Anti-Choice Legislation in the States

I have an interview with Nancy Northrup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, over at The American Prospect today on upcoming anti-choice state legislation. Check it out.

I Was on C-SPAN

The panel I moderated yesterday at Campus Progress' National Conference on state legislation on reproductive rights was on C-SPAN. Check it out.

Illinoise on Reproductive Justice

The Illinois state legislature has a really good bill on reproductive justice in the Illinois State Assembly. But I hear that now that the bill has passed out of committee, the anti-choice committee is coming out in full force, and state legislators are overwhelmingly lining up on their side. The bill proposed is the kind of thing we should be seeing more of -- ensuring basic reproductive rights for all women -- but just aren't. Veronica Arreola outlined what the bill would do really well for RH Reality Check:

• Ensure that each individual has as many options as possible when it comes to making decisions about their own reproductive heath care.
• Reduce unintended pregnancies through comprehensive sex education rather than abstinence-only-until-marriage programs.
• Protect and expand access to birth control (including emergency contraception) for all individuals in Illinois.
• Ensure that the government cannot interfere with an individual's right to have a child or to terminate a pregnancy.

Ultimately this bill is about giving women the power to make their own choices about their reproductive health care.

Even if the bill doesn't pass, what is good about these debates that have been repeatedly been popping up in state legislatures all around the country, is that people are beginning to talk -- really talk -- about what they want public policy around reproductive health to be.

Blog for Choice Day: Pro-Choice Hope for a New Administration

Today is the 36th anniversary of the infamous Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade. It is a very important day to both pro-choice and anti-abortion activists, but most of America is preoccupied with the release of the Oscar nominations. But despite the public's inattention to the subject of abortion access, it is one of the foundations of freedom in our country today. As Ruth Bader Ginsburg laid out in her dissent of the court's decision in Gonzalez v. Carhart, a case that confirmed the so-called Partial Birth Abortion Ban as constitutional, women must have control over her reproduction to have full and equal access to citizenship.

The list of tasks for this new administration is long, but today is a day for many pro-choice activists like myself to ask the administration to make choices about women. My list is long as well, mostly because women's health has been under attack for the last eight years.

1. Rescind what is known as the "global gag rule." This regulation, one of Bush's first acts in office, withholds funds from any group that also provides abortion services or includes abortion as an option for women seeking family planning, even if the U.S. funds aren't used for abortion itself. This has caused massive budget cuts in organizations like Planned Parenthood International. When clinics like these shut down, women in third world countries often have no where else to turn to for family planning or other medical care.

2. Repeal the Hyde amendment. This is a domestic law that forbids federal funds from getting used on abortion services. Although many may not want "their" tax dollars used for abortions, abortions, like other kinds of health care to poor people, are extremely difficult to fund privately and repealing this amendment would do more to increase access to family planning to poor women than almost any other action.

3. Fully fund Title X. Family planning funds have remained roughly stagnant since the beginning of the Bush administration. Just to get the funds to where they were, adjusted for inflation, in 2000, the Obama administration must allocate more than $700 million (the previous administration allocated $300 million), and even that number doesn't do enough to hire translators or bilingual staff at family planning clinics, increase the service to women who might require more attention, or allow family planning clinics to open in states where there may be so few.

4. Restore U.S. funding to the UNFPA. As Michelle Goldberg outlines in her forthcoming book, antichoice activists used false allegations of UNFPA officials using coercive abortion practices in China to de-fund the United Nations Population Fund. By restoring funding to the organization, it would show the world that the United States is willing to become a leader on family planning again.

5. End funding to abstinence-only programs in the United States. Such programs have been proven, through study after study, to be ineffective at reducing teen pregnancy or delaying age of sexual initiation. Our young people deserve the information they need to use condoms and other contraception when they do decide to become sexually active.

6. Begin looking at ways to increase access to abortion and family planning services, rather than just stopping the losses. Many women today, especially women in southern states where abortion is unpopular, have a serious lack of access to abortion and family planning clinics. The most recent study shows that more than 87 percent of counties in the United States don't have an abortion clinic and Mississippi and South Dakota only have one in the entire state.

7. Include women's reproductive health care in any future reforms to the health care system overall. Women use health care very differently than men. Women visit doctors more often and spend more on prescriptions because of birth control and other contraception. Pregnant women often aren't covered under individual insurance plans, and even if they are, they pay more for marginal care. Women need to be fully included in future health care reforms.

