy, $30-$50 a month for hormonal birth control can be a major obstacle for many. As Michelle Chen notes in ColorLines, women of color are among those hardest hit by out-of-pocket costs.
Birth control as common ground?
Many centrists hope that contraception will be a source of “common ground” between the pro-choice and anti-abortion camps. The premise sounds reasonable. If anti-choicers oppose abortion, surely they will support measures proven to reduce the abortion rate, like expanded access to contraception. Political scientist Scott Lemieux argues in TAPPED that conservative opposition to birth control coverage is further proof that the common ground hypothesis is wishful thinking:
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it ignores the broader set of assumptions about women and sexuality on which actual opposition to abortion is based. Consider anti-choice Republicans, who consistently opposed expanding contraceptive use: Given the choice between reducing abortion rates and controlling female sexuality, they will always choose the latter. Thus the idea that contraception can be a means of achieving a ceasefire in the culture wars has always been a fantasy. Liberals and conservatives aren’t just divided by abortion but by broader questions of female equality and sexual freedom.
The USCCB clearly understands that birth control is broadly popular. Its lobbyists aren’t even trying to argue that birth control shouldn’t be covered because it’s sinful. Instead, they are playing semantic games about what constitutes preventative health care. According to the USCCB, birth control shouldn’t count because fertility isn’t a disease. Be that as it may, pregnancy is a life-altering health condition that can kill you. As a matter of fact, the Catholic Church is on the record as saying that pregnant women must sacrifice their own lives for their fetuses. Ergo, pregnancy prevention is preventive health care.
Approving free birth control would go a long way towards restoring the trust between the Obama administration and its pro-choice base, at low political cost. It seems unlikely that the USCCB and its allies have the power to fuel a national backlash on this one. After all, three quarters of U.S. Catholics disagree with their own church’s teachings on birth control.
Conscience concerns
Speaking of the Department of Health and Human Services, Megan Carpentier at RH Reality Check wonders what happened to President Barack Obama’s early promise to repeal the so-called “conscience clause” rule that allows health care workers to opt out of providing reproductive health care that conflicts with their anti-choice principles. The rule is still on the books, over a year after Obama pledged to repeal it.
FEMA Foul
Finally, how did some BP oil spill cleanup workers end up living in formaldehyde-laced FEMA trailers ruled unfit for human habitation? As I report for Working In These Times, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, wants answers from FEMA and the General Services Administration about how these trailers found their way back onto the market.
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Weekly Pulse: Dr. George Tiller’s Assassin Was No Lone Wolf
by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
When Scott Roeder shot Dr. George Tiller in church last year, media accounts described him as a lone wolf. Roeder acted alone on the day of the assassination, but he was part of a community of career anti-choice terrorists, as Amanda Robb reports in Ms. Magazine.
A community of radical, anti-abortion activists
Over the course of 6 months, Robb interviewed Roeder over a dozen times. She met with his allies at the court house. She even got permission to sit in on phone calls between Roeder and his friends. Robb’s exhaustive investigation revealed that Roeder had for years been enmeshed in a community of radical, anti-abortion activists, many of whom have committed acts of terrorism ranging from clinic arson to butyric acid attacks to murder.
Roeder was not a card-carrying member of any mainstream anti-abortion organization, but he drove to the scene of the crime with the number of Operation Rescue’s senior policy adviser on his dashboard.
Robb’s intensive reporting was supported by the investigative fund of the Nation Institute. (more…)
Weekly Pulse: Anti-Choice Terror in the Heartland
Dr. George Tiller, one of the few physicians in the country who performed second and third trimester abortions, was fatally shot in church on Sunday. It seems that Tiller was marked for death because of his work. The man charged with murdering Tiller, 51-year-old Scott Roeder, has a 20-year history of anti-choice and anti-government extremism.
Tiller’s compassion for his patients was legendary. Even during his lifetime, many referred to him as a saint for risking his own life to perform abortions that few other doctors would provide, irrespective of his patients’ ability to pay. The American Prospect features a moving tribute to Dr. Tiller by Michelle Goldberg, who relates a life story that’s equal parts John Irving and John Grisham:
Nation columnist Katha Pollitt attended a vigil for Dr. Tiller in New York’s Union Square. Pollitt reports that, compared a similar vigil she attended in 1998, the crowd was younger, angrier, and larger. She says that, over a decade after the murder of Dr. Barnett Slepian, people are finally fed up with anti-choice terrorism:
Going back to the Prospect, Ann Friedman argues that Tiller’s murder, and the years of violence and intimidation that led up to his assassination show that the United States’ current protections for abortion providers are not working:
While we wait for reform, Attorney General Eric Holder is doing his best to protect abortion providers in the wake of Tiller’s murder. The Colorado Independent’s Ernest Luning reports that Holder has ordered U.S. Marshals to step up security for a late-term abortion provider in Boulder.
A 360-degree harassment of doctors and their staff is part of a deliberate, anti-choice extremist strategy. Josh Harkinson looks back on the time he spent reporting on anti-choice activists in Wichita, the home of Dr. Tiller’s clinic, for Mother Jones. The groups often targeted people at home. “People have a public identity that they like to keep separate from their private identity,” one anti-abortion activist told Harkinson, “but we believe you can’t separate the two when you are talking about killing babies. And people are more likely to listen to what you say and be influenced when you bring the issue home to where they work and live.”
