Posted October 23, 2007 | 10:57 AM (EST) on Huffington Post Their title was "Something Wrong with This Picture?" and I'd originally titled it "Let's Keroack Orr", but Women's Voices for Change reposted it and gave it a better title. I didn't have time to insert all the links here so goo read it on HuffPo if you want to see them--and by all means, please leave a comment.
___
My goodness, I go away for a week and miss all sorts of happenings in the world where sex and politics collide.
I returned from my high school reunion, then a week with family in Arizona without my computer or New York Times subscription, and found messages asking for comment on the Portland, ME, middle school that has added prescription contraceptives to its health clinic services. You can imagine the twitter from the self-righteous right who believe no one would ever think about sex if we pro-sex education and pro-contraception people didn't call it to their attention. They have apparently forgotten their own adolescence (I suggest they attend their high school reunions to revive those repressed memories).
Fortunately, many parents spoke up with exactly what needed to be said: while they rightly prefer that their kids abstain from sexual activity at such a tender age, they want even more for the school to help them keep their kids safe from disease and pregnancy if and when they do become sexually active. The school board voted to keep its policy of providing the full range of contraceptives in its health care formulary.
Meanwhile, there was related national news I was mercifully oblivious to last week as well. It seems that as surely as young people discover their sexuality no matter how ardently adults may wish to the contrary, George W. Bush just as surely and ardently continues his pattern of filling the position of Deputy Assistant Secretary for Population Affairs (DASPA) -- the person in charge of administering Title X, our nation's major family planning program for low income uninsured individuals -- with a person -- Dr. Susan Orr, who fundamentally opposes birth control.
Read that last sentence again slowly to fully savor the irony.
With W of course, up is down and down is sideways. We've grown inured to the duplicity, the sleight of hand, the wink while Halliburton profits as our sons and daughters die in Iraq, the ruthlessness with which the one percent get richer while the rest of us get a burgeoning national debt and fewer of us get health insurance.
So it's no surprise that the man talks piously about creating a culture of life while taking funding from lifesaving prevention programs like family planning and giving it to abstinence only preachers. This makes the U. S. the laughingstock of the world's public health organizations and in the end paradoxically increases disease, unintended pregnancies, abortions, and deaths.
Usually, though, this administration and its right wing buddies at least try to obfuscate their Orwellian redefinitions. Not so, however when it comes to overseeing a program founded by his father, and for decades enjoying bipartisan support because it provides contraceptive services to over five million American women each year through some 4,500 public health facilities, preventing 1.3 million unintended pregnancies and hundreds of thousands of abortions, and saving taxpayers $3 on Medicaid pregnancy and newborn-related care for every dollar spent. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists family planning as one of "Ten Greatest Public Health Achievements of the 20th Century" for good reason.
Last year, Dr. Eric Keroack was appointed to the position of DASPA. Among other wacky ideas, Keroack alleged that pre-marital sex changes the brain chemistry so that bonding to another person becomes difficult. A non board-certified ob/gyn, Keroack not only opposed birth control, he was also medical director of A Woman's Concern, one of many chains of so-called Crisis Pregnancy Centers, whose purpose is to dissuade women from choosing abortion under any circumstances. But family planning prevents abortion, right? Yes, but these organizations support sexual abstinence until marriage, oppose contraception, and do not distribute information promoting birth control.
Fortunately for women who depend on Title-X for their most basic health care including annual gyn exams, breast and cervical cancer screening, and birth control methods, Keroack soon fell like Humpty Dumpty from the weight of his own corruption. It turned out he was under investigation for Medicaid fraud in his private practice.
The appointment of Susan Orr -- who is not a medical doctor -- while also clearly in the down is up category, seems less like Humpty Dumpty and more like those Bozo Bop Bags that were popular with kids in the 1960s. You know, the clown punching bags with weights in the bottom so that you could punch and punch till you wore yourself out but never knock it down or out.
