Tag Archives: Health and Human Services

Morning-After Pill Still Strong

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June 20 marks the fifth anniversary of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of over-the-counter Plan B One-Step, a type of “morning-after pill” (itself a type of emergency contraception), without age restrictions. The first morning-after pill was approved by the FDA in 1998, but political backlash prevented easy access to it for more than a decade.

In 2011, the FDA was poised to approve over-the-counter access for Plan B for people 17 and older. The Department of Health and Human Services intervened, raising concerns that young girls might not be able to use the drug safely — even though studies have shown that Plan B is safer than taking an aspirin. The Obama administration, however, claimed that younger people still needed a prescription to ensure they understood the proper use of Plan B.

Access to Plan B gives teenagers another chance to avoid unwanted pregnancy.

The wrangling continued. In early April 2013, a federal district court judge dismissed that claim, stating that the Obama administration’s restrictions were a “politically-motivated effort to avoid riling religious groups and others opposed to making birth control available to girls.” On April 30, the FDA announced that the morning-after pill would be available without prescription to users 15 years of age and older.

The fight to expand over-the-counter access for the morning-after pill wasn’t over. Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, stated that “over-the-counter access to emergency contraceptive products has the potential to further decrease the rate of unintended pregnancies in the United States.” It wasn’t until June 2013 — five short years ago this week — that the FDA approved Plan B One-Step for over-the-counter sale without age restrictions, after the Department of Justice dropped its appeal. In February 2014, certain generic morning-after pills were similarly approved.

Today, let’s celebrate this expanded access to the morning-after pill by reviewing what we need to know about this important form of contraception. Continue reading →

Women Against Forced Breeding

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Justice for Jane demonstration. Photo: Karen Thurston

Why are these women, awash in a sea of “pink slips,” all of whom have had abortions, standing on the steps in front of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in late February 2018, demonstrating live on YouTube? Why are they demanding the firing of the director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, Scott Lloyd, the bureaucrat who forces young women to breed against their will?

Why are we protesting? Because we are not having it! And neither is Sen. Patty Murray, who took to the floor of the Senate to amplify our views, pointing out that, once again, our government has overstepped its authority, ignored the rule of law, and allowed one man’s ideology and/or religion to determine the rules for women in his custody. And neither is the House Pro-Choice Caucus having it, as members lined up soon after the protest to sign a “pink slip” to terminate Lloyd.

House Pro-Choice Caucus members Zoe Lofgren, Diana DeGette, and Jerrold Nadler sign “pink slip” to terminate Scott Lloyd. Photo: @RepJerryNadler

Here is the latest story in the long line of stories about our government’s disrespect for women.

Teenager Jane Doe escaped an abusive Salvadoran family and entered the United States as an undocumented, unaccompanied minor. She was detained in Texas and placed in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which is responsible for sheltering these youth. When she discovered she was pregnant she asked for an abortion. So, imagine Jane, alone in a foreign country, uncertain of her immigration prospects, but holding onto dreams for a better future for herself. Unfortunately for her, the ORR is headed by an ideologue named Scott Lloyd. Continue reading →

Tom Price, Secretary Against Health and Human Services?

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Protesters at Sen. McCain's Tucson office, December 20, 2016.

Protesters at Sen. McCain’s Tucson office, December 20, 2016.

On December 20, I took part in a demonstration opposing changes to Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act (ACA). We gathered outside Sen. John McCain’s Tucson office and told our health care stories. Almost all of us were women, but our stories included issues like the cost of diabetic testing supplies and insulin, the difficulties with employer-provided health plans that don’t allow specialized testing and care outside of their network, the prohibitive cost of medication for chronic conditions like AIDS, and my story of a CT scan (which I could only afford with government assistance) for something unrelated that found my kidney cancer. We were unable to meet with anyone from the office, but the written stories were given to staff and a later meeting was set up.

Tom Price is among those who could do the most harm to the greatest number of Americans.

