Jon O’Brien Interview from Family Planning Health Services on Vimeo.

Richard Doerflinger, speaking for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, responded to a Wall Street Journal article about Wisconsin’s Medicaid Family Planning expansion saying: “It reflects a view of women which is extremely dismissive . . .” Mr. Doerflinger goes on to recommend that the expansion be rejected because family planning advocates are only interested in a woman’s reproductive function and making sure it isn’t used.

Family Planning Health Services, Inc. and the Wisconsin Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association are very proud to release this engaging video interview with Jon O’Brien, president of Catholics for Choice. Mr. O’Brien explores themes of political power and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. He establishes a clear three-question structure within which legislators and the public can evaluate lobbying efforts and policy recommendations like Mr. Doerflinger’s:

1. Is it factually correct?
2. Who does the speaker represent?
3. What are the consequences to ordinary working people?

Mr. O’Brien says that good Catholics can support contraception. He describes the history of the Vatican’s Birth Control Commission which was: “far less than divine inspiration. It was a matter of stacking the deck!” Even though the outcome was pre-determined to oppose use of the birth control pill, according to O’Brien, education and dialogue . . . “changed the hearts and minds of the bishops” on the Commission. “Can you imagine how many lives could have been saved,” O’Brien asks, “if the Pope had enough faith in Catholics to accept the Commission’s recommendations?”

Mr. O’Brien’s emphasis throughout the interview is that the bishops and legislators must “Listen to the lives of ordinary Catholics. He says: “We are the ones who go to the ballot box.”  On reproductive health issues, according to O’Brien, “The bishops have failed to convince Catholics not to use contraception. So what do they do? They go off to Capitol Hill or to your state assembly and behind the doors they try to pressure legislators into not allowing access to family planning.” With no equivocation he says: “There’s something that’s downright wrong and un-American about that!

O’Brien states that the information that the hierarchy gives on contraception and condoms is inaccurate and that the bishops do not speak for Catholic voters. But to make his most important point on testing the validity of lobbying by the bishops against family planning, Mr. O’Brien praises the courage and example of Bishop Kevin Dowling from South Africa. Paraphrasing Bishop Dowling, who has differed with Church teachings on the use of condoms to prevent HIV/Aids, O’Brien says:  “Using condoms to prevent AIDs is not about preventing the transmission of life. It is about preventing the transmission of death.

If we apply the test to Mr. Doerflinger’s statement regarding Medicaid family planning, it is factually incorrect, it represents the view of some (but not all) of the 350 U.S. Catholic Bishops, and the consequence would be to reduce access to health care for thousands of American women.

Part 1 – James Wagoner from Family Planning Health Services on Vimeo.

After James Wagoner’s call for a ‘radical pragmatism’ to end the myth that sexual health care and education encourage risky behavior, we spoke with Congresswoman Gwen Moore (D-WI).

Part 2 – Gwenn Moore from Family Planning Health Services on Vimeo.

Congresswoman Gwen Moore explains that the consequences of ignorance about sexual health are too severe to permit ideological debate. Our next interview with Sarah Audelo of Advocates for Youth, says the age of sexual misinformation must end.

Part 3 – Sarah Audelo from Family Planning Health Services on Vimeo.

Sarah Audelo, of Advocates for Youth, says the high rates of sexually transmitted infections and unintended pregnancies among our young people compel us to teach them how to protect themselves. Our next interview, with Clare Coleman of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association discusses that there are economic as well as health reasons to expand access to care.

Part 4 – Clare Coleman from Family Planning Health Services on Vimeo.

Clare Coleman discussed patient care, standards of reproductive health care, and evolving health care delivery models. If the question is: “How can family planning clinics and programs put the pieces together in a patient-centered way,” her answer is that; “The source of funding has to be less important than the standard of care. She is leading a lively discussion about innovations and integration of family planning services in the primary preventive health care system. Congresswoman Lois Capps (D-CA) emphasizes that federal support for family planning services is key to our economic recovery.

