American Public Health Association Releases Policy on Abortion Coverage

From Lois Uttley, MergerWatch/Raising Women’s Voices


On November 9, the  American Public Health Association's (APHA), Governing Council adopted a strong policy, "Protecting Abortion Coverage in Health Reform." it calls on the President and Congress to reject any legislative proposals to further restrict or eliminate abortion coverage in health reform. Instead, it urges the President and HHS to avoid establishing administrative roadblocks to insurers' ability to cover abortion and urges Governors and state legislatures to allow abortion coverage in the state insurance exchanges that will open in 2014. Further, it calls for the repeal of the Hyde amendment so that abortion can be covered in both public and private insurance programs under the Affordable Care Act.

The American Public Health Association voted to call on the President and Congress to improve abortion coverage in health reform, not further restrict or eliminate it, as incoming leaders of the House of Representatives have proposed.

At the APHA's annual meeting of more than 12,000 public health professionals and researchers, taking place this week in Denver, the organization's Governing Council adopted a new policy, "Protecting Abortion Coverage in Health Reform." The policy reviews the public health literature supporting the need for comprehensive reproductive health care, including access to abortion, as a foundation for a "well woman" standard of care across the lifespan. The organization's new policy then states:

"APHA takes the position that current restrictions on use of federal funds for abortion coverage in the Medicaid program and other federally-funded health insurance programs are unjust and effectively deny access to legal abortion services to the country’s most vulnerable women. Extending that kind of restricted coverage to millions more American women through health reform is contrary to the goals of health reform and squanders an important opportunity to improve the lives and health of low-income women and the families that depend on them."

If Men Could Become Pregnant...

As coverage for the new health care reform law is being debated, women's health is once again at stake. 

When the health care bill was passed, Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Mikulski demanded that being a woman could not be considered a pre-exisiting health condition ---- hopefully paving the way for birth control and other reproductive health procedures to be covered.

Despite this language, A panel of "experts" meets for the first time next week to determine if both public and private health plans should cover the entire cost of contraception. The Catholic church is fighting full coverage of contraception for women. The Church issued the following statement in September, stating that they opposed birth control being declared preventative care, which would allow birth control to be fully covered under the new reform. Letter from Catholic Church

The letter asserts that birth control is not preventative care, even though it is the best care I can think of to prevent unwanted pregnancy. (Aside from abstinence, and women sleeping with women instead of men, GASP!). 

A study by the Guttmacher Institute shows that many women who take contraception will lapse due to cost, and that the biggest barrier to obtaining birth control is lack of health care coverage. Guttmacher Institute Statement. Universally covering birth control allows women to have real control over their bodies and lives -- regardless of income. This is a fundamental human right needed to ensure that women can be full, productive citizens with choice in all aspects of their lives. 

Our newly elected Senate majority leader, Harry Reid has said that the new health insurance legislation needs "tweaking" and that not covering birth control is a good "tweak."

The irony in all of this is that health care routinely covers prescriptions that "treat" impotence. That will not change under the new health care reform act.  If ensuring penises stay errect is good health care, then ensuring uteruses stay unfertilized is also good health care sense. Gloria Steinem's classic essay "If Men Could Menstruate" comes to mind. She says that if men could menstruate,  "sanitary supplies would be federally funded and free." I similarly assert that if men could become pregnant, birth control would be federally funded and free. 

Immigration Rights are Reproductive Rights Too

The below information is from an immigration policy update e-mail sent from  Maurice Belanger, of the National Immigration Forum.  Immigration is a social justice issue and a reproductive justice issue as female immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants face huge challenges to having controll of their reproductive lives.  No human is illegal.

Quoted from an e-mail dated November, 9 2010

The mid-term elections saw Republicans picking up more than 60 seats in the House of Representatives, enough to give them control. The leadership change means not only does the Speaker of the House give up her gavel, but the chairmanship of all the committees and subcommittees change as well.



Committee Leadership


While it is too early to say what the precise makeup of the Committees will be, we do expect that the current top-ranking Republican members to assume leadership of the Committees having to do with immigration.