I begin with this story because Tom Price, Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, doesn’t think the government has any place in our health care system. He fits very well among Mr. Trump’s choices to head government departments and agencies, a group of people who don’t believe in the work of their respective departments: Jeff Sessions for attorney general, who was denied a federal judgeship because of his racist comments and judicial overreach as Alabama’s attorney general; Scott Pruitt, who has sued the Environmental Protection Agency 13 times because he opposes regulations and doesn’t believe in climate science, to head that agency; Betsy DeVos for secretary of education, who has no background in education and has spent millions of dollars lobbying to get money away from public schools; and Rex Tillerson, who worked all his life for Exxon, which had a large deal with Russia put on hold by sanctions imposed after Russia annexed Crimea, as secretary of state, with the ability to lift those sanctions. And that’s just a sample.

Since 2009, Price, an orthopedic surgeon, has been a member of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), a group whose members sign a “declaration of independence” renouncing payments from third-party payers, whether government or private insurers. Their journal has published articles opposing taxes on cigarettes, linking abortion and breast cancer, doubting whether HIV causes AIDS, and opposing mandatory vaccinations. They oppose regulating medical practice even as far as hospital peer reviews, and are fiercely for free-market medicine. Continue reading →

Pro-Choice Friday News Rundown

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  • orange-kool-aid-man-205As all of us know by now, the moronic stooges of the incoming administration pose a serious threat to our reproductive rights. Trump’s pick for HHS secretary, Tom Price, has twice co-sponsored federal legislation that would define fertilized human eggs as legal persons. Vice President-elect Pence co-sponsored these legislative attempts. Paul Ryan has supported such legislation as well! Is it realistic that the push to legally recognize an egg as a “person” could succeed? Could stem cell research lose federal funding? Could Price make it easy for insurance companies to stop covering birth control? Yes to all of the above. (Scientific American)
  • There has been a lot of chatter about “faithless electors” refusing to grant their states’ electoral votes to Donald Trump next week. Personally speaking, I’m keeping my expectations low and preparing for the orange version of the Kool-Aid man to be in office come January 20, 2017. (Time)
  • Did you know that the fear-mongering weasels in Texas drafted a cockamamie booklet full of idiotic, disproven lies called “A Woman’s Right To Know” that is required to be given to women seeking abortions? Of the many blatant falsehoods cited in the book, they try to scare women into thinking having an abortion increases one’s risk of breast cancer. Fun fact: it doesn’t. (Huffington Post)
  • Republican legislators in Ohio, completely IGNORING the fact that federal courts have previously deemed such laws unconstitutional, advanced a law to outlaw abortion as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. Which is before most women even show signs of being pregnant. Infamously anti-choice Gov. John Kasich vetoed this bill and instead passed a 20-week ban based on the notion that this is when a fetus can feel “pain.” (NBC News)
  • Notably, the American Medical Association concluded more than a decade ago that fetal perception of pain is “unlikely before the third trimester.” They concluded that the capacity for pain probably does not even exist before 29 or 30 weeks. (Fact Check)
  • Various Arizona artists are planning a “Nasty Women” art exhibit in downtown Phoenix January 14 to 20, and they’re donating the proceeds to Planned Parenthood Arizona! (Phoenix New Times)
  • Our Knight in Shining Brown Armor, Barack Obama, just made it super hard for individual states to defund Planned Parenthood! (NY Times)
  • Donald Trump doesn’t have time to be bothered with daily intelligence briefings, but he does have time to meet with rappers. #Priorities (Rolling Stone)
  • 30 million people will lose their insurance if Obamacare is repealed. Thirty million. (NBC News)
  • Maybe this scathing Trump op-ed in Teen Vogue will make you optimistic about the next generation. (Teen Vogue)
  • Ya know what I don’t wanna see when I walk into a public restroom at a restaurant, bar, hospital, hotel, or school? Anti-abortion graffiti propaganda written all over the damn wall. Well, Oklahoma passed an atrociously asinine law requiring anti-abortion rhetoric to be posted on bathroom walls in public restrooms. And business owners would have to pay the costs for this nonsense! The state claims it wants to achieve an “abortion-free society.” Wow. That sounds amazing. Know what will help get us there? Widespread access to affordable birth control and comprehensive sex education in all schools. Oklahoma notoriously does not support either of those initiatives, though. (NY Mag)
  • Speaking of Oklahoma, they lost a battle in the TRAP war. (Slate)
  • Roe v. Wade will be fine (according to this optimistic writer, who is banking on the longevity of the very old liberal members of SCOTUS). (Slate)
  • In my last rundown I shared the news of Texas trying to force the burial of fetal remains (only the ones resultant from abortion, not miscarriage — cause apparently those are less sacred and valued to legislators). Well that’s canceled. For now. (Texas Tribune)
  • Guess what? Abortion does not harm women’s mental health. The medical field has spoken. Definitively. (NY Times)

