reproductive justice

January 22 will mark the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. My dear friend and fellow “WGL” (of Women, Girls, and Ladies traveling panel fame) Gloria Feldt, who is also a noted author/blogger, and one-time teen mom who rose to be the head of the world’s largest reproductive health provider and advocacy organization, Planned Parenthood, has an article in the current issue of Democracy Journal in which she rethinks the most famous Supreme Court decision of recent time.

And another amazing mama and activist, Rebekah Spicuglia, writes about the first global consortium of motherhood organizations: the International Motherhood Network (IMN).

Great stuff, on both accounts. (And congrats, you two!)

What Will Hillary Do? The latest:

Ted Kennedy Asks Hillary Clinton To Head Senate Healthcare Team
11/19/08
LA Times: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y), considered a prominent contender to become secretary of State in the Obama administration, was offered an alternative Tuesday — to be a senior member of the Senate team aiming to overhaul the nation’s healthcare system.

Why Obama Wants Hillary for His ‘Team of Rivals’
11/20/08
Time: As he wrapped up his second week as President-elect, it was clear that Obama was taking the long view in both diplomacy and politics. How else to explain the fact that he had all but offered the most prestigious job in his Cabinet to a woman whose foreign policy experience he once dismissed as consisting of having tea with ambassadors?

And while we’re on the subject of Cabinet appointments:

Will Tom Daschle Be The Secretary Of HHS The Reproductive Rights Community Wants?
11/19/08
RH Reality Check: Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle’s record on reproductive and sexual health and rights is a mixed one.

If you’ve been subway traveling in NYC in the past year, then you may have noticed the proliferation of ads for Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs), which often feature the shadowy face of a young woman, and some text about “having more than one choice” or “if only I’d known.” We’ve heard from RH Reality Check about the misleading information spread by CPCs and their partner organizations, and Pandagon featured the story of a woman who called up a CPC, claimed that she had headaches but was not sexually active, but was still informed that she might be pregnant and should make an appointment.

Ms. Magazine adds to these damning exposes with an article in their latest issue featuring two college-aged women who went to check out the CPCs their college health centers directed them to. That bears repeating: their COLLEGE health centers. In fact, according to the article, 48% of college health centers that responded to a survey by the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance directed college students to CPCs.

What do these young women get when they’re directed the CPC way? Well first, one gets a delay, which is the last thing a woman considering pregnancy options wants. Then, upon arrival, she is handed the typical post-abortion stress fact sheets:

“Even before I found out I wasn’t pregnant, the counselor said I should abstain from sex,” says Lopez. She was given a fact sheet on “post-abortion stress” and asked to fill out a form that sought nonmedical information about her family and her religious beliefs. And then, when her urine test revealed not a pregnancy but a possible urinary tract infection, the center did not offer her any medical treatment or refer her elsewhere.

Lacking medical personnel, the goal of these centers is not to provide a woman with an array of options, but to convince her that having an abortion will be ruinous to her mental, physical, and emotional well-being. Have a history of breast cancer in the family? If you have an abortion, you’ve signed your death warrant.

While there have been campaigns against these centers and their advertisements, including legislation from Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) seeking to hold CPCs to “truth in advertising” standards, CPCs receive millions in federal grants ($60 million according to a 2006 Washington Post report), coming from taxpayer dollars, to fund their operations.

But besides the Bush administration’s long affiliation with abstinence-only education and obsession with re-opening the culture wars (on a side note, an interesting article from Frank Rich: with the defeat of three key anti-choice votes in South Dakota, Colorado, and California, has the American populace finally proved that they’re moving beyond this particular culture war?), we shouldn’t be surprised by their funding for these programs. After all, the paternalistic “protection” of a woman’s psyche, treating her as a woman-child who can’t be trusted to make these decisions on her own, has been at the forefront of reproductive legislation, appointments, and Supreme Court debates throughout the Bush administration:

1. The appointment of Dr. W. David Hager to the Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs in 2004. As The Nation wrote, Dr. Hager was the author of “Stress and the Woman’s Body and As Jesus Cared for Women, self-help tomes that interweave syrupy Christian spirituality with paternalistic advice on women’s health and relationships.”