Judiciary Committee: Lamar Smith (R-TX): In the mid-1990s, Smith authored the law that became the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). Among other things, this law included summary exclusion for persons arriving in the U.S. without proper documents; the three- and ten-year bars to admissibility for persons deported from the U.S.; the one-year asylum filing deadline; the electronic worker verification system that has evolved into today’s E-Verify; the 287(g) program; and a mandate for an annual increase in the Border Patrol and construction of a “triple-tiered” border fence. By greatly expanding the definition of “aggravated felony,” applying punishment retroactively, and severely restricting judicial review, the law has resulted in the removal of thousands of legal immigrants who have committed minor crimes.

In its original form, the law would have reduced legal immigration by taking out parents of U.S. citizens from the “immediate relatives” category and eliminating the category for brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens. (Smith’s effort to cut legal immigration was thwarted in the Senate.)


Smith has continued to be a tireless opponent of immigration reform and an advocate of more enforcement. Recently, Smith has supported the rights of states to enforce immigration laws, legislation to end birthright citizenship, and mandatory application of the E-Verify electronic worker verification system. See this member profile from the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) and this article from Politico for more on Rep. Smith.


Regardless of any legislation he may try to advance, as Chair of the Judiciary Committee, Smith will be in a position to hold hearings where Administration officials will have to answer his charges that they are “ignoring” immigration laws. A recent column posted on his Web site includes some of the assertions about the Obama Administration’s enforcement of immigration laws that he may turn in to topics of oversight hearings.

Immigration Subcommittee: Steve King (R-IA): Representative King has been outspoken and extreme in his views about immigration. In 2006, for example, he delivered remarks on the floor of the House while building a model of a border wall that he felt should be built, including an electrified wire on top to act as a “disincentive for people to climb over the top or put a ladder there.” After all, according to King, “[w]e do that with livestock all the time.”


In an interview with Politico, King announced that he would like to see legislation to end birthright citizenship, to reaffirm states’ right to enact Arizona-like immigration laws, to take away deductions from employers who pay illegal immigrants, and to crack down on cities that don’t go after illegal residents.


For more information on Rep. King, see AILA’s member profile of him. You can read more of Rep. King’s choice words on immigration here.


Homeland Security Committee Peter King (R-NY): Representative Peter King is currently the ranking Republican on the Homeland Security Committee. There is a question as to whether King will be given the Chairmanship; the Republican caucus has term-limit rules for leadership of committees. Should he obtain a waiver to the rule, he told Congressional Quarterly that, regarding immigration, the Committee will push for legislation focused on “law enforcement both at the border and in the interior United States.”


Rules Committee: The House Rules Committee is the last stop for legislation before it is considered on the House floor. The Rules Committee decides the terms of debate on legislation. Unlike the Senate, where Senators can spend days considering amendments and hundreds of amendments may be considered, the Rules Committee in the House will decide which amendments will be considered before debate begins. The Rules Committee under Democratic leadership has been helpful by not allowing many amendments proposed by immigration hard-liners. (The amendments are often extraneous or "non-germane" to the bill being considered.) With leadership now in Republican hands, we can expect that more restrictionist amendments will be allowed on a variety of legislation unrelated to immigration that is debated in the House. David Dreier, currently the ranking member on the Committee, is expected to assume leadership. On his Web site, Dreier touts his sponsorship of H.R. 98, which would require all workers to present a Social Security card with machine-readable information establishing work authorization when they apply for a job. In the 110th Congress, he was a co-sponsor of a bill that would have, among other things, required the hiring of 18,000 more Border Patrol agents.


New Members: According to the Center for American Progress, of the more than 100 freshman Republicans of the 112th Congress, “39% have already declared their intention to end the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship.” Almost a third want to reduce legal immigration.


Newly-elected members include Lou Barletta (R), who will represent Pennsylvania’s 11th District. As Mayor of Hazelton, he pushed through a local ordinance in 2006 to deny business permits to companies that employ undocumented immigrants, and to fine landlords who rent to them. (The law was later struck down as unconstitutional.) Rand Paul (R), the Senator-elect from Kentucky, said on his campaign Web site that he opposes “amnesty” and favors building “an electronic fence” along the Southwest border. He also favors ending birthright citizenship. Tea Party favorite Marco Rubio will be Florida’s new Senator. He is of Cuban-American descent, but has taken a hard line on immigration. On his Web site, he says that regarding immigration, he believes “that our nation’s immigration policy should consist of border enforcement, securing the border, fixing the visa process and ensuring that no law extends amnesty to illegal immigrants.”