Pro-Choice Friday News Rundown

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Won the popular vote by more than 2 million. Just sayin'.

Won the popular vote by more than 2 million. Just sayin’.

I hate being the bearer of bad news. Unfortunately, it feels like I’ll be showering our dear readers with doom and gloom for the next month, as well as the full 208 weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency.

First, let’s get the worst out of the way:

  • We at Planned Parenthood are now in grave danger of being defunded. The president-elect has promised this and the Republican-controlled Congress will likely be more than gung-ho to gut us once and for all. I don’t shill for donations often (at all, really) on this blog, but if you can find it in your heart (and wallet) to help us, we and the millions of women we serve would be so thankful. (NY Mag)
  • Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services, Tom Price, is a creep who espouses radical beliefs about “personhood,” thinks women should have no control over their bodies, doesn’t support insurance coverage of birth control, and is on the “defund Planned Parenthood” train. (The Daily Beast)
  • He’s also a Lying McLiarFace who asserts that “not one woman” ever struggled to afford birth control. (The Atlantic)
  • As of now, Hillary Clinton has trumped The Donald in total votes by more than 2 million (and counting). That isn’t a small margin. It’s “YUGE” and “bigly” (as the president-elect would say). Our soon-to-be commander in chief is not taking kindly to the news that he LOST the popular vote by such a large margin: The reckless, thin-skinned toddler in a 70-year-old body hopped on Twitter (his favorite platform) to assert that, had “millions” of people not voted illegally, he would have won the popular vote.

    First of all — this is a highly dangerous statement as there is literally ZERO evidence of “millions” of people voting illegally. However, if there were even the slightest possibility this could be true (it isn’t), how in THE WORLD can he take the giant leap to posit that everyone voting illegally voted for Hillary Clinton? Couldn’t it be equally possible that these millions of (non-existent) fraudulent voters voted for him, which calls into question whether he REALLY won the election? Funny how he only tosses out accusations of widespread voter fraud when it threatens his ability to claim victory and deem himself the winner. (NBC News)

  • Hillary Clinton wasn’t just failed by the Electoral College. Widespread voter suppression tactics (enacted by Republicans in 2010, right after Barack Obama’s history-making win — coincidence, I’m sure!) closed down at least 868 polling places nationwide and kept potentially millions of people (mostly minorities … probably another coincidence!) from voting. (WaPo)
  • Texas: Epicenter of anti-choice, anti-woman malarkey. They stay on the front lines of the War on Women! The abhorrent legislators there have decided that beginning December 19, all fetuses surgically aborted must be buried or cremated, regardless of gestational stage. Gov. Greg Abbott is claiming this measure is being taken for the “enhanced protection of the health and safety of the public.” Yet this mandate doesn’t apply to women who have miscarried in their own homes? How is this related to health and safety, then? Jeez … I’m sure their aim is not to SHAME women or make them suffer for choosing to abort, right? And I’m sure it’s definitely NOT meant to make abortion providers jump through potentially insurmountable obstacles in finding nearby funeral homes willing to provide fetus funeral services, which can cost upward of $2,000? Oh, and I must mention, Mike Pence did this in Indiana during his tenure as governor. (Broadly)
  • Speaking of vice president-elect Bad Hombre, he is practically dancing on Fidel Castro’s grave and had the gall to refer to him as a “tyrant.” Friendly reminder — Gov. Pence is the man who supported putting a woman in jail for having a miscarriage. #PotMeetKettle (ITV)
  • Could the orange menace known as Donald Trump ax our copay-free birth control unilaterally with no help from Congress? Unfortunately, yes. (Vox)
  • The megalomaniac in chief’s ultra-petty Twitter account is a frightening death spiral into madness. This man is not OK mentally, and that should terrify us all. (Mother Jones)
  • And his cabinet is a crapshow too! It’s shaping up to be the most conservative in decades. (Politico)

