Choice Words

Congratulations. Words seem too small to express the historic nature of this election. A country founded on and formed by racial slavery and genocide has elected a person of color to its highest office. The fight for racial justice continues, but this is a vital moment in our national story.

And now the real work begins.

Young voters supported you by an astounding margin, over two to one. Perhaps more importantly, youths played a crucial role in your grassroots-style campaign. A new generation of organizers has been activated, and not a moment too soon.

The past eight years have been devastating for human rights in the US and abroad. The neoconservative Christian fundamentalist agenda has attacked the reproductive rights and health of young people, a crucial part of any comprehensive human rights framework. Mr. President-elect, we need you as an ally in our quest for Reproductive Justice.

Federally funded abstinence only programs have left a generation unprepared to make informed decisions about their sexual and reproductive health. In this election young people have shown themselves to be highly motivated critical thinkers. Mr. Obama, we need you to fulfill your promise of providing federally funded comprehensive sexuality education that respects our intelligence and ability to make decisions for ourselves.

We’ve also seen federal funds funneled into Crisis Pregnancy Centers, far right religious organizations that often deliberately mislead women in order to prevent them from pursuing and obtaining abortions. It’s time to start trusting people to make their own decisions about their health, and to make available the necessary resources, including contraception and birth control, so those decisions can be informed and based on the a wide range of available options.

The attack on reproductive health has been part of a broader attack on the well being of Americans. Too many young people do not have the option of making the choices they want to about their health because they cannot afford medical care. Healthcare should be, must be a human right. This country is long overdue for a truly universal healthcare system. In a time of economic crisis the ability to afford medical care should never be a question. No one should ever have to worry about being able to obtain the reproductive healthcare they need.

Reproductive Justice is about more than access to quality care and prevention methods, though. Intersections of oppression along lines of gender, race, class, ability, geography, and immigration status negatively affect the reproductive health of so many young people. Environmental degradation isn’t just about moose – the harm we are doing to our environment has a huge negative effect on our health, and hurts those with the least relative power and privilege first and most dramatically. We need the right to have children, too. This is impossible when, for example, indigenous women find themselves unable to conceive or giving birth to children who are sick because of environmental toxins. Racist anti-immigrant sentiment and laws puts the health of undocumented immigrants at risk. We need you to be a president who will think about the impact to our reproductive health of every major issue that crosses your desk.

The past eight years have hurt us, but this movement has been fighting an uphill battle for a lot longer than that. For over thirty years we have watched as the right to have an abortion has been limited more and more. If young women can’t afford the procedure what good does that right do them? It’s time, finally time, to repeal the Hyde Amendment. It’s time to trust women to make decisions about their own bodies, not to limit when medical care should and should not be available based on moralistic ideas that ignore lived experience. Choice needs to be possible.

Despite legislation like the Violence Against Women Act, the nightmare of sexual violence has not gone away. Instead, such policies have led to a massive prison system that does nothing to make people safer, and in fact has the opposite effect. While we debate marriage rights, queer and trans youth are dying in cold blood. We need radical new ideas about how to address violence in a way that does not resort to government violence, to fundamentally change our culture.

US policy has a large impact on people the world over. War in Afghanistan and Iraq makes even the idea of reproductive and sexual freedom impossible for so many people. Mr. President-elect, end these wars.

And end the Global Gag Rule. Please, let healthcare providers do their jobs.

Mr. Obama, the challenges you face as you prepare to take office are daunting. I was grateful you recognized this in your acceptance speech, and heartened by your openness to hear from your constituents about our needs, our desires, our hopes. The above are just some of the issues my friends and I care deeply about. In the next few weeks, months, and years you’ll be hearing a lot more from us about these and other concerns.

The pro-choice youth of the US have a clear picture of what we want our future to be and are not afraid to demand of government what we need to realize that vision. I look forward to working with you, to an impassioned debate of ideas, to forming a government and culture in the business of ensuring human rights for all. Watch and listen, Mr. President-elect, and work with us, as a movement of young people turns our dream of Reproductive Freedom into reality.