2. The appointment of Eric Keroack as chief of family-planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services in 2006. As Susan Jacoby wrote in the Washington Post at the time, “In his view, anyone who has premarital sex is less likely to form a healthy relationship later in life because every orgasm somehow reduces a person’s capacity for deep emotional attachment. Dr. Keroack’s view of orgasm was approximately that of Gen. Jack D. Ripper in the movie Dr. Strangelove. Gen. Ripper, as you may recall, was concerned about the Russians stealing his ‘precious bodily fluids.'”

3. And finally, the most notorious and egregious example, was the ruling in Gonzales vs. Carhart, where the Supreme Court upheld the federal partial-birth abortion ban, primarily on the paternalistic claim of the Inconstant Female. As Dahlia Lithwick brilliantly argued at the time, “Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion is less about the scope of abortion regulation than an announcement of an astonishing new test: Hereinafter, on the morally and legally thorny question of abortion, the proposed rule should be weighed against the gauzy sensitivities of that iconic literary creature: the Inconstant Female.”

Ah yes, the fragile female psyche. Too weak to handle a few bad brushes with males, as the purity proponents argue, too fickle to be decisive on their own reproductive choices. We shouldn’t be surprised that CPCs have been federally funded under Bush, but we should hope that President-Elect Obama ushers in a new era where women are no longer treated as child-citizens.

–Kristen Loveland

These three researchy news items just in, courtesy CCF:

The Television Got Me Pregnant, by Tracy Clark-Flory, Salon, Nov. 4, 2008 — A new study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics. They found that, among sexually active teenagers, those who spend the most time watching racy programming like “Sex and the City” are twice as likely to become, or get a partner, pregnant. Researchers interviewed 718 sexually active teens aged 12 to 17 once a year for three years and, based on an analysis of 23 TV shows, estimated the amount of sexual content (including kissing, petting and sex) that they had been exposed to. About 12 percent of those who viewed the least amount of sexual programming became involved in a pregnancy, compared to 25 percent of those who consumed the most. A total of 58 girls got pregnant and 33 boys got a partner pregnant during the study.

Pregnancy Discrimination Complaints Jump, Especially for Women of Color, by Theresa Walsh Giarrusso, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Nov. 6, 2008 — Workplace discrimination against pregnant women is on the rise in a stunning way according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The National Partnership for Women and Families found that in 2007 working women filed 65 percent more complaints of pregnancy discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission than they had fifteen years earlier. The report also finds this new wave of discrimination affects women of color at a much higher rate than white women.

The Economics of Single Motherhood, by Kat Bergeron, Biloxi, Miss., Sun Herald, Nov. 6, 2008 — No other state has a higher rate of children born to single mothers than Mississippi, at 53.7 percent. That compares with the lowest state, Utah, at about 18 percent. Last year 46,456 Mississippi children were born, 24,939 to single mothers, and the numbers are rising. About 15 percent of those births are to teens aged 15 to 19. That is a slight drop from a decade ago but the trend is again upward, as are the rest of the unwed-mother statistics. Pete Walley, an economic analyst who studies and reports trends to state leaders, says that if Mississippi doesn’t change the numbers, it will permanently become No. 50 in income, health, education, economy, even in per capita traffic deaths.

In the past few weeks, a number of conservatives, most prominently Colin Powell, have endorsed Obama’s candidacy for president (talk about reaching across the aisle). Most recently came an endorsement from Jeffrey Hart, who was a Nixon and Regan speechwriter and who worked at the National Review for four decades.

The endorsement seemed unique and particularly significant for offering a strong defense of Roe v. Wade and embryonic stem cell research. Hart’s conservatism is of the Burkean kind, rooted in realistic assessment of social conditions and changes. He inextricably ties woman’s right to choice to the advancement of women’s equality. It makes one realize exactly how much the Republican party has morphed itself under Bush. I think Hart’s rationale deserves repeating in full:

Ever since Roe vs. Wade, abortion has been a salient controversy in our politics. But the availability of abortion is linked to the long advancement of women’s equality. Again, we are dealing with social change, and this requires understanding social change, a Burkean imperative that Obama understands.

On my Dartmouth campus, half the undergraduates are women. They do not want to have their plans derailed by an unwanted pregnancy. In Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, the Court ruled that the availability of abortion “enables women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the country.”

Though there is a tragic aspect to abortion, as Obama recognizes, women’s equality means that women have control of their reproductive capability. Men don’t worry about that. The fact is that 83 percent of elective abortions occur during the first trimester, and decline rapidly after that.

