Articles about Action
Association of Reproductive Health Professionals Alert
[We received this as a comment, and thought it warranted being moved up to its own post. Dino]
The Association of Reproductive Health Professionals issued this alert to it’s membership. Please consider following this link to easily and electronically express your opinion about this proposal to HHS Secretary Leavitt.
http://capwiz.com/nfprha/home/
Dear ARHP member,
We have an urgent matter to bring to your attention. Recently, the Bush Administration proposed new regulations under which the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would redefine pregnancy as beginning prior to implantation and adopt a definition of abortion that includes many forms of contraception, including some birth control pills, IUDs, and emergency contraception. Both of these proposed definitions are alarmingly at odds with science. This regulation would also allow health care providers and facility staff to refuse to provide any medical service – if doing so would violate their moral beliefs.
If adopted, the new regulations could mean that providers of federally-funded family planning services could no longer guarantee their patients access to contraception. We cannot tolerate this last ditch attack on family planning as the Bush Administration prepares to leave office.
To make it quick and easy for you to learn more about and take action on this outrageous proposal, ARHP has partnered with our colleagues at the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association (NFPRHA). Please click here (http://capwiz.com/nfprha/home/) to easily and electronically express your opinion about this proposal to HHS Secretary Leavitt.
Thank you for your quick response on this critical issue.
Sincerely,
ARHP Policy Team
57 Leading Groups Urge Administration to Abandon Proposed Rule that Would Limit Women’s Access to Essential Medical Services
Dear Secretary Leavitt:
The undersigned medical, public health, religious, advocacy, and research groups committed to women’s health strongly oppose the Department of Health and Human Services’ draft regulations that could significantly limit women’s access to basic reproductive health services, including some of the most common forms of birth control. If implemented, these regulations may preempt state laws that protect women’s access to health care and undermine the nation’s fragile network of safety net providers that serve low income women. We strongly urge the Department to immediately abandon its effort to bring about these ill-conceived and harmful policy changes.
Abstinence in Congressional Testimonies
On April 23rd, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held the first ever congressional hearing to address the effectiveness of federally funded abstinence-only programs. The hearing, led by Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, featured numerous public health experts who testified that abstinence-only programs are not only ineffective, but also fail to provide young people the information needed make educated decisions about their sexual health. Legal Momentum has long recognized the ineffectiveness of these programs and the particular harm they cause to young women and girls. Continue reading this article »
Caught Cybersquatting: Pregnancy Crisis Center Pulls Website
Thanks to solid local reporting, a Crisis Pregnancy Center website designed to deceive women who were looking for information about reproductive health services was taken down this week. Website visitors who typed in “fphs.com” instead of “fphs.org” were sent to a crisis pregnancy center site instead of to the family planning clinic site they were looking for.
Pat Peckham, a reporter with Wausau, Wisconsin’s weekly newspaper, City Pages, discovered the alternate site and pursued the story to its end. In this case, the end was that Hope Crisis Pregnancy Center took the website down because others might see their deceit as ‘untoward.’
Continue reading this article »
Hope Pregnancy drops its internet site designed to intercept unwary Family Planning clients.
This article appeared in The City Pages in Wausau, WI. It was written by Pat Peckham, and ties in to our podcast regarding Phyllis and the Hope Pregnancy Center.
Family Planning Web Ruse
Hope Pregnancy drops its internet site designed to intercept unwary Family Planning clients.
Up until this past week, women trying to get information online about Family Planning Health Services may have been unknowingly diverted to Hope Pregnancy Resource Center in Wausau.
Response to Roe V. Wade Podcast
[A Note from Podcast Coordinator: Not long ago we posted a podcast regarding the anniversary of Roe V. Wade. Our own Sue Kettner posted a comment that I found to be so insightful I would like it to be a post on its own. So we are elevating it to the front page.]
My thoughts after listening to the interview with American Life League’s Judy Brown and Cathy Thompson from the Religious Coalition For Reproductive Choice: I believe there were some points forgotten or missed and felt compelled to respond with my recollections about abortion.
I was just three months old on the day of the Pearl Harbor Attack…December 7, 1941. I was 4 years old the year the US dropped Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I reference these dates so a reader will know the decade I was born into and some sense of where the US was during that decade.
I first heard the word abortion on a newsreel in the movie theater at about age 5 or 6. Movies were cheap entertainment and my parents took the whole family at least twice a week. We saw reports of the war and shots of Roosevelt and Churchill and later Truman during those news reels. The news reels also reported on organized crime and how various well known organized crime bosses were being charged with providing abortions. Now, what I (at 5 and 6 and 7 years of age) thought was that abortion was a terrible thing that organized crime people were doing to vulnerable women in America. The crime figures were usually charged with providing abortion and tax evasion. As a child, I didn’t understand what tax evasion had to do with it.