In other reproductive health news, Rachel K. Jones, a co-author of a controversial paper arguing that sex educators should present withdrawal as a legitimate method of birth control, defends her study by questioning the motives of her critics in the blogosphere:
I would argue that, on the contrary, Jones’ study has been criticized for its shoddy evidence. The authors admit at the outset that there’s very little research on withdrawal and that the practice has not been systematically tested in clinical trials, unlike other forms of birth control. Most of what we know about the practice comes from small studies, and/or studies that weren’t designed to measure the efficacy of withdrawal as it is actually used. (For more discussion of the study, see last week’s Pulse.) The evidence the authors present barely supports the contention that withdrawal deserves more study. However, they go much further, suggesting that sex educators change their curricula to present withdrawal in a more favorable light. Many of Jones’ critics found that suggestion irresponsible. Before lecturing her critics about their receptiveness to evidence, Jones should take a hard look at the gap between her evidence and her recommendations.
Recent events have pushed reproductive choice to the forefront of national consciousness. For the latest on healthcare controversies, big and small, stay tuned to the Weekly Pulse.
Weekly Pulse: Czar 44, Where are You?
Weekly Pulse: Czar 44, Where are You?
By Lindsay Beyerstein, TMC MediaWire blogger
The Obama administration may be about to pull the plug on the health czar. The position has gone unfilled since Obama’s appointee-apparent, former Sen. Tom Daschle, withdrew his name from consideration for both czar and Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) in early February. Several serious candidates are emerging in the unofficial race to lead HHS, but there’s no corresponding shortlist for health czar.
The czar and his Office of Health Reform were initially touted as proof that Obama was really serious about shepherding a health reform package through Congress. But the Obama team may ultimately decide that the Office of Health Reform is an obstacle instead of an asset without Daschle and ditch it altogether.
As Erza Klein explains in the American Prospect, the position was created especially for Daschle and any other candidate might be worse than nothing as far as passing a healthcare reform package goes. Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly agrees, and says that nixing the health czar doesn’t necessarily indicate that the Obama administration is any less committed to healthcare reform.
The purpose of the health czar was to create a single emissary to represent President Obama’s healthcare agenda to Congress. When the Clintons tried to reform healthcare in 1993, they discovered that various powerful administration officials were claiming to speak for the president.
The health czar was supposed to prevent future confusion as the president’s spokesperson. Many senior healthcare officials are already close to Obama and a similar situation could arise. Daschle would have been a credible health czar because he’s closer to the president than any of them, and a former congressional heavyweight to boot. Gov. Kathleen Sebelius is a front-runner for HHS secretary and she has a very good relationship with Obama. But Gov. Sebelius is a Washington outsider who has never served in the U.S. Congress, which might make her a less compelling candidate for czar.
Ezra Klein, linked above, argues that if nobody can fill Daschle’s shoes, appointing a less compelling czar might just add to the din of executive branch officials vying for the attention of key Congressional leaders.
Maybe it’s a good idea to send as many Obama health officials to Congress as possible. If nothing else, they might cut into time the reps are currently spending with health insurance industry lobbyists, as Talking Points Memo reports.
Speaking of contenders for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Gov. Howard Dean recently published an article on AlterNet defending Obama’s comparative effectiveness research (CER) agenda against right wing critics like Rush Limbaugh. Dean draws on his experience as a doctor and a healthcare policy-maker to argue that CER is a way to put more scientific evidence in the hands of doctors, so they can choose the very best treatment for the money. Right wingers don’t like the idea. They’re literally afraid that if science determines that a treatment is bogus, the government will stop paying for it. Right wingers calls this “rationing.” Taxpayers might call it evidence-based policy. Last we checked, Medicare and Medicaid were not faith-based programs.
As Dean points out, the CER to be funded by the new economic stimulus bill is officially for doctors, not legislators. “Mr. Limbaugh and his cohorts would have you believe that this research will be used to deny needed care to your great Aunt May and be run by the politburo. But the Bill passed by Congress states right up front that the Government can not make coverage decisions based on this research,” Dean wrote. Realistically, though, that’s kind of a hollow assurance. Once the research is done, there’s no way to stop legislators from using publicly available research findings to make healthcare decisions.
In another corner of the healthcare reform-o-sphere, Katrina vanden Heuvel says that time is right to reform New York’s draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws in The Nation. These laws have been on the books 35 years. The laws essentially force judges to send drug possessors to jail based on the weight of the drugs they were caught with, whether the judge thinks imprisonment would be a good idea or not. New York’s budget crisis might be a blessing in disguise for drug reform, vanden Heuvel argues, because policy-makers are sick of paying to keep drug offenders locked up whether they need it or not.
And finally, some good news from RH Reality Check. Many people just wouldn’t feel right stepping out without a spritz of perfume, a blast of breath-freshener, or regrettably, a head-to-toe shellacking with Axe Body Spray. As Joe Veix reports for RH, another spray-on product may one day be added to the essential equipment list: contraceptive. An Australian company is currently testing a hormone spritz for women. The product is applied to the forearm. Like the contraceptive patch, the spray is designed to deliver hormones through the skin. Researchers hope that through-the-skin delivery can produce the same results as pills, but with lower doses of hormones and fewer side effects.
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