Gloria Steinem to Speak on 21st Century Feminism

In my family where there are three Glorias. I am known as Gloria #1. But in the world of feminism and activism for women, we all know who Gloria # 1 is. Alex and I are pleased as punch to invite you to our annual Women of the World lecture at Arizona State University. Gloria Steinem will honor us as our very special guest lecturer on October 17 at 7pm in the Memorial Union. It'll be a happening, honey! Click the image at left to enlarge it for more information.

Check this out: Working Mothers--Who's opting Out?

Friends-
Here's a very timely program starring some of my great friends and colleagues who'll set the record straight about women, work, and family--who's opting out or not, who's staying in and why, and what the media has got right and wrong.

WORKING MOTHERS: WHO'S OPTING OUT?
Tuesday, October 16, 7 p.m., $8 admission
The New School, New York City
Wollman Hall, 65 West 11th Street, 5th floor (enter at 66 West 12th Street)

You've read the articles--and gotten angry at the debate. Are vast numbers of working mothers bolting the career track--or dreaming of doing so? Are elite women betraying feminism by staying home with their children? Or do the Opt-Out stories rely too heavily on anecdotal evidence--while shoving aside actual labor statistics and working families' needs?

JOIN US as some of the KEY THINKERS and CRITICS of the "opt-out" storyline DISCUSS & DEBATE the real state of working motherhood in America today.

Moderated by E.J. Graff, senior researcher, Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, Brandeis University, collaborator on Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men and What to Do About It. The panel includes Joan Williams, Distinguished Professor of Law, University of California, Hastings College of the Law, and author of Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It; Linda Hirshman, lawyer, professor emeritus Brandeis University and author of Get to Work; Heather Boushey, senior economist, Center for Economic and Policy Research, and co-author of Hardships in America and The Real Story of Working Families; and Ellen Bravo, author of Taking On the Big Boys: Why Feminism Is Good for Families and Business and the Nation.

Here's all the information.


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Buggers Can’t Be Choosers

Posted on HuffPo 10/5/07

Oh how I wish I’d said that first. But though the quip’s origin is often attributed to Winston Churchill --as are most great lines--it was apparently British writer and academic Cecil Maurice Bowra
who said it first, to explain his engagement to a “plain girl” named Audrey Beecham.

Sexism be damned, I sincerely doubt I will be the last to cite this clever turn of phrase each time poor beleaguered Sen. Larry Craig (R-Wide Stance, to quote another great phrasemeister, former Rep. Sam Coppersmith, D-AZ) flashes onto our news screen. Craig’s seems to be the story that just won’t die, much to the chagrin of his Republican leadership. Kind of like those groundhogs, headlines just keep popping up all over, their incessantly high-pitched chatter mocking the holier-than-thou’s who have a headlock on the party of their choice.

That’s the same party that wants to deny reproductive choice to others, by the way.

The rest of us like to act as though we really don’t care that much about Craig’s sexual proclivities. But his little toe-tap wouldn’t have become such a big story unless we cared about it-- a lot.

So when Craig announced today that he will stay in Congress despite the Minnesota distroct court’s ruling that he can’t withdraw the guilty plea he entered after being “stung” in the now-enshrined Minneapolis airport men’s restroom-cum-tourist destination, the groundhogs immediately reared their little heads and began chattering away again.

I suspect Larry Craig will come out of this just fine eventually, as did Bowra. In fact, Bowra became the head of Wadham College and in 1992 a building was even named for him there. Meanwhile, he continued to supply us with a steady stream of quotables. On hearing of the marriage of a well-known literary pair, for example, he snipped, “Splendid couple – [I] slept with both of them".

But then though the British love their sex scandals as much as we do, they tend to regard them as entertainment rather than political morality lessons. Until we in the USA come to terms with the fact that sexuality is part of every human being’s life and develop a healthier relationship with sex, we will continue to spend way too much of the GNP on hiring plainclothes cops to track down gay men, even if they have to lure them into action in order to establish their sexual orientation.

Perhaps buggers can’t be choosers. But as a body politic, Americans can choose to spend our time and resources making sure everyone has healthcare, bringing an unworthy war to an end, and transforming abstinence-only sex education classes into medically accurate and comprehensive ones, rather than allowing our political agenda to be led by those who have an obsession with Larry Craig’s—and everyone else’s--sex life.

