Tag Archives: CPC

Pro-Choice Friday News Rundown

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  • Republican legislators in Arizona sure have a lot of nerve. They want to mandate that doctors performing abortions ask “why” a woman is terminating her pregnancy. What is the “why” behind this invasive questioning other than wanting to intrude upon the privacy of a woman undergoing a perfectly legal medical procedure? (AZ Central)
  • We at Planned Parenthood will always stress the importance of comprehensive sex education in schools. If you happen to think that sex education isn’t crucial to children’s development, I welcome you to read this disturbing but informative piece over at the New York Times. In the age of widespread smartphone access, young, impressionable kids are learning about sex from the worst source possible — online porn. (NY Times)
  • Speaking of the NYT, why does columnist David Brooks have such a fundamental misunderstanding of late-term abortions (and the fact that only slightly more than 1 percent of abortions are performed at 21 weeks or later, according to the Guttmacher Institute) and the reasons women have them? This is a highly educated, privileged man with access to soooo many educational resources and statistics on the subject … It’s almost like he’s being willfully ignorant! (Slate)
  • How Trump’s Global Gag Rule Is Devastating Abortion Rights & So Much More One Year Later (Bustle)
  • Alarming news: Head and neck cancers caused by HPV are expected to outnumber cervical cancer cases in the next few years. (U.S. News & World Report)
  • Additionally, men infected with HPV-16, the type responsible for most HPV-related cancers, are 20 times more likely to be reinfected with the same type of HPV after one year. (Science Daily)
  • Thank you, Cosmo, for highlighting Planned Parenthood’s efforts to increase access to telemedicine abortion in 2018. Ensuring women have choices and access to safe procedures will always be a meaningful endeavor for us. (Cosmopolitan)
  • Women who were denied an abortion are three times more likely to be unemployed than women who were able to access one. Women’s access to reproductive health care has an undeniable economic impact! How many times do we have to highlight this connection? (Rewire)
  • Excuse me if I sound radical, but Trump and the Republicans’ war on Medicaid is tantamount to genocide of the poor. (Salon)

Pro-Choice Friday News Rundown

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  • For the last month and a half, the cruel degenerates of the Trump administration have tried to block Jane Doe, a pregnant, undocumented 17-year-old, from obtaining an abortion. This has honestly been such a heartbreaking story to follow. A little background on her story: Jane (from Central America) attempted to cross the U.S. border into Texas by herself. Before she left, according to reports, she allegedly watched her parents beat her older sister after learning she was pregnant, hitting her with cables and firewood until she miscarried. After being apprehended by immigration officials and taken to a refugee shelter, Jane Doe learned she, too, was pregnant. Unfortunately, because she’s a minor without parental consent, she needed to petition a judge in order to terminate her pregnancy. With the help of an attorney, she obtained permission from the judge but was then refused transport to the medical facility by the Office of Refugee Resettlement — now run by a controlling, anti-choice zealot installed by the Trump administration. For the last seven weeks, she has been at the mercy of these cretins, with her pregnancy advancing against her will. After myriad legal steps, she was finally granted an abortion on Wednesday morning. In summing up this story, I must highlight the words of the author of this piece: “It’s sickening that a helpless teenager, who traveled unknown miles seeking safety, has been denied medical treatment because the U.S. government sees her fetus — and not her — as ‘a child in our care’ deserving of full legal protection.” Sickening indeed. (Broadly)
  • Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) let Scott Lloyd (the current director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement) have it on the matter of Jane Doe. Get ’em Pramila! (The Opposition)
  • Speaking of Scott Lloyd, this utter asshat has suggested in multiple opinion articles that women receiving contraception through federal funding should have to sign a “pledge” promising not to have an abortion and that the Supreme Court’s rulings on abortion infringe on men’s “right to procreation.” Is this punk serious?? (Buzzfeed)
  • Vice interviewed Jane Doe about her ordeal and what it’s been like to have her body be at the mercy of the U.S. government. (Vice)
  • Jane Doe also wrote a powerful open letter that I think should be required reading for everyone. I hope with every fiber of my being that this brave girl will have a bright future. (Jane’s Due Process)
  • This list of the “most sexually diseased states in the U.S.” puts Arizona at No. 19. Obviously it’s not great to be in the Top 20 but at least we’re not No. 1. That distinction goes to Alaska! (Backgroundcheck.org)
  • I have to be honest about how personally devastating it is to type this sentence: “Never in its history has the nation’s family planning safety net been in such jeopardy as it is today.” (American Journal of Public Health)
  • And to compound upon that, please be aware that the GOP is now looking to potentially ban abortion at 6 weeks — which is well before many women even KNOW they’re pregnant. Ugghhhh! (Refinery 29)
  • Speaking of the GOP, ever wonder when they’ll just cop to the fact that they just plain don’t think women should be sexually active? (Marie Claire)
  • I’ve talked about maternal mortality quite a bit in these rundowns over the years, but this even surprised me — “Data collection on maternal deaths is so flawed and under-funded that the federal government no longer even publishes an official death rate.” (ProPublica)
  • I’m not sure if we have any readers in Massachusetts but if so — beware of the fake clinic trying to trick you into believing they provide abortions. It’s a cruel trick and they must be stopped. (Rewire)