Orr, formerly senior director for marriage and families at the Family Research Council, supported Bush's move to strip federal employees' health insurance of contraceptive coverage and told the Washington Post, "We're quite pleased because fertility is not a disease. It's not a medical necessity that you have [contraception]." And she is on record as supporting the gag rule that denies funding to family planning programs that give women accurate information or counseling about abortion.
It's no surprise that the ideological right, exemplified and led by groups such as the Family Research Council, opposes abortion, but now it should be abundantly clear they also oppose birth control. It's not that they don't understand birth control prevents abortion; it's that they don't want women to have birth control in the first place. Or the sexual and reproductive self-determination that goes with the ability to plan and space one's own childbearing.
It also shouldn't surprise anyone that a president who values blind fealty above all tows the line of the far right that he believes elected him, and sees that his administrative appointees do so as well. But he might have instructed Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt to be rather more careful this time in selecting a person who actually supports the program she or he is appointed to administer.
If you agree there is something wrong with this picture, then write and tell Secretary Leavitt. Rep. Louise Slaughter tells you how. While you're at it, copy all your members of Congress and 10 friends, urging them to do the same. Orr can be Keroacked if the public outcry is loud enough.
Showing posts with label sexuality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sexuality. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Happy Birthday, Margaret
Woman must have her freedom, the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she will be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man's attitude may be, that problem is hers - and before it can be his, it is hers alone.
September 14 is the birthday of Margaret Sanger, founder of the U.S. birth control movement. She was born Margaret Higgins in Corning NY in 1879, though ever vain, she would later alter the family Bible to appear three years younger. The sixth child of eleven living siblings, her earliest childhood memories were of crying beside her mother’s bed as after she almost died following a difficult childbirth.
Sanger’s mother, Anne Higgins, did die, worn out from those too frequent pregnancies and births, at age 50. These experiences formed the sensibilities that propelled Margaret Sanger to advocate for birth control. She dedicated her first book on the fundamental rights of women to control their fertility to her mother. The quotation above and those that follow reveal her clear worldview about women and a laser beam focus on the work she believed with all her heart to be the most essential to women’s health, wellbeing, and rightful place in the world:
She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it
War, famine, poverty and oppression of the workers will continue while woman makes life cheap. They will cease only when she limits her reproductivity and human life is no longer a thing to be wasted.
Perhaps the best-known and most quoted of Sanger’s statements is this one that cuts to the core of why reproductive self determination is simple justice for woman, and without the freedom to make her own childbearing decisions, no other freedoms have meaning:
No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.
But her belief in the value of birth control went beyond feminism and women’s freedom. Too often, the right to sexual pleasure is pushed aside in the debates over birth control access today. Margaret took this subject on in the same frank way she took on other issues, and even included guidance about achieving orgasm in some of her writings. She spent much of her life raising money and supporting the research that led to the birth control pill, believing that a reliable method that could separate intercourse from the mechanics of birth control could not only dramatically reduce unintended pregnancies but also increase a couple’s sexual pleasure.
A mutual and satisfied sexual act is of great benefit to the average woman, the magnetism of it is health giving. When it is not desired on the part of the woman and she gives no response, it should not take place.
When she started her quest at the dawn of the 20th century, birth control was illegal and such methods as existed were rudimentary at best. Indeed, the term “birth control” hadn’t even been created; “family limitation” was the term of art at the time, and “reproductive health” wasn’t even a glimmer in anyone’s eye. Sanger had neither funds nor powerful supporters nor the force of public opinion behind her when she took her first bold steps. But she had passion for her mission, a vision of how she would bring birth control to women through a network of clinics that ultimately became Planned Parenthood. She had a sharp sense of how to use controversy and the media to stir up support for her cause
Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that woman in her which struggles for expression.
Sanger’s words which have most influenced my approach to life and my work for women’s reproductive rights, health, and justice are simply these:
Life has taught me: we must put our convictions into action.