Part 5 – Lois Capps from Family Planning Health Services on Vimeo.

After Congresswoman Capps talked about the immediate opportunity to receive federal support for expanded family planning services, Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) celebrates the end of ‘gender as a pre-existing condition’ in health care and what the health care insurance reform victory means for women’s health.

Part 6 – Tammy Baldwin from Family Planning Health Services on Vimeo.

Congresswoman Baldwin (D-WI) summarizes the new opportunity and we wrap up this introductory video with a call to action. Look for expanded interviews as well as more interviews on this topic in the near future.

Contact us at www.belowthewaist.org

Mr. Newman Goes to Washington from Family Planning Health Services on Vimeo.

In 2008, Family Planning Health Services and the Adams County Health Department presented a combined educational program for medical professionals visiting the US from Uzbekistan.

The group consisted of doctors, nurses and administrators of health programs. They were well educated, caring individuals who wanted to understand how public health departments and non-profit family planning agencies were run in the US. They cared very

much about their citizens and providing quality health care to their people. They expressed that they had lived a long time under Russian rule and they now saw their independence as an opportunity to improve their health care delivery systems.

We read with dismay the recent article in the Canadian Press attached below. It would appear those very motivated health providers are now caught in a government supported program to sterilize poor women…even against their knowledge and will.

Long ago someone asked us if teen girls shouldn’t be forced to have a Norplant Implant contraceptive inserted in their arm at age 13. Norplant provided contraception for 5 years by preventing ovulation. The questioner thought this would be a good way to prevent teen pregnancy…at least until the girl graduated from high school. I was shocked by the question and replied that I don’t believe in involuntary birth control. I believe in voluntary birth control and family planning services. This is a nation founded on freedom of the individual and I could never condone forcing someone to contracept just like I could never see forcing someone to conceive.

Too many of our ancestors fought and died to see that we have freedom in this country. Freedom to make our own choices. Many, many of our ancestors came to the USA seeking just those freedoms for themselves and their children. Forced contraception, whether temporary or permanent, is un-American[1] and should be outlawed anywhere in the world.

________________

1 un-A·mer·i·can

–adjective

not American; not characteristic of or proper to the U.S.; foreign or opposed to the characters, values, standards, goals, etc., of the U.S.

By Mansur Mirovalev (Canadien Press)

GULISTAN, Uzbekistan — Saodat Rakhimbayeva says she wishes she had died with her newborn baby.

The 24-year-old housewife had a cesarean section in March and gave birth to Ibrohim, a premature boy who died three days later.

Then came a further devastating blow: She learned that the surgeon had removed part of her uterus during the operation, making her sterile. The doctor told her the hysterectomy was necessary to remove a potentially cancerous cyst, while she believes he sterilized her as part of a state campaign to reduce birthrates.

“He never asked for my approval, never ran any checks, just mutilated me as if I were a mute animal,” the pale and fragile Rakhimbayeva said through tears while sitting at a fly-infested cafe in this central Uzbek city. “I should have just died with Ibrohim.”

According to rights groups, victims and health officials, Rakhimbayeva is one of hundreds of Uzbek women who have been surgically sterilized without their knowledge or consent in a program designed to prevent overpopulation from fuelling unrest.

Human rights advocates and doctors say autocratic President Islam Karimov this year ramped up a sterilization campaign he initiated in the late 1990s. In a decree issued in February, the Health Ministry ordered all medical facilities to “strengthen control over the medical examination of women of childbearing age.”

The decree also said that “surgical contraception should be provided free of charge” to women who volunteer for the procedure.

It did not specifically mandate sterilizations, but critics allege that doctors have come under direct pressure from the government to perform them: “The order comes from the very top,” said Khaitboy Yakubov, head of the Najot human rights group in Uzbekistan.