Pro-Choice Friday News Rundown

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  • With all of the shenanigans that have transpired in North Carolina over the years (their racially discriminatory voting debacles especially), it’s nice to be able to highlight the state for doing something positive for a change. North Carolina has managed to close its black-white maternal death gap. This is amazing and so important. (Vox)
  • I’m sure we all remember (and would like to forget) the Jan Brewer era? Well, friendly reminder: Arizona Already Tried What the GOP Wants to Do to Medicaid. It Was a Disaster. (Slate)
  • Our nomination for sentence of the week: “Whatever maternity care his mother got when she was pregnant with him helped him grow into the healthy, thriving, intolerable jerkoff he is today.” HA! (XX Factor)
  • Christian crisis pregnancy centers in Illinois are suing the state because they want to keep lying to vulnerable pregnant women about their options. Let’s hope they catch the ‘L’ they deserve. (Chicago Tribune)
  • The majority of women who have abortions are already mothers. They share their stories about why they chose to terminate their pregnancies. (Elle)
  • Parents are doing a mediocre job teaching teens about love, sex, and the misogyny that permeates our culture. Eighty-seven percent of teenage girls have experienced harassment, abuse, or assault. This is not OK. (NBC News)
  • Due to the fact that we have a thin-skinned narcissist with the restraint and civility of a toddler in the White House, there are obviously A LOT of concerns about national politics. However, we can’t lose sight of the fact that local politics have a much greater effect on most of our daily lives — especially for women. NARAL President Kaylie Hanson Long details why. (Think Progress)
  • Literally ALL the medical groups hate Trumpcare. Have they no compassion for the rich people who would be further enriched by GOP tax cuts?!? (NBC News)
  • Wow — a majority of GOP voters largely support Obamacare’s birth control mandate. Surprising! (The Hill)
  • While conservative politicians are doing everything within their power to ensure women have less access to birth control to prevent unintended pregnancy and less access to abortion to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, the foster care system is bursting at the seams with child victims of the opioid crisis. I personally have spent a great deal of time looking for SOME kind of evidence that the “pro-life” politicians who seek to restrict women’s rights are also advocating somehow for these children. Unfortunately I’m at a loss. Their privileged, traditional, nuclear families aren’t fostering them. They aren’t publicly advocating for them vocally. They aren’t trying to bring about meaningful change to the foster care system. Oddly, it seems like the “pro-life” advocacy only applies to CURRENT, not former, residents of a womb. Sad. (Mother Jones)
  • Well, this is heart-wrenching and tragic: In developing nations, 214 million women want to prevent pregnancy but have no contraception. How will poverty ever be eradicated if women have no control over their fertility, limited ability to prioritize their existing children and give them better opportunities, and no meaningful path toward economic independence? (XX Factor)

Book Club: Generation Roe

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Like many in her generation, Sarah Erdreich thought the freedoms that Roe v. Wade guaranteed were secure. A child of the post-Roe era, she learned that the landmark decision had legalized abortion, striking down many of the state and federal restrictions that had previously forced countless women to risk their lives and health in the hands of underground abortion providers — providers whose work was not accountable to any professional medical standards.

What Erdreich learned was true, but it wasn’t the entire truth. Legalizing abortion was one thing. Guaranteeing access to it was another. After college, graduate school, and a series of abandoned career starts, Erdreich ended up in Washington, D.C., working for the hotline for the National Abortion Federation. Her job changed her perspective, opening her eyes to the extent that restrictions and barriers still diverted many people from the legal procedure of abortion. It was that experience that inspired her to write Generation Roe: Inside the Future of the Pro-Choice Movement (Seven Stories Press, 2013).

Generation Roe is worthwhile reading for those who want to build on the legacy of Roe v. Wade.

Generation Roe assesses where we are today, 40 years after Roe, with a sobering look at the continuing threats to reproductive freedom. In the decade that Roe was decided, 77 percent of all U.S. counties lacked an abortion provider. Today, that figure has jumped to 87 percent, while the number of women of childbearing age in those counties has increased from 27 to 35 percent. That’s one of many indicators Erdreich uses to capture the contradictions of the post-Roe era. Those like her who grew up after 1973 have never known what it’s like to live without the availability of legal abortion. But that availability has been curtailed by everything short of overturning Roe, from legal means, such as statutes mandating medically inaccurate pre-abortion counseling — plus waiting periods of 24 hours or more — to illegal means, such as threatening abortion providers and their patients.

Unfortunately, while so much significance can be pegged on Roe v. Wade, and while those few syllables can serve as a sort of shorthand for reproductive freedom, there isn’t a counterpart that succinctly captures its myriad curtailments. As a result, many of those curtailments are left out of the conversation. It takes a news hound to follow what’s happening in the 50 states on the abortion front and to have a thorough sense of where that leaves people who seek abortion services. “I absolutely think most people are not aware of what the realities are in terms of barriers to access,” says law student Kyle Marie Stock, one of the many people Erdreich interviewed for her book. Continue reading →