State Governorships and Legislatures


In addition to the turnover in Congress, Republicans made big gains among State Governorships and legislatures. Of the 37 states that held gubernatorial elections, there were 29 Republican wins verses 18 Democrats. In state legislatures, Republicans added more than 675 seats to their ranks, and made some historic takeovers—for example, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Republicans now control the Minnesota Senate for the first time in history. The Republican tilt in state governments will affect the outcome of efforts to adopt state and local anti-immigration measures, including legislation modeled after Arizona’s SB 1070.


Prospects for Progress


While prospects for positive immigration reform legislation getting through the 112th Congress will be remote, any effort to enact hard-line enforcement-only legislation will face the same question that pro-reform advocates have faced in the 111th Congress: Are there 60 votes in the Senate? As the Washington Independent put it,


A Democratic Senate will have trouble getting immigrant-friendly measures past the House, while the House will have trouble getting enforcement-only measures past the Senate — or the president’s desk. The result will likely be more of the same on immigration policy.


Prospects for Republicans in the next election may be influenced by how prominently they feature the anti-immigration, enforcement-only agenda of immigration restrictionists in their party. Will Republicans allow Steve King and Lamar Smith to be the face of the Republican Party on the immigration issue? If so, they may feed a trend where Latinos—the fastest-growing portion of the electorate—have been migrating to the Democratic Party. In this election, Latinos in some key states voted overwhelmingly Democratic and helped Democrats retain control of the Senate. The use of immigration as a divisive wedge issue backfired in some very important races, motivating Latinos to go to the polls to punish the politicians who portrayed them as criminals. For more on how Latinos acted in this election, see this ImmPolitic blog post.)


Over the next two years, Republicans will have to decide whether they will continue to alienate Latino voters, or change their tune on immigration and offer real solutions for our broken immigration system, not divisive sound bites.
New Immigration Fees go Into Effect November 23


The new fee schedule for immigration fees go into effect on November 23. Fees for most applications will go up. The fee for naturalization applications will not increase. To see what the new fee schedule is, go to this page on the Web site of USCIS.

Women's Sexuality and Women's Oppression: Intimately Linked

This weekend, I facilitated a discussion of the Purity Myth by Jessica Valenti at the Unitarian Society of Ridgewood. This discussion reminded me once again of all the ways that women's oppression is located within our bodies. Our bodies are legislated, debated, and regulated.

Proof of this can be found in countless court cases. Judges have ordered C-Sections against a woman's will, and have declared that women do not have the right to say no to sex after they have said yes. The root of these ills is the distrust of women's bodies, and ultimately the fear of women's sexuality.

Controlling women's sexuality is a way to "protect" the morals of a nation-- women, since Victorian times, have been seen as the bearers and markers of morality. In this context we have become not fully human.  Our morality has rested on chastity and fidelity instead of on our words, actions, and good deeds.


The Purity Myth deconstructs the virginity movement for what it is -- a movement that focuses on women's sexuality by demanding women's lack of sexuality until marriage. This movement, although no longer federally funded, is alive and well.  There is a generation of young people who did not have comprehensive sexuality education (and many who still do not receive it); "Purity Balls" -- an elaborate prom like evening where girls as young as eleven pledge to allow fathers to be the keeper of their virginity until marriage are being held across the nation and in nearly every state; purity pledges, rings and born-again virgins can be found on the internet, in pop culture, and even in politics.


According to Valenti, there are serious consequences to the focus on women's and girl's sexual purity. The most blatant of which is that women's value is tied to their ability to refrain from sex, creating two distinct types of women and girls, those that are "bad" and those that are "good".  In addition the myth of purity:

• Marks only select  women are valuable - namely white, middle, and upper class women who live up to the image of the perfect virgin. 
• Takes away women's ability to control their bodes leading to the reversal of many reproductive rights.
•  Blames the victim in cases of sexual assault -- if you are sexually active, you cannot say no to sex, you must have WANTED it.
• Reinforces the myth that men can not be responsible for their sexual actions and that men can separate sex from love and that women cannot. 
•  Designates heterosexual sex as the only sex that is valuable and valid and only within the context of procreation. Non-hetersexual sex, and indeed, anything other than penetration for the purpose of reproduction is ignored and subjugated.

