The fight for women’s health

On January 7, 2011, Rep. Mike Pence re-introduced an amendment to Title X of the Public Health Service Act to prohibit family planning grants from being given to clinics that perform abortions.

While currently in the first step of the legislative process, if this bill were to pass millions of women across America would be significantly effected.

While on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, Pence said, “let us rededicate ourselves to protecting the unborn and to protecting taxpayers on matters of conscience.”

If Pence really wants to protect taxpayers, it is a matter of conscience to kill this bill, support Title X, and support women across America.

According to Planned Parenthood’s website, “Title X serves over five million low-income individuals every year.” This could include many students on our campus.

Last Tuesday, many people came out to Erie, not just to support, but to denounce Planned Parenthood as well.

In an article written by David Bruce, former Congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave was reported saying at the rally, “Planned Parenthood is all about abortion. We, as taxpayers, should not fund these activities.”

By law, family planning clinics under Title X can not use grant money toward abortion.

Whether you are pro-choice or anti-choice, it does and should not matter that these clinics offer abortions as an option to an unplanned pregnancy.

What Planned Parenthood is really all about, is providing women with contraception, STD testing, treatment for STDs, annual exams, and cancer screenings that have and can save the lives of many women.

This is not another argument about whether abortion is moral or not. This is a battle over women’s health and the lives of millions. We must stand up.

‘Deficit gurus’ launch assault on women’s health

March is Women’s History Month. But this year, for the vast majority of women in America, there is little to celebrate.

Over the past months, “deficit gurus” in the U.S. House of Representatives have unleashed the most devastating assault on women’s health in our nation’s history. If legislation already passed in the House is approved by the Senate and signed into law by President Obama, women’s rights and health will be set back by decades.

Many critical programs are on the chopping block, such as the Public Health Service Act or Title X, providing basic health services, including Pap smears, family planning services, and cancer screenings to more than 5 million low-income people, mainly women.

Slashing Title X will lead to thousands of unnecessary deaths. Maternal and Child Health Block Grants, chiefly benefitting poor women and children, will be cut by $210 million. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will be reduced by some $755 million, undermining many public health efforts such as confronting HIV/AIDS. Community health centers providing essential services to millions of women and families across the country will face a brutal $1.3 billion cut.

This onslaught against women joins that against U.S. working people. Look, for example, at the assault on Medicaid, or the drive to cut wages, benefits and collective bargaining rights. Wisconsin is only the most flagrant example of a nationwide phenomenon.

Or consider the chorus that, both from the right and from sectors of the “liberal” left, is calling for “saving” Social Security by reducing benefits, increasing eligibility age or privatizing the program. Yet Social Security is financially sound for at least another 27 years. Whatever problems it may have could be easily fixed by simply raising the cap on the taxable income of the very wealthy. And Medicare and other publicly financed health care programs, favorite targets of the budget cutters, pose a problem only because the U.S. health care system, pre- and post- the federal health law, is built upon a rotten foundation: for-profit health insurance.

Despite subtle differences, both sides of the political aisle convey the same message: “We” must pay for “our excesses” that caused “the deficit” by giving up on our “generous benefits.”

Notably, Wall Street excesses figure nowhere in these arguments, even if its benefits are clear. As President Obama noted candidly in his State of the Union address, “the stock market has come roaring back and corporate profits are up.”

Meanwhile, our “benefits” don’t even include guaranteed access to basic health care, as is the norm in every other wealthy nation. The new federal law has “reformed” the system essentially by mandating us to purchase for-profit insurance increasingly under-insurance under penalty of a fine, and expanding coverage, not necessarily care, through an underfunded Medicaid program. Finally, it leaves at least 23 million people uninsured annually a decade from now.

If this scenario is allowed to stand, women will suffer disproportionately. But in the spirit of International Women’s Day, women’s groups and others are fighting back, and championing the most just and cost-effective solution to our health care woes — single-payer national health insurance, an improved Medicare for All.

As we commemorate those 15,000 brave women who back in 1908 marched through New York City demanding shorter hours, better pay and voting rights, American women and working Americans generally must demand no less.

Wisconsin Hits Labor, Repro Rights in Single Blow

Wisconsin’s passage last week of a law stripping public workers of their bargaining rights is another major attack on reproductive rights and women’s health care access, say family-planning advocates.