Uzbek authorities ignored numerous requests by The Associated Press to comment on the issue. Most western media organizations have been driven from the country, and government officials face serious reprisals for contacts with foreign journalists. However, the AP was able to interview several doctors, sterilized women and a former health official, some on condition of anonymity.

This Central Asian nation of 27 million is the size of California or Iraq, and population density in areas such as the fertile Ferghana Valley is among the world’s highest.

Rights groups say the government is dealing with poverty, unemployment and severe economic and environmental problems that have triggered an exodus of Uzbek labour migrants to Russia and other countries.

Heightening the government’s fears is the spectre of legions of jobless men in predominantly Muslim Uzbekistan succumbing to the lure of Islamic radical groups with ties to Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida.

Uzbekistan is not alone in coming under allegations of using sterilizations to fight population growth: Authorities in China’s Guangdong Province were accused by Amnesty International in April of carrying out coerced sterilizations to meet family planning goals. But no other country is known to use that method as a government policy.

Uzbekistan once had one of the Soviet Union’s highest birthrates, four to five children per woman, and Communist authorities even handed out medals to “heroine” mothers of six or more. Young army conscripts from Uzbekistan and the four other Central Asian republics made up for a declining ethnic Russian population.

Now, as authorities try to unravel that legacy, the birthrate has dropped to about 2.3 children per woman — still higher than the rate of 2.1 that demographers consider sufficient to replenish a falling population.

The sterilization campaign involves thousands of government-employed medical doctors and nurses who urge women of childbearing age, especially those with two or more children, to have hysterectomies or fallopian tube ligations, said Sukhrobjon Ismoilov of the Expert Working Group, an independent think-tank based in the capital, Tashkent.

The surgeon in Rakhimbayeva’s case, a burly man in his 40s named Kakhramon Fuzailov, refused to comment on her claims and threatened to turn an AP reporter over to the police for “asking inappropriate questions.”

In 2007, the UN Committee Against Torture reported a “large number” of cases of forced sterilization and removal of reproductive organs in Uzbek women, often after cesarean sections. Some women were abandoned by their husbands as a result, it said.

After the 1991 Soviet collapse, Karimov, a former Communist functionary, remained at the helm and retained many Soviet features, such as strict government control of public health. Government-paid doctors and nurses are assigned to each district or village.

Family planning is far different from western norms.

Instead of focusing on raising awareness of widely available condoms or birth-control pills, the Health Ministry has chosen to promote uteral resections nationwide as the most reliable method of contraception.

Some women do volunteer. Khalida Alimova, 31, a plump, vivacious sales manager from Tashkent, agreed to a resection in March, almost a year after her third child was born.

She said her husband, Alisher Alimov, 32, an occasional cab driver who spends days playing backgammon with his friends, refused to use condoms or allow her to take birth-control pills.

“Now I feel relieved,” Alimova said over a cup of green tea in the kitchen of their shabbily furnished Tashkent apartment. She added, though, that she never told her husband about the operation.

Many other women, especially from poor rural areas, say they face coercion from health workers or even potential employers to agree to sterilization.

A 31-year-old mother of two from the eastern Uzbek city of Ferghana said the director of a kindergarten where she sought a job told her to show a certificate confirming she had been sterilized.

After consulting her disabled husband, who receives a government pension of $40 a month, she said she agreed to the procedure, produced the certificate and got the job.

“We just had no choice,” the woman, who gave only her first name Matluba, said by telephone from the eastern city of Ferghana. She refused to provide her last name or identify the kindergarten for fear of being fired.

Several health workers, who spoke on condition of anonymity also because they feared dismissal or persecution, said the authorities are especially eager to sterilize women with HIV, tuberculosis or a drug addiction. Instruments often are not sterilized properly and can infect other women, they said.

Inexperienced medical workers can also cause serious health complications. “Any negligence can do a lot of damage,” said Shakhlo Tursunova, a gynecologist from Tashkent.