Both Obama and McCain support federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research, Obama more urgently. The conservative movement publications, following Bush, have been fiercely opposed. Such opposition required a belief that a cluster of cells (the embryo) the size of the period at the end of this sentence is as important (more important?) than a seriously ill human being.

I myself cannot fathom such a mentality.

In fact, embryonic stem cell research is being energetically pursued in the following nations: Israel, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, China cooperating with the EU. Privately funded and state funded laboratories are moving ahead vigorously.

Recently, Harvard announced a program that will be part of a multi-billion dollar science center to be established south of the Charles River, and will be able to supply sem cells to other laboratories. I call that Pro-Life.

The other day I wrote a post saying that Sarah Palin could call herself a feminist if she wanted to (more on that next week), but that she did not practice a viable feminism. I’ve previously written about how Palin’s policies are distinctly anti-women.

Women have the right to sexual freedom and privacy as well as the right to economic and social independence and advancement; a lack of reproductive rights represents a disconnect preventing women from fully taking advantage of either. A woman cannot be both sexually active and fulfill her economic/social plans without the assurance of birth control and the choice to abort if needed. In Slate, Linda Hirshman cited statistics on female teenagers’ economic prospects if they give birth at an early age:

The fact sheets from the well-respected National Campaign To Prevent Teen Pregnancy describe a bleak prospect: Even controlling for social and economic backgrounds, only 40 percent of teenage girls who bear children before age 18 go on to graduate from high school, compared with the 75 percent of teens who do not give birth until ages 20 or 21. Less than 2 percent of mothers who have children before age 18 will earn a college degree by age 30, compared with 9 percent of young women who wait until age 20 or 21 to have children.

But wait, there’s more: “Overall, teenage mothers—and their children—are also far more likely to live in poverty than females who don’t give birth until after age 20.”

I think it’s obvious that women must have access to reproductive choice. And because lack of information can have such an egregious and detrimental impact on a young woman’s future social standing, we must be prepared to speak openly and honestly about sexuality and the effect of unexpected or too-early pregnancy on women’s economic future in our society.

Yet, when it comes down to reproductive justice, the McCain camp is unwilling to address the reality of women’s multiple circumstances in today’s America. Palin doesn’t believe in abortion unless a woman’s life is at risk. McCain has created some fantasy world where thousands of women making up “illnesses” and “health risks” to fetch themselves abortions, using “air quotes” to describe women’s “health” concerns. Though Palin and McCain may claim that they are concerned about women’s issues, they have no idea about the needs of the majority women in America. It’s a dark realization, an especially dark one with November 4th looming.

But to add some levity, take a look at the ever-awesome Samanta Bee’s take on John McCain on women’s “health”:

(Wait for it, wait for it… It’s in there)

It’s hard to believe that election day is now less than a week away. The Economists’ Policy for Women’s Issues has graded the candidates nationally, but here with a special (and first!) edition of Global Exchange, Gwen and Tonni will be grading each candidate on their work in international issues that affect women. We are absolutely thrilled to have them address a topic that has been egregiously overlooked in this election. –Kristen

In just a few days the citizens of the United States of America will cast their ballots and determine their President, the future leader of the Free World (and really anything he so chooses). Today we consider what both candidates’ positions on reproductive health, international trade, the conflict in Darfur, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan mean for women internationally.

Toni Ann Brodber: Not too long ago I found myself explaining to a newly baptized American friend of mine why we foreigners watch every 4 years with bated breath as the American public decides our collective fate. Your policy often becomes our policy whether we like it or not. Some of us know this first hand. Frankly many of us faced near asphyxiation as a result of recent US policy decisions. Now, by the time we’ve learned how to breathe with barely any air there’s hope…and the cycle begins again.

Gwendolyn Beetham: I don’t know how many of my friends (including, you, Tonni!) from around the world have told me that they wish they could vote in this year’s election, not least because White House policies very much affect women around the world.

TB: No pressure.

With the current economic crisis, what the next president’s foreign policies will mean for women isn’t grabbing any headlines. There has been some coverage of how the candidate’s different policies will affect US women, but, like our friends at the Center for New Words, we’re of the opinion that there just hasn’t been enough. So, we’ve done the research for you. We’ve looked at how the candidates’ foreign policy positions will affect women globally, and have taken it one step further by grading the campaigns. Our findings may (or may not)surprise you.