After the war ended and there were less newsworthy events linked to organized crime, I didn’t see or hear the word abortion again until I was nearly an adult. In high school, sometimes when a girl got pregnant, her boyfriend wanted her to “get rid of it.” Usually no one knew what that meant or how that was possible so she continued to be pregnant. Many times girls went away. An enlightening book about the era is “The Girls Who Went Away, The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V Wade” by Ann Fessler.
One point not clear in the interviews was when contraception became available. Contraception wasn’t new in the 1960’s.
My mother used a diaphragm and breastfeeding to achieve the birth spacing in our family. My father was familiar with condoms…which he called “safes” – a word used during the war I’ve learned.
Did they have access to birth control? Yes. My father knew the store to go to in our township to purchase “safes” which were behind the counter and not openly discussed. My mother was able to get contraceptive care through her physician, most likely because she was married. The thing that happened in the early 1960s was that birth control pills were developed and sold. They were easy to use and extremely effective. The speakers were right…now the American woman could effectively control her fertility. I took some of those early birth control pills for 5 months in 1962. I took Enovid E and it cost $1.69 in the drug store. After using those birth control pills, I went on to have healthy pregnancies and healthy babies. When my family size was complete, I used birth control pills again. Countless women in my generation used birth control pills and most of them worked outside the home eventually.
Another element:
The American woman moved into the workforce outside of her home out of necessity during World War II. She went back to being a woman focused solely on the work of her family after the war. However, women had learned from that war experience that they could do the work in the factory and in the office and they were good at it. They also filled many important roles in the medical community and had done so for decades. Financial necessity and personal interest sent women back into the workforce armed with a tool that would help them postpone pregnancy, achieve birth spacing and limit the size of their families. Fewer children in a family and Mom’s income helped the family maintain their health and raise and care for their children.
I was already working outside the home by the time Roe v Wade happened in 1973. I came to work at a family planning provider in 1975. Some states had abortion available at that time. Sometimes women needed to travel outside of Wisconsin to obtain an abortion. Within a few years, first-trimester abortion became available in Wisconsin. Women from most parts of the state still had to travel to Madison, Milwaukee, Green Bay or Appleton. They needed a checkup 3 to 4 weeks after the procedure. By 1978 our family planning agency was providing on-site clinics and women came to the local family planning provider for their checkup rather than going out of town again. The confidentiality provided by the family planning clinic was essential to women and their families.
The statewide family planning providers in Wisconsin have prevented thousands and thousands of abortions by providing accessible, affordable, effective contraceptive methods. Today, those family planning providers have another tool to help prevent the unintended pregnancy. That is Emergency Contraception (EC). If taken as soon as possible after any unprotected sexual contact, EC can prevent pregnancy quite effectively. …Sue Kettner Family Planning Health Services
We want YOU!
BelowTheWaist has been up in the world for about a month now and it’s been pretty interesting for those of us behind the scenes to see how many people are checking out the podcast, who’s registering and who’s commenting. Now, we think it’s time for a few more of you to come out of the woodwork. We know you care and that you have things to say on our many topics and we’re ready to hear and share them. We designed this site based on the idea that everyone should have access to the reproductive health care and family planning services they want. Here at BelowTheWaist, we understand that idea means different things to different people and that the fields of family planning and reproductive health care are constantly changing and evolving. And we want to know what it means to you. With that in mind, we would LOVE it if you sent us your thoughts, ideas, and impressions. We’ll post as many of them as we can on our home page and archive them in our various topic areas. Send your articles to submit@belowthewaist.org and join the free flow of ideas! Got an idea for a podcast? Want to participate in a podcast? Contact Dino, our podcaster at podcast@belowthewaist.org.
Reproductive Justice: Choosing a Broader Movement
Recently the Tides Foundation released this brief about expanding the reproductive justice movement. Click here to read their entire brief
Introduction: Envisioning Reproductive JusticeDuring the 19th and 20th centuries, the women’s movement in the U.S. made tremendous gains. We have a great deal to celebrate, and consequently a great deal to defend. As if in backwards motion, the 21st century is proving to be more politically treacherous, particularly in the area of reproductive justice. Since 1995, states have passed nearly 400 measures blocking access to essential reproductive health services. Although we still have Roe, the right to have an abortion has been systematically eroded, state by state, and is now in more peril than at any time since its passage. Increasingly, women across the U.S. lack access to basic reproductive health services and are struggling daily with a host of reproductive injustices that the traditional reproductive rights movement has yet to include in its advocacy efforts.
Continue reading this article »