Speaking of Trump’s cabinet, I can’t “get the worst out of the way” until I introduce you to our future attorney general: Continue reading →

Mythbusting: Does Emergency Contraception Cause Abortion?

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[T]he Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported recently that one in nine sexually active women, or 5.8 million women, has used emergency contraceptive pills, such as Plan B. Emergency contraception is a woman’s back-up method to prevent an unwanted pregnancy, and women report using it when they feel their contraceptive method has failed, such as a broken condom, or they do not use a regular contraceptive like birth control pills.

The latest scientific evidence shows that Plan B works mainly by delaying ovulation — not by affecting a fertilized egg.

Some conservative politicians have been stating publicly that emergency contraceptive pills (ECPs), such as Plan B, cause abortions. They may believe that life begins at conception (fertilization of the egg by the sperm) and argue that ECPs disrupt a fertilized egg’s ability to implant in the uterus, which they consider equivalent to abortion. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and experts from the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health consider a pregnancy to be established when a fertilized egg settles itself on the wall of the uterus — implantation. A woman is most likely to become pregnant when she ovulates, which is usually about two weeks before her next period. Sperm can live for up to three days. So, if an egg is fertilized, there are still possibly six to 12 days before the implantation may take place.

When ECPs were first developed and information about them was submitted to the FDA for market approval, the drug manufacturers included mention of every possible mechanism on how the pill might work to prevent pregnancy. This included wording about preventing or delaying ovulation, making the sperm or egg less able to meet, and possibly preventing implantation. However, the latest scientific evidence has shown that ECPs such as Plan B mainly work by delaying ovulation — Plan B does not affect implantation and has no effect on existing pregnancies. Several prominent researchers have stated that if in fact Plan B disrupted implantation, it would be 100 percent effective at preventing a pregnancy, and that is not the case. Continue reading →

That Was Then, This Is Now: A History of Emergency Contraception

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plan bThe following guest post comes to us via Morganne Rosenhaus, community engagement coordinator for Planned Parenthood Arizona.

For more than 10 years, emergency contraception has been the “poster child” for what it looks like when politics trumps science, again and again and again. Women’s health advocates, women’s health care providers, and researchers have argued for years (and two different presidential administrations) about the safety of emergency contraception and the importance of its place on the shelf, between the pregnancy tests and the condoms.

The age restrictions on emergency contraception have been in flux. Where do things currently stand?

In 1999, Plan B was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a prescription-only product (all new drugs are first approved as prescription-only). In 2003, the manufacturer of Plan B filed an application with the FDA to make it available over-the-counter (OTC). An FDA Advisory panel voted to recommend Plan B for OTC access with no age restriction. Then political turmoil ensued. You can read all the details here in this handy timeline.

In 2006, Plan B was approved for OTC access, but with an age restriction, which meant men and women 18 years and older could purchase Plan B at the pharmacy, but only with an ID providing proof of age. The Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) filed a lawsuit against the FDA over the ridiculousness of placing a scientifically unfounded age restriction on emergency contraception, which eventually led to the lowering of the restriction to 17 years. The FDA was also asked to re-review their rationale for imposing an age restriction in the first place.

Then things got worse. Let’s fast forward to 2011. Continue reading →