“This law has undone four decades of progress in Wisconsin to ensure women’s reproductive health,” said Amanda Harrington, spokesperson of the Madison-based Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin, in a telephone interview. “It has turned Wisconsin into ground zero in the national movement to make it more difficult for women to obtain and pay for birth control, breast cancer screenings and tests and treatments for sexually transmitted diseases.”

Harrington’s organization serves over 73,000 patients in its 27 health centers each year.

Public workers’ unions and their allies have been battling Gov. Scott Walker in three weeks of energetic protests that attracted tens of thousands of demonstrators to Madison.

The unions initially resisted Walker’s demand that workers pay more towards their pensions and health benefits, but then in February agreed to pay 5.8 percent of their wages for pensions and 12.6 percent for health benefits, a combination that is equivalent to an 8 percent pay cut for the average worker who earns $48,348.

That shifted the battle to collective bargaining rights, which unions in the past have used to insist, for instance, that their health plans cover women’s contraceptives. That in turn helped shift private insurance plans in the same direction.

“Increasing the cost of health care benefits from 6 percent to 12 percent of wages hits women hard because they generally earn less than do men,” said Harrington. “This is bad enough, but the measure signed by Gov. Walker gives unprecedented powers to the state health department to revamp public health programs without the traditional protections of oversight by the legislature and input from the public.”
Most Bargaining Rights Gone

Most of the 175,000 state and local workers in Wisconsin–including the female-dominated ranks of nurses and teachers–will be prohibited from bargaining for wages beyond the rate of inflation, unless approved by a referendum.

Male-dominated unions of firefighters and police who are part of that total are exempt, because Walker said he could not risk disruptions in public safety if these unions staged strikes.

Walker, who introduced many anti-choice bills during his nearly nine years in the Wisconsin assembly, has launched an anti-birth control agenda, according to Lisa Subeck, executive director of the Madison-based NARAL Pro-Choice Wisconsin, the political watchdog of the pro-choice movement.

Subeck said that Walker has an eye on repealing Wisconsin’s Contraceptive Equity Law, which requires insurance plans that cover prescription drugs to also include coverage for prescription birth control.

Initially proposed in 1999, the law has a rocky history; anti-choice activists and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Madison helped defeat it each time it was introduced. But family planning and public health groups finally got the legislature to pass the measure in 2009. It was included in the budget measure signed by Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle in 2009 and took effect Jan. 1, 2010. Besides Wisconsin, 25 other states have contraceptive equity laws.

“Under Walker’s plan, insurance companies could choose to cover Viagra but not prescription birth control, which would allow insurers to discriminate against women,” Subeck said in a press release. “Although Walker claims the elimination of family planning services is a cost-saving measure, it isn’t. A 2008 Guttmacher Institute study found that every $1 spent on birth control through the Medicaid program saves taxpayers $4.02.”

Walker also wants to eliminate Title V, the only state-funded family planning health care program, Subeck said.

Less weight gain found among African-American women in dense urban areas

Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine’s (BUSM) Slone Epidemiology Center have found that African-American women who live in more densely populated urban areas gain less weight than those in more sprawling auto-oriented areas. The results, which appear in the current issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, were based on data collected in the Black Women’s Health Study, an ongoing study of the health of 59,000 African American women conducted by the researchers since 1995. While studies conducted at a single point in time have found higher levels of obesity among residents of sprawling areas compared to residents of more urban areas, there has been little information on this topic from studies that have followed residents over time.

The researchers assessed the association of women’s residential environments with weight change and the incidence of obesity during a six year period of follow-up in the Black Women’s Health Study. They focused on nearly 18,000 women who lived in the New York, Chicago or Los Angeles metropolitan areas. The women’s residential neighborhoods were characterized by an “urbanicity score”— considered dense urban neighborhoods.

They found that both six year weight gain and the incidence of obesity were lower among women who had high urbanicity scores as compared to those with low scores. Women who lived in suburban or rural neighborhoods were considered to have low urbanicity scores.

According to the researchers, a previous study of these women, found those who lived in denser neighborhoods walked more than women in more sprawling areas. “Policies that encourage more dense and urban residential development may have a positive role to play in addressing the obesity epidemic,” said lead author Patricia Coogan, MPH, D Sc, a senior epidemiologist at the Slone Center and an associate professor of epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health.