These messages are insidious and pervasive. We have not escaped the "virgin /whore" complex where women and girls are either they type a man "brings home to Mom" or the type that they leave in the bedroom. Sex and sexuality are much more complicated, and much more full of potential than this dichotomy suggests. In fact, there is no actual medical definition of virginity, despite our assertion that this is an actual physical state. (Think of all of the commercials for tampons or other feminine products that assure a woman is a virgin even if she uses the product).

In reality, purity and virginity (like almost all things, I am convinced) are socially constructed.  We have constructed a meaning of purity that is different for men and women.  It is women’s sexuality that is seen as impure and dirty, whereas men are seen either as not able to control their sexual urges (boys will be boys) or as studs if they engage in sex.  There is no equivalent to the virgin/whore complex for men in our culture. 

What is the alternative you ask?  The alternative , is to ACTUALLY TRUST WOMEN AND GIRLS. Trust women and girls to know, and have control of, their own bodies. Allow women and girls to have access to adequate and real information about sex, love, life and reproduction so they can make decisions about their bodies.  Don't tell girls that their value is based on purity and then sell them writhing teens in music videos.  Don't tell girls that if you aren't pure, then you must be a whore and wonder why they dress in scantily clad clothes. 

I believe this issue is so important because if our oppression is located in our bodies, then our liberation is as well.  Our bodies are what allow us to move, act in, and experience the world. We cannot control our destinies if control of our bodies is denied to us. 

The Political Connection to Gay Youth Suicide

A lot has happened since I blogged last.

1. The New Jersey veto that denied family planning funds to NJ women was not overridden.

2. The Don't Ask Don't Tell repeal failed.

3. Six gay teens have committed suicide.

Dear readers, let me direct you back to items 2 and 3. I will line them up again for visual effect:

1. The Don't Ask Don't tell repeal failed.
2. Six Gay teenagers have committed suicide in the last three weeks.

I believe there is a connection between the failure to overturn DADT, the anti-gay marriage campaigns, and the recent suicides of gay youth. Anti-gay messages are INTERNALIZED, especially by youth. We are concerned about youth and violent video games, youth being exposed to sexualized images, youth drinking, but what about youth being told that THEY ARE WRONG, that THEY SHOULD LIVE IN THE SHADOWS. That it is ok to be gay, AS LONG AS YOU DON'T TELL ANYONE.

Messages are strong, especially when you feel alone, especially when you are scared. Often the voice that says you are not ok is the voice that drowns out everything else.

I have been touched by the public grieving process in churches, in communities, on college campuses and on Facebook. I am buoyed by the fact that perhaps these youth will not loose their lives for nothing, that their lives will re-energize the gay rights movement and our allie, that people will see that it isn't so easy to be gay today and that everything is not as ok and "liberal" as it seems.

A tenant of feminism is that the personal is political. When there is a wave of suicide by gay youth something is going on in our larger community and it is up to us to mobilize and not take no for an answer. It is a matter of survival, if not ours, then theirs.

N.J. Senate fails to override Gov. Christie's veto of $7.5M in family planning funds | NJ.com

The New Jersey Senate failed to override the veto of family planning funds leaving a huge gap in healthcare for women and families.

The flowing news article from NJ.com is excellent. Stay tuned to Reproductive Justice NJ for more information.



N.J. Senate fails to override Gov. Christie's veto of $7.5M in family planning funds NJ.com

10 Reasons to Reinstate Family Planning Funds.

Tomorrow is the override vote on family planning funds.  Here are 10 reasons this should be overturned:

1. 136,000 low-income women were served with     
     these funds last year.

2. 40,000 unplanned pregnancies were prevented.

3. 28,0000 HIV tests were administered.

4. 70,000 breast exams were performed. 

5. For every $1.00 spent, we will save $3.74 dollars. 

6. Every $1.00 spent would trigger $9.00 in federal matching funds.

7. We spent $65 million to ensure malls in Bergen County stay closed on 
    Sundays. 

8. Not that this is a bad thing, but family planning funds don't pay for 
    abortions. 

9. If you are against abortion, consider this: family planning services 
    prevented an estimated 19,000 abortions last year. 

10. Family planning centers provide pre-natal care.

Gee-- that seems like  96 million dollars worth of reasons and 204,000 people served worth of reasons to overturn this veto.  I wish someone's mother would write a letter to their elected official son telling him to "be a good boy" and vote for family planning. 

(Sources: The Record, NJ Budget, Planned Parenthood)