Meet Our Candidates: Gilbert Romero for State Representative, LD 21

Posted on July 11, 2018 by Matt

The time to fight back — and fight forward — for reproductive justice is fast approaching. The stakes are high in this year’s state election, with candidates for governor, secretary of state, attorney general, and other races on the ballot. The Arizona primary election will be held August 28, 2018, and voters need to be registered by July 30 to cast their ballots. Reproductive health has been under attack, both nationally and statewide, but Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona has endorsed candidates who put our health and our rights first. Get to know them now in our series of “Meet Our Candidates” interviews, and make your voice heard in 2018!

[J]ust weeks before he announced his candidacy for state representative late last year, Gilbert Romero was hitting the pavement for another campaign — the nationwide push for the Medicare for All Act. Although he’s only in his mid-20s, Romero has ample experience as a canvasser and community organizer in the Phoenix metro area. In addition to Medicare expansion, he has been an advocate and activist for the rights of working families and immigrant communities.

“It’s a fundamental right for people to have autonomy over their bodies and lives.”

Romero also brings “deep Arizona roots” to his candidacy, as he puts it on his campaign website. His family has been in Phoenix’s West Valley for generations — and, lately, that’s where he’s been going door to door to talk to community members. Romero seeks to represent Legislative District 21, which includes the West Valley communities of Peoria, Surprise, El Mirage, Sun City, and Youngtown.

A recent incident in the first of those cities puts in sharp focus the need for candidates like Romero, who is also an ardent supporter of reproductive rights. Peoria made national headlines last month when a pharmacist there refused to fill a prescription for local first-grade teacher Nicole Arteaga. Arteaga had gone to the pharmacy after learning from her physician that her pregnancy would end in miscarriage, as the fetus she was carrying had no heartbeat. The pharmacist, though, cited ethical objections to providing medications that would safely end her pregnancy. He was protected by a 2012 “right to refuse” law that Democratic state legislators have been trying to repeal since it passed.

When it comes to reproductive rights, Romero doesn’t mince words. As he wrote on social media earlier this year, “Our campaign unapologetically supports a woman’s right to choose.” It was that commitment that earned Romero the endorsement of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona (PPAA). Romero generously took the time to tell PPAA more about his background, positions, and campaign on July 8, 2018.

Please tell us a little about your background.

I’m a third-generation Arizonan who’s lived in my district for my whole life. I earned my bachelor’s degree in women and gender studies in 2015 and then worked as a community organizer with Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA) working on the Fight for $15 campaign, fighting for workers’ rights. I’ve also been arrested fighting for the immigrant community.

I was also appointed the Young Ambassador from the City of Peoria, to Newtownards, Northern Ireland, when I was 16, representing my city in a cultural exchange program. I’ve always had a passion for public service and community organizing. Continue reading →

Meet Our Candidates: David Garcia for Governor of Arizona

Posted on March 28, 2018 by Rachel Port

[W]hen David Garcia ran for superintendent of public instruction in 2014, two friends, independently of each other, told me I would like him a lot. So when he announced last year that he was running for governor, I listened to his reasons and was impressed.

The same groups in Arizona that push anti-abortion legislation so strongly also have other interests, including state funding for religious schools in the form of “vouchers.” The Empowerment Scholarship Account program, which gives money to parents to spend on private or religious school tuition, is already available for children with special needs, or who attend public schools that perform poorly. Last year, these groups lobbied successfully to extend this program to all children. The problem is that these moneys come out of public school funding, hurting the rest of Arizona’s students.

“Without a moderating influence in the governor’s office, Arizona will continue to see bad legislation that chips away at women’s reproductive rights.”

The program, which was scheduled to begin this school year, had just been signed into law when Dr. Garcia decided to run for governor. Although he has been involved in education policy for years, and was looking forward to making positive changes as superintendent of public instruction, he felt he could no longer run for that office. As he said, “The superintendent’s role is to implement the voucher bill, and there’s no way I could put together a full-throated campaign for a position whose responsibility would be to dismantle public education.”

Fortunately, thanks to a strong grassroots effort, enough signatures were collected to get a repeal of the voucher law onto the ballot this November. On the strength of this widespread opposition, the courts put a permanent injunction on the law until voters get to have their say, a decision the Arizona Supreme Court recently upheld.

It is no surprise that Gov. Doug Ducey didn’t just sign voucher expansion into law — he also actively lobbied state legislators to help pass the bill. Ducey is involved with the far-right Center for Arizona Policy, which has been responsible for anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ, and religious freedom bills for years. Its director, Cathi Herrod, has been one of his policy advisers since his first race for governor. If Ducey is reelected, we can confidently expect more of the same. Continue reading →

Abortion: 1 in 3 Speakout

Posted on April 3, 2017 by Anne Hopkins

Here we stood, a score of women at the U.S. Capitol, there to share our personal abortion stories privately with lawmakers and online with the public on March 21, 2017. We were storytellers in the fifth annual “1 in 3 Speakout: Stories from the Resistance.” Our goal — to put a human face on abortion; said in another less ladylike way, to get in our representatives’ grills. We were all darned tired of being characterized by ignorant anti-abortion advocates as shadowy, irresponsible, hypothetical women.

“Hey, talk to us,” we demand of our lawmakers. “We’re real people.”