Health workers involved in the campaign are threatened with salary cuts, demotion or dismissal if they do not persuade at least two women a month to be sterilized, a former high-ranking Health Ministry official told the AP on condition of anonymity.

Veronika Tretyakova, a 32-year-old doctor from Tashkent, said she came under pressure from health workers to be sterilized.

“The nurse said, ‘They would hang me if I let you have another child,’” Tretyakova said. “I told her to think about her soul.”

Tradition plays a strong role in this male-dominated society, where a large family is seen as a blessing from God, and women are often blamed for childless marriages.

After checking out of the maternity hospital in Gulistan where she lost her son, Rakhimbayeva said she shared her anguish with her husband, Ulmas, a 29-year-old bus driver who refused to be interviewed for this story. Their marriage was arranged by their parents in 2008.

Instead of consoling her, she said, he told her to move back to her parents’ house and wait for divorce papers as he did not want to live with a barren wife.

“He never even questioned why the doctors maimed me, just blamed everything on me,” Rakhimbayeva said wringing her hands. “Now I have no hope of having children, no job, no future.”

I am also tired of the assumptions that Planned Parenthood is the sole provider of reproductive health care in America. There are many, many family planning providers who are non-profit, private providers. There are many, many family planning providers that are within public health departments.  Federal funding goes to support family planning services to improve and enrich the health of America’s families. These programs are successful. ‘None of the federal dollars received are for abortion care.’

Taxpayers save $3.74 for every dollar expended on family planning services. Seven million US women use family planning providers yearly and 1.5 million unintended pregnancies are prevented. This federal funding is preventing abortion and increasing healthy outcomes for US men, women and their children.  Contrast that with supporting the efforts of BP and you can conclude that the legislators noted in the article may be bought and paid for and have completely forgotten the constituents they are supposedly representing.

From RH Reality Check, and the great Jodi Jacobson…

What would you say if I offered you an investment that yielded nearly $4.00 in value for every $1.00 invested…and could prove it?

And what would you say if the yields from this investment over the long-term meant better health, higher educational attainment, higher economic productivity and lower social costs for US citizens, benefitting by extension our country as a whole in the short- and long-term?  What if this investment contributed meaningfully to reducing poverty and to increasing the freedom of individuals to make decisions about their own lives but still be socially responsible?

If you’re a smart investor, I am guessing you’d be interested. On the face of it you might think that people across the political spectrum could agree that such investments would be a good idea.

But in the United States today, of course, things are never that simple.

The investment in question is government funding for Title X, Medicaid and other programs that support voluntary family planning and related sexual and reproductive health services, as well as education and training of health professionals, and outreach to adolescents and young adults. These funds provide millions of Americans with access to routine primary health exams and screenings (such as for breast and cervical cancer), access to contraception, testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, and increased access to treatment for AIDS-related illnesses. They also enable women to avoid unplanned pregnancies, thereby reducing the need for abortion. This money saves and improves lives.

In 2008, for example, publicly-funded clinics provided over 7 million female clients with contraceptive supplies, helping to avert an estimated 1.5 million unintended pregnancies. The Guttmacher Institute estimates that of these pregnancies, 656,000 would have resulted in an unplanned birth and 616,000 would have resulted in an abortion (the remainder would have resulted in miscarriage). Overall, concludes Guttmacher, by helping women avoid unintended pregnancies and plan how many children they want and when to have them, publicly supported family planning clinics save taxpayers $3.74 for every $1 that is spent providing contraceptive care. These savings are net of the total that would include early detection and treatment of cervical and breast cancers caught during regular exams, sexually transmitted infections avoided and those treated, and any number of other benefits of access to these basic primary health services.

So…what’s not to like?

Ask Congressmen Pete Olson (R-TX) and Mike Pence (R-IN).