Reproductive Health
The Global Gag Rule (also known as the Mexico City Policy) was a Reagan-era policy that made it possible to deny U.S. funding to organizations that that “provide abortion services or counsel, refer, or lobby on abortion”. One of George W. Bush’s first official acts in office was to reinstate this policy, which had been repealed during the Clinton Administration. This rule led to the scaling back of reproductive health programs in approximately 56 countries around the world, which, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights, “imperils women’s health and lives both in countries where abortion is legal, as well as where it is illegal.” Reports on the impact of the Gag Rule on women’s lives point to a shortage of contraceptives, clinic closings, loss of funds for HIV/AIDS education, and a rise in unsafe abortions in countries where the rule has been implemented.

According to a survey conducted by RH Reality Check in December 2007, Obama plans to overturn the Global Gag Rule and reinstate funding for UNFPA. McCain supports the Global Gag Rule and voted against repealing it in 2005. He has not addressed UNFPA directly, but, when asked in a town hall in Iowa whether he believed that contraceptives stopped the spread of HIV, McCain responded, “You’ve stumped me.”

Grade:
Obama/Biden: A
McCain/Palin: D-

Comments:
For the past seven years, the Bush Administration has also stopped funding the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), claiming that it “supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.” UNFPA’s office in China as an example of such support, despite the fact that a U.S. fact-finding mission to China found “no evidence that UNFPA has supported or participated in the management of a programme of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization”. More recently, USAID discontinued funding to Marie Stopes International (MSI) in several African countries due to the organization’s ties to UNFPA in China. (Curiously, such moral objections don’t seem to stop the government from letting China buy up much of the U.S.’s debt.) According to UNFPA, the $34 million in funding that the U.S. would give annual could prevent:

2 million unwanted pregnancies;
nearly 800,000 induced abortions;
4,700 maternal deaths;
nearly 60,000 cases of serious maternal illness;
over 77,000 infant and child deaths.

For more policies and grades, click to go past the jump!

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Elaine Lafferty, former editor of Ms. magazine and a Democrat, has been on Palin’s plane (EDIT: as a paid consultant) since soon after she was nominated and has offered a defense of the intelligence, feminism, and confidence of Palin in a piece at The Daily Beast titled “Sarah Palin’s a Brainiac.”

Of course this has created some furor in the feminist world, so here are my two cents. While Palin seems to have hit more of a stride now, all of her early exhibitions of intellectual work and curiosity showed someone unprepared for the job of VP, someone who had never thought about issues beyond the Alaskan borders, and someone who showed a lack of intellectual curiosity. Elaine may see someone different on the plane, but the public decides based on what they’re given access to, and their access to Palin has been minimal and, in the beginning, unsettling.

The other issue here is “What Is Feminism.” I believe that Palin thinks she is working for women–and to a certain extent her candidacy is good for feminism, forcing conservatives to support a powerful female candidate. Of course, we’ll see what the narrative on her “ability” and “intelligence” turns out to be after the election, when, if McCain loses, his camp may turn on her. Clearly in her own personal life, she has shown moxie and a great deal of confidence (over-confidence in taking on a job she wasn’t really ready for yet?).

Personally, I would call a woman who designates herself a feminist and who currently supports women’s progress in many areas of social/economic/political life, but not a woman’s right to choose, a feminist. I’m not sure who has the right to give or take that designator away, and I don’t think there’s a real point in fighting over the moniker itself. However, I do think we need to determine what is a viable feminism .

In our era, a woman, like any man, will have to work hard to achieve her desired social and economic standing. At the same time she has the right to a private sexuality. As a result, she may choose to prevent pregnancy or abort if pregnancy occurs at an undesired time, a time which will prevent her from achieving the social/economic independence and power that Palin claims women have a right to go after. Reproductive choice is today inherently tied into women’s status, and thus Palin’s feminism, a feminism that does not give a woman that right to choose, is not a viable feminism for our age.

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Hey all, I am completely excited to announce that GWP will be going global with a new column from Gwen and Tonni called Global Exchange. Global Exchange will be appearing the last Wednesday of every month. Here’s an intro from the authors so you know what to expect. — Kristen