8. Make reproductive health something that everyone cares about. There is often an urge to allow reproductive health groups to be the ones to care and talk about access issues, but reproductive health and family planning affects everyone. By leaving the burden on certain groups to talk about these issues, they often become ignored or marginalized in public discourse. They are considered less important or serious than other issues like foreign policy or the economy when reproductive health and rights is intricately linked with these issues.

9. Become a world leader on reproductive health and rights. Women around the world suffer from the inequalities of their societies, are subjected to rape as a weapon and are forced into child marriages or genital cutting before they can make the decisions for themselves. By becoming a world leader on addressing these issues, we can show the world that we are a humanitarian nation once again.

10. Develop new methods of contraception. There are many available options of contraception today, but they're not enough. Many hormonal contraceptions make people sick. We need to develop new ways for people to access contraception -- and yes, this includes men.

UPDATE: This list is by no means definitive. I ask you to leave your requests to the new administration in comments.

Congressman Encourages Poor Women to be Sterilized

Via Satyam at Think Progress, a Louisiana congressman wants to pass a law where the government would pay poor women $1,000 to tie their fallopian tubes. In a move that's uncomfortably reminiscent of the eugenics movement back in the 1960s where black women were forcibly sterilized, Rep. John LaBruzzo (D-LA) says in the Times-Picayune that people will be "excited" about his new plan because clearly traditional family planning "repeatedly failed to solve the problem."

This taps into something I wrote about earlier this month, inspired by how conservatives are often supportive of some women's reproductive rights (like Bristol Palin) as long as they're young, at least middle class, and white. Others receive paternalistic lecturing about how they need mandatory Gardasil vaccines (even as conservatives seek to prevent their daughters from getting the vaccine) and are discouraged from procreating. The point is that we need to be supportive of all reproductive choices of all women. That is the definition of reproductive justice.

Cross posted on Pushback.

White Privilege and Reproductive Justice

Tim Wise, a prominent anti-racism thinker, published an article on white privilege in the election. One line I thought was particularly good was this:

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because "every family has challenges," even as black and Latino families with similar "challenges" are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

This has been something on my mind for a while ever since the Bristol Palin pregnancy story broke. I just finished a review of Jeanne Flavin's Our Bodies, Our Crimes (NYU Press) for Bitch, and a good deal of Flavin's argument is about how race and class determine how supportive of society is of your reproductive decisions. Setting aside the icky eugenics-style past of attempting mass sterilization of women of color, today the stereotypes of "welfare queens" have a lot to do with irresponsible reproduction.

One could well think of this recent story about the Bush administration requiring immigrants to take the HPV vaccine. The traditional conservative mantra on this issue tends to freak out at the idea of putting this vaccine into their daughters -- but these same people are entirely in favor of vaccinating a group of people that tends to be overwhelmingly Hispanic. The underlying assumption here is that our perfect, white daughters are beautiful and pure and don't need to be vaccinated against icky nasty HPV. The implication about immigrants is too nasty to even type. What comes out of this is a paternalistic desire do control women's sexual health. For some it's okay, and for others they are a "burden."

In the end, what it means for me to be pro-choice is to support the reproduction and sexual health of all women, regardless of race or class. Rather than trying to control the reproduction of one set of women and then get very defensive about the "choices" of another, we need to make sure all women have the tools they need to make educated and safe choices about their reproductive health.

Humanizing Anti-Choice Folks

Via Megan at Jezebel, More magazine’s extremely humanizing profile of South Dakota anti-abortion activist Leslee Unruh is fascinating. The author, whose uncle was an ob-gyn killed by an anti-abortion fanatic, managed to make friends with Unruh, who was the driving force behind South Dakota’s abortion ban that was overturned in 2006, and who is working on a campaign for another abortion ban on the ballot this fall. Megan, who was surprised by Unruh’s charisma and the fact that she didn’t condemn the author’s uncle to hell, asked if there was an Unruh for feminists and the left. But Unruh is fascinating because she’s unique.

There are thousands of women who are the equivalent of Unruh on the other side, including the author of the profile. It’s because she’s a fervent activist against abortion and for chastity (or its modern equivalent, “purity”) that Unruh is unlike almost any American today. Guttmacher Institute research shows that nearly all Americans (95 percent) have sex before marriage, 98 percent of women use birth control during their reproductive lives, and the majority (nearly 60 percent) of Americans believe abortion should always or usually be legal. The abortion ban that Unruh fought for in South Dakota in 2006 was defeated by 10 points. That’s not a small margin.