In the ongoing witch hunt to eliminate access to reproductive and sexual health care in the United States, Olson and 31 Republican colleagues requested a report from the Government Accountaility Office (GAO) on federal spending for organizations most experienced in providing the services and programs that yield the above-noted social and economic benefits.  Their purpose? To vilify the funding.

The recently released report, notes the GAO summary:

responds to [the Congressional] request for information on federal funds provided for fiscal years 2002 through 2009 to selected organizations involved in health-related activities and their affiliates: Advocates for Youth, the Guttmacher Institute, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the Population Council, and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States.

Reports reviewed included:

expenditures of federal funds that HHS agencies and offices and USAID provided both directly and indirectly to the selected organizations and their affiliates, as well as expenditures of funds provided directly and indirectly by federal agencies other than HHS and USAID, such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which provided grants totaling about $4.1 million to Planned Parenthood affiliates who reported such expenditures during the period of our review.

What was the conclusion?

“For fiscal years 2002 through 2009, the selected organizations and their affiliates in our review reported total expenditures of about $967 million in federal funds provided directly and indirectly.”

More than one-third of this amount, about $342 million, was reported as expenditures from an HHS program for family planning services.. Nearly all (about $942 million) of the reported expenditures were from programs administered by HHS and USAID; the remaining $25 million in reported expenditures were primarily from programs administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the U.S. Department of Justice.

The nakedly ideological nature of this effort is underscored by the lack of any “smoking gun” in the GAO report, of which none was expected in any case. We all know the U.S. government provides public funding for basic reproductive and sexual health care, funding that enables people to protect their health, exercise their rights, and yields numerous social and economic outcomes. Reams of scientific data have been published on the benefits of these funds.  None of the funds, by law, are spent on abortion care, except in those circumstances in fact allowed by law, such as in cases of rape or incest, circumstances which in any case the anti-choice movement is ever-seeking to further restrict.

In an interview with the Houston Chronicle, Rochelle Tafolla, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of Houston and Southeast Texas said that their organization provides “crucial services to people in a city with the highest number of uninsured of any city in the nation.”

“None of the federal dollars received are used for abortion care,” Tafolla said. Planned Parenthood affiliates in Texas that provide abortion services “are required to be separately incorporated from the entity that provides family planning services,” she said.

No news flash here.

But what the GAO report does do is allow these good gentleman–otherwise known as the people that love to hate Planned Parenthood–to further waste your own and my tax dollars and our time by trying to eliminate funding for Title X and related programs. They do so ostensibly because they feel they have a monopoly on “morality,” and find the thought of women planning their families to be a moral affront, while, for example, losing no sleep over concurrently defending British Petroleum and deepwater oil drilling as we witness the largest ecological catastrophe in this country’s history unfold before our eyes.  Olson, referred to by one of his constituents as an “oil-soaked congressman” for his reliance on campaign funds from the oil industry, has introduced a bill to lift the moratorium on deep water drilling.

Pence is one among several usual suspects, such as Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ) and the Family Research Council, leading anti-choice fundamentalist colleagues in and outside of Congress in their newest effort to eliminate government funding for all forms of sexual and reproductive health care by introducing a bill entitled the Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act. Their strategy appears to be taking a page from the health reform debate and all past efforts to equate contraceptive delivery with abortion and to draw equivalency between government-funded family planning services, and abortion care.  This completely bogus piece of “legislation” confirms what someone wrote on Twitter the other day, and I paraphrase: “The far right is the group that likes to complain government does not work, and then seeks office to prove the point.”  To put that in bold, Pence rails against abortion and defends BP in a single segment on Hardball with Chris Matthews.

The irony is that by fruit of their efforts to restrict women’s access to primary preventive care, these men and their comrades are likely responsible for more unintended pregnancies and abortions in the United States than any other single factor. Meanwhile they rabidly opposed and continue to oppose sane regulations that might have prevented the loss of lives from the explosion on the Horizon rig, and might have prevented the utter devastation we will see for decades to come in one of the richest ecosystems in this country.

I call all of this immoral.