Well, apparently its gone to a political level, except this time its targeting low-income women. A Louisiana legislator has proposed to sterilize poor women and in return, give them $1000 in welfare and food stamps. Unfortunately, this is another proposal being created by gov’t to control a woman’s reproduction. Stated in the article, former KKK leader also had this idea. So not only is this a way of “getting rid of” poverty in hurricane stricken areas, but also to keep women of color from reproducing. This, to me, doesn’t come as a surprise since it was proposed by a state senator in the south, no surprise at all.

The New Orleans Women’s Health Center and the Women’s Health and Justice Initiative came out with an intersectional, feminist response to LaBruzzo’s legislative plans - you can read the whole thing here.

There’s upset in the Australia Legislature over a bill that would make late-term abortions pretty much impossible.

The legislation, which passed the lower house last week, allows unfettered access to abortion up to 24 weeks. After 24 weeks, a woman seeking an abortion would need two doctors prepared to argue that continuing the pregnancy would be harmful to her physically, mentally or socially.

Industry Minister Theo Theophanous feels a wider definition of late-term abortion should be established.

For more about this, check out “Abortion bill goes too far” at The Australian.

These two links speak for themselves:
Sex Is For Fags & Iron Hymen.

These websites are completely satirical look at abstinence-only education. What do you think?

Just this past week, California legislators successfully passed a bill requiring insurances to cover the vaccination Gardasil. This bill also will require insurance to cover cervical cancer treatment as well as annual cervical cancer testing. There also has been international efforts, like the United Kingdom, to pass similar laws to protect women from cervical cancer. This is a great victory for Californian women and girls since it has reported the most cases of cervical cancer in the country annually. Hopefully other states shall do the same and adopt California’s new bill.

I’m gonna make this short and (not so) sweet and send you to the New York Times article that explains this in depth. So basically our current (is he still here) president wants to require all federal health programs to sign a “written certification” that they will not refuse to hire nurses and other providers who object to abortion and even certain types of birth control.

It get worse.

The proposal, which circulated in the department on Monday, says the new requirement is needed to ensure that federal money does not “support morally coercive or discriminatory practices or policies in violation of federal law.” The administration said Congress had passed a number of laws to ensure that doctors, hospitals and health plans would not be forced to perform abortions.

The proposal defines abortion as follows: “any of the various procedures — including the prescription, dispensing and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action — that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation.”

Mary Jane Gallagher, president of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, which represents providers, said, “The proposed definition of abortion is so broad that it would cover many types of birth control, including oral contraceptives and emergency contraception.”

Read more about it here.

Promising news out of Northern Ireland! According to BBC News, Members of Parliament (MPs) in the country are debating abortion rights. More specifically, they want to create an amendment to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill that would grant women in Northern Ireland the same abortion rights enjoyed by women in Britain. Apparently, when the Abortion Act passed in Britain in 1967, it never went into affect in Northern Ireland (which, wikipedia tells me, is an “administrative division” of the United Kingdom”). As a result, North Irish women seeking abortions are forced to travel to Britain, which greatly increases both cost and stress.

Currently, the amendment is tabled until the next session of parliament. Labour MP Diane Abbott says that, in spite of stiff opposition, she believes that there is a “good chance” the amendment will be passed. Here’s more from Ms. Abbott, one of the bills biggest champions:

“When it comes to abortion rights, Northern Ireland women are effectively second class citizens: they don’t have the same rights as women in England and Wales and Scotland and they even have fewer rights than women in the Republic of Ireland [. . . ] The effect of the amendment would be to give women in Northern Ireland exactly the same rights to abortion with [National Health Service] funding that women elsewhere in Britain have.

For the sake of our sisters in Northern Ireland, let’s hope that the amendment is successful. Come autumn, I’d really like to be proud of my namesake (Erin is the Gaelic word for Ireland) for upholding reproductive justice and advancing women’s rights!