In other words, Unruh’s fervent campaigning against sex, birth control, and abortion makes her one of the biggest outliers in America. Unruh is the face of a campaign that’s marginal in nearly every sense of the word. Although many people who want to protect reproductive choice fear the power that anti-choice activists have gained in recent years, it’s important to remember just how strange these people are. They’re not monsters, damning everyone who has sex to hell, but they do hold views that are extremely different from everyone else’s.

We don’t have to look far to find an Unruh on the left. Nearly everyone knows one.

Cross posted at pushback.

APA: There’s No Such Thing as "Post-Abortion Syndrome"

Via Lynn Harris at Broadsheet, the American Psychological Association has determined (PDF) that “abortion hurts women” rhetoric is bunk. The APA, which was to have adopted the new standard this morning, says in its draft language “the relative risks of mental health problems are no greater than the risks among women who deliver an unplanned pregnancy.” In other words, forcing women to carry through with an unplanned pregnancy is just as risky for mental health as it is to have an abortion.

This is particularly significant, because as Reva Segal and Sarah Blustain reported in The American Prospect in 2006, those in favor of an abortion ban in South Dakota have based much of their argument on the idea that abortion is harmful to women’s mental health. If the flagship mental health professionals organization, the APA, has determined that abortion is no risker to mental health than an unwanted pregnancy, then much of the reasoning behind the abortion ban has evaporated. In fact, by eliminating women’s ability to successfully take control of their reproductive health, the proponents of the ban are putting women at greater mental health risk.

Cross posted at pushback.

State Department Skeptical of Midwifery

The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that people born in their own homes with a midwife may not be recognized as American citizens and denied important documentation like passports. The new practice has raised some panic in the southern part of Texas, where Latinos are commonly born in their own homes with a midwife. Yesterday the National Latina Institute for Reproductive health issued a statement that called this determination "racist and unfair." The statement went on to say, "This practice unfairly targets Latino citizens on the border and those who were born to parteras or midwives in private residences, a common practice among Latinos."

This is pretty clearly evidence that among certain groups, "American" means something very specific. Even how we view childbirth has become strongly influenced by culture. Midwives used to be extremely common, even among white Americans, but sometime before the middle of the 20th Century, middle-class Americans began giving birth in hospitals. Now, the State Department has determined that this is the norm, and has deemed all others with different beliefs or cultural practices un-American.

"Somos parte de la solución"

As the international AIDS conference wraps up today in Mexico City, I realized I didn't link to one of the most significant parts that I heard about. Becky Johnson over at RH Reality Check has a great post on a session in which Elena Reynaga, former sex worker and activist today who appeared at the conference wearing a bright pink T-shirt with white lettering that read "Somos parte de la solución" ("We are part of the solution"). Today, Reynaga works on AIDS issues worldwide.

A video of her presentation (which I understand is very powerful, although I don't speak Spanish so I can't understand it) can be found here on Kaiser Family Foundation's website. Scroll to 1:05:00 when her speech begins. I don't know of a transcript and translation, but I'd love to see one if it's out there.

WAM!: Reproductive Rights/Justice Framework

One of the most useful parts of this panel is that the women on this panel (Emily Douglas of RH Reality Check, Aimée R. Thorne-Thomse from the Pro-Choice Public Education Project, Cristina Page of Birth Control Watch, and Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon) are young and contemporary, but they've also lived though the journey from the pro- and anti-choice framework to reproductive justice. A lot of the national messaging in the 1990s was around privacy and coathangers, but that messaging was largely ineffective to young women, especially young women of color. The pro-choice movement still struggles to encompass the social and reproductive justice aspect of where the debate is now. By framing reproductive rights around health care access, reproductive technology, and environmental justice, the pro-choice movement can blow the pro-lifers out of the water. The problem is that so much of the institutional framework is still focused on Roe v. Wade -- a name that few young women these days really identify with.

Page brought up the history behind the op-ed she co-authored with a pro-lifer from Michigan called "The Right to Agree." She thought the facts were on the side of the pro-choice movement and not on the side of the pro-life movement. (Page noted that she differentiates between people in America that are pro-life and the pro-life movement that is largely made up of radicals.)

Changing the framework around reproductive rights and reproductive justice. Page pointed out that the mainstream media is uncomfortable with conversation around abortion. (Jon Stewart refused to have Page on his show when she wrote her book How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America because "abortion just isn't funny.") And, as Amanda pointed out, it's hard to drive the fight when you constantly have to respond to attacks by the pro-life movement like the whole "abortion hurts women" framework.