I suspect that were she still alive, it would please her greatly to know know that so many people continue to put our convictions into action for the cause she began, though she would be appalled to see the many challenges that still exist to keep women from having universal and affordable access to birth control. Ellen Chesler’s biography of Sanger ends with her granddaughter and namesake, Margaret Sanger Marston, asking her grandmother how she wanted to be remembered. Margaret Sanger’s response was that “she hoped she would be remembered for helping women, because women are the strength of the future. They take care of culture and tradition and preserve what is good.”
And that’s how we should remember her today. Forgive the pun, but thanks to Sanger, so many women can now joyously celebrate their freely chosen “birth days”.
© Gloria Feldt 9/12/07
September 14 is the birthday of Margaret Sanger, founder of the U.S. birth control movement. She was born Margaret Higgins in Corning NY in 1879, though ever vain, she would later alter the family Bible to appear three years younger. The sixth child of eleven living siblings, her earliest childhood memories were of crying beside her mother’s bed as after she almost died following a difficult childbirth.
Sanger’s mother, Anne Higgins, did die, worn out from those too frequent pregnancies and births, at age 50. These experiences formed the sensibilities that propelled Margaret Sanger to advocate for birth control. She dedicated her first book on the fundamental rights of women to control their fertility to her mother. The quotation above and those that follow reveal her clear worldview about women and a laser beam focus on the work she believed with all her heart to be the most essential to women’s health, wellbeing, and rightful place in the world:
She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it
War, famine, poverty and oppression of the workers will continue while woman makes life cheap. They will cease only when she limits her reproductivity and human life is no longer a thing to be wasted.
Perhaps the best-known and most quoted of Sanger’s statements is this one that cuts to the core of why reproductive self determination is simple justice for woman, and without the freedom to make her own childbearing decisions, no other freedoms have meaning:
No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.
But her belief in the value of birth control went beyond feminism and women’s freedom. Too often, the right to sexual pleasure is pushed aside in the debates over birth control access today. Margaret took this subject on in the same frank way she took on other issues, and even included guidance about achieving orgasm in some of her writings. She spent much of her life raising money and supporting the research that led to the birth control pill, believing that a reliable method that could separate intercourse from the mechanics of birth control could not only dramatically reduce unintended pregnancies but also increase a couple’s sexual pleasure.
A mutual and satisfied sexual act is of great benefit to the average woman, the magnetism of it is health giving. When it is not desired on the part of the woman and she gives no response, it should not take place.
When she started her quest at the dawn of the 20th century, birth control was illegal and such methods as existed were rudimentary at best. Indeed, the term “birth control” hadn’t even been created; “family limitation” was the term of art at the time, and “reproductive health” wasn’t even a glimmer in anyone’s eye. Sanger had neither funds nor powerful supporters nor the force of public opinion behind her when she took her first bold steps. But she had passion for her mission, a vision of how she would bring birth control to women through a network of clinics that ultimately became Planned Parenthood. She had a sharp sense of how to use controversy and the media to stir up support for her cause
Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that woman in her which struggles for expression.
Sanger’s words which have most influenced my approach to life and my work for women’s reproductive rights, health, and justice are simply these:
Life has taught me: we must put our convictions into action.
I suspect that were she still alive, it would please her greatly to know know that so many people continue to put our convictions into action for the cause she began, though she would be appalled to see the many challenges that still exist to keep women from having universal and affordable access to birth control. Ellen Chesler’s biography of Sanger ends with her granddaughter and namesake, Margaret Sanger Marston, asking her grandmother how she wanted to be remembered. Margaret Sanger’s response was that “she hoped she would be remembered for helping women, because women are the strength of the future. They take care of culture and tradition and preserve what is good.”
And that’s how we should remember her today. Forgive the pun, but thanks to Sanger, so many women can now joyously celebrate their freely chosen “birth days”.
© Gloria Feldt 9/12/07
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