This is the second of three posts on the bills discussed during Choice USA’s Lobby Day. You can read the first post here.

Stop Deceptive Advertising for Women’s Services (SDAWS), H.R.2478 in the House and S.2793 in the Senate, would prohibit falsely advertising abortion services, and direct the Federal Trade Commission to enforce this rule.

SDAWS is aimed at Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs). Set up to look like women’s health clinics, many CPCs are in fact run by conservative religious groups with the sole purpose of keeping women from obtaining abortions. They often advertise in ways that suggest they provide abortion services, either by talking about abortion in their ads, implying it through the language they use, or advertising under “abortion” in the phone book. The first time I saw an ad for a CPC was in the anti-choice church I grew up in, and I couldn’t figure out why our church was promoting abortion services.

CPC advertising is especially important to Choice USA as they are targeting college students, often advertising in campus papers.

Once a woman enters the doors of a CPC, the staff will often do whatever they deem necessary to dissuade her from obtaining an abortion. They will offer pregnancy tests and ultrasounds, but that’s usually it when it comes to medical services. Women have been refused information on where to obtain abortions and faced stall tactics that stretched out the time before their abortion-making obtaining one impossible. They have been shown medically inaccurate diagrams and models, told abortion can give you breast cancer, make you infertile, and cause sever depression and suicidal thoughts.

A lot of this information needs to be shared through consciousness raising activities. However, we can work through the law to stop the false advertising that gets so many women through the doors of CPCs in the first place. You can take action using the tactics I suggested in a previous post. For more information check out the National Abortion Federation’s page on SDAWS and CPCs.

Apparently, for the first time in fifteen years, Congressional Democrats are revisiting the military’s infamous “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” of course, refers to a policy enacted by President Clinton, in an attempt to make good on his campaign promise of opening the armed forces to homosexuals. In short, they can serve, just not openly. (Suddenly I’m reminded of the Catholic church’s stance on homosexuality; it’s not a sin to be gay, but it is a sin to act on it). Anywho, it’s great news that someone is trying to re-address this issue. However, it’s not expected to change in the near future. Here’s what USA Today had to say about it.

I personally cannot imagine willingly signing up for military service (I have actually kept a running list of “ways I would be willing to avoid the draft” for the last, oh, six years). That said, anyone who wants to make that sacrifice should be able to do so without facing discrimination from the very government whom they fight to protect. Good for Congressional Dems, for taking a first step towards repealing this policy.

This is the first in a series of three posts about the legislation we lobbied for during Choice USA’s Lobby Day.

The Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, which had the intended purpose of reducing the federal budget deficit, contained language that stopped pharmaceutical companies from providing prescriptions at lower than market costs to health clinics and College and University health centers. Previously, companies were supplying schools and safety-net providers with low cost or no cost birth control. Now, low income women and college students are forced to pay market price, approximately $40-$50 per month.

The DRA has had a direct effect on many of Choice USA’s student organizers - $50 a month really adds up when you’re a broke college student. Since Choice USA is an organization made up of young people organizing around issues that impact our lives, this is a perfect issue for us to take action on. Students have been running campaigns on their campuses building awareness and support, including at the University of Michigan where organizers linked the rising cost of birth control and being able to afford dinner (pictured above). On July 17 we took the campaign to Capitol Hill.

Representative Joseph Crowley and Senator Barack Obama introduced the Prevention Through Affordable Access Act, H.R.4054 in the House and S.2347 in the Senate. This legislation would allow pharmaceutical companies to once again provide birth control at less than market value. One of the best things about this bill is that it’s a no cost solution - it has no impact on taxpayer’s wallets, just allows companies to offer discounted medication.

During Choice USA’s Lobby Day we discussed this bipartisan legislation with the offices of Senators and Representatives, sharing with them personal experiences of losing access to affordable birth control and delivering petitions from our campuses. See my previous post for suggestions of ways to get involved and influence your legislators to support the Prevention Through Affordable Access Act.