Photo: Rewire News

First, we took our rally to the Capitol steps. Just as crowds began to gather, no doubt curious about our megaphone and pointing to our “I HAD AN ABORTION” and “I STAND WITH 1 IN 3” signs, we were shooed away by police to the more distant location shown in the above photo. We had been in the path of — you guessed it — President Trump’s motorcade. He was making his last-gasp attempts to salvage the Republican bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare. How appropriate to see, just days later, his plan aborted. Continue reading →

What’s in a Name: Repealing the Affordable Care Act

Posted on March 27, 2017 by Rachel Port

Supporters drop off petitions and rally at Rep. Martha McSally’s Tucson office, March 15, 2017

As this post goes to press, word has come that Speaker Paul Ryan has pulled the American Health Care Act, being unable to muster enough votes to pass it. So we have escaped that disaster, and it appears no attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act will proceed in the near future. But the fight is not over. Aspects of this bill will come up in other forms and we will have to be vigilant. But this is a victory for activism, so many thanks to all of you who made phone calls, demonstrated, told your stories, and reminded the Republicans that destroying something is not the same as governing.

So as you read this, realize what we have escaped, and what we need to watch out for as we proceed.

People were going to die. But the free market would have triumphed.

Republicans called it Obamacare, and used that name as a slur to run against President Obama in 2012. It didn’t win that race for them, but there are enough people in this country for whom the name Obama is enough to damn a program. One woman, whose son lost his job and had his monthly insurance premium fall from $567 to $88, attributes that decrease to the tax credits in Trump and Ryan’s new American Health Care Act. You know, the bill that never passed. In actuality, her son became eligible for a subsidy under Obamacare — the Affordable Care Act — which is still the law.

Paul Ryan and his cronies in the House of Representatives hated the Affordable Care Act before it was written. They hated it even more when it passed and more than that when it was implemented.

What did they hate about it? Continue reading →

A Visit to Jeff Flake’s Office: Fighting for Health Care

Posted on January 30, 2017 by Rachel Port

Jeff Flake, 2014. Photo: Gage Skidmore

January 24 was a national day of action called by the groups MoveOn, Indivisible, and the Working Families Party. The goal was to visit our senators’ offices around the country with concerns about Donald Trump’s cabinet appointments. In Tucson, there was an action outside Sen. John McCain’s office, but instead of joining that, I decided to go by myself to Sen. Jeff Flake’s office to tell someone on his staff my health care story. I was surprised and delighted to find a group from the SaddleBrooke Democratic Club there before me, standing partly inside and partly outside the office, talking specifically about Trump’s cabinet nominees Jeff Sessions and Betsy DeVos. Someone offered me a letter about DeVos, which I refused, not wanting to dilute my message. I joined the group, and a few others straggled in.

We are stronger when we work together, and there is room for whatever kind of action you are able to take.

Several people spoke to a staff person about education and civil rights. One woman brought up the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and how it has helped her family, hoping that Flake would hear people like her who are afraid of what repeal would mean. Someone asked whether Sen. Flake received letters; he had sent in several with no response. There was also talk about what kinds of communications are most likely to receive the senator’s attention. Hint: It was not mass emails sent in by organizations. Personal communications in person or by phone, or personal letters, are more likely to get attention than emails.

A Latina woman sat down with me to get my information. When I asked what her position was, she said this was her first day as an intern in the office. I wished her well and congratulated her, but told her I wanted to speak with someone on the staff. The intern took my name and address, then referred me to a staff member, the same woman who had met with the group from SaddleBrooke. She was interested and friendly. I said I was there to discuss Medicare and Medicaid specifically because they were the reason I was alive today. More than nine years ago, when I had valley fever and developed lumps on my legs, my doctor sent me for a chest x-ray, which showed a spot on my lung. The radiologist recommended a CT scan for a better look at it. Continue reading →

Tom Price, Secretary Against Health and Human Services?

Posted on January 17, 2017 by Rachel Port

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 →

STD Awareness: Sexually Transmitted Infections and Seniors

Posted on September 14, 2015 by Anna C.

For a while now, seniors plus sex has equaled a surefire route to punchlines and nervous giggles. Take, for instance, an episode of Amy Poehler’s old TV show, Parks and Recreation, titled “Sex Education.” In the opening scene, Poehler’s character Leslie Knope sets up the premise of the episode:

Soon, Knope and her team of public servants find themselves giving information about sexual health to an audience full of elderly citizens, which attracts the attention of abstinence advocates, who accuse her of moral depravity. Hilarity ensues. Funny stuff!

Funny, but based on a not-so-funny reality: Baby boomers and other older people are facing rising rates of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), both here in Arizona and nationwide, as well as across the pond in Jolly Old England.

Earlier this year, the Arizona Department of Health Services released data showing an increase in STD rates among people 55 years of age or older. For example, in Maricopa County, this population more than doubled its gonorrhea rate, which climbed from 6.1 cases per 100,000 people in 2012, to 12.7 per 100,000 people in 2014. That’s still much lower than the overall rate for Arizona, which was 97.8 cases per 100,000 people in 2013, but the fact that the rates of gonorrhea and other STDs are spiking among the 55-plus population is alarming nevertheless. Continue reading →