Appeasement is Lethal

The Huffington Post
Gloria Feldt and Maria Luisa Sanchez Fuentes| BIO | I'M A FAN OF THIS BLOGGER
Appeasement is LethalPosted October 3, 2007 | 02:20 PM (EST)
(The HuffPo link takes you directly to this post where you can comment.)

Rosaura "Rosie" Jiménez died bleeding and doubled over in excruciating pain from infection caused by the botched illegal abortion she sought in desperation. She was 27, a scholarship student in McAllen, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border, six months shy of getting her teaching credential and struggling to make a better life for herself and her 5-year-old daughter when she was caught in a vise called the Hyde Amendment [PDF]. This law denied her, as it has denied millions of low income women who depend on Medicaid for their health care, financial access to a safe abortion.

Rosie's life was sacrificed on the altar of politically expedient appeasement.

Pro-choice members of Congress, it seems, hadn't fought the bill, so sure were they that the courts would find such discrimination unconstitutional.

Once the Hyde amendment of 1977 put the anti-woman camel's nose under the tent, and pro-choice forces were in part unwilling and in part unable to wrestle the beast to the ground, increasingly draconian restrictions became the norm. Abortion opponents learned that while they were unsuccessful in making abortion illegal, they could lull the public to inaction by switching to a slow, incremental strategy of making abortion inaccessible, one restriction at a time. So barriers to access are increasing for all U.S. women, but especially the young, the poor, and those living in the 87 percent of counties without an abortion provider.

Rosie's Sisters in the U.S. and Mexico

We speak together as Rosie's sisters. For women are all sisters in the slow march toward full equality and simple justice. And no where are we more connected in that march than across the U.S.-Mexico border.

In Mexico, where abortion has been largely illegal for many years, unsafe abortion is the third to fourth highest cause of maternal mortality, and has caused many thousands of women's deaths through the years. Approximately 1,000 women die and over 100,000 have been hospitalized every year from the ravages of illegal abortion.

In the U.S. today, where abortion has been legal since the Roe v Wade decision in 1973, such deaths are exceedingly rare. That Rosie's death -- the first known to be a consequence of Hyde -- is unusual is evidence that safe, legal, and accessible abortion care is truly a blessing for the lives and health of women everywhere.

On April 24 of this year, a woman-made miracle occurred in Mexico City. The capital city decriminalized abortion to the twelfth week of pregnancy -- an enormous victory for women's health, rights, and dignity, and one that has set a precedent not only for Mexico, but for all of Latin America. Since then, more than 2,500 women have received safe abortion care with zero complications.

In Mexico, unlike the U.S., the right to health is protected by the constitution. So, the law's constitutionality will almost certainly be upheld by the federal Supreme Court. In turn pro-choice activists are working to guarantee that these new freedoms will soon be expanded to other Mexican states.

The Mexico City Ministry of Health has also put forward clear guidelines to ensure access to legal abortion services, while reinforcing access to sexuality education (that actually talks about sex) and contraception. They understand that the way to make abortion rare is not to deny access but to make unintended pregnancy rare by making access to reliable contraception and medically accurate sex education universal, and trusting women to use their minds and moral frameworks.

Without access, rights mean nothing
Yet, while Mexico and many other countries from Colombia to Portugal to Ethiopia move forward toward respecting women's legal and moral autonomy to make decisions about their own lives, shamefully, the U.S. is sliding backward.

The U.S. Supreme Court's recent Gonzales v Carhart decision overturning almost 35 years of precedent that made women's health the primary value in the law must be itself overturned by new laws such as the Freedom of Choice Act [PDF] that guarantee women the human and civil right to make their own childbearing decisions.

To start the long road back to full access, biased counseling mandates, required delays, denial of insurance coverage, forced involvement by parents, violence and harassment of providers and patients, and travel burdens -- all part of the U.S. landscape -- must be replaced with laws and services that respect women's desire for motherhood and freedom.

No, appeasing is not the middle ground that allows restrictions on women's consciences; the middle ground is prevention [PDF].

Rosie Jiménez was everyone's sister -- or daughter, mother, aunt, wife, cousin, friend.

In her memory, October is designated Abortion Access Month in the U.S. The reproductive health crime perpetrated against Rosie is symbolic of the 68,000 women and girls who die every year globally as a result of oppressive laws and lack of access to safe abortions. But these deaths are a miniscule part of the story of illness, misery, and suffering that can be averted by guaranteeing that abortion is safe, legal and accessible.

Appeasement is lethal to women and the pro-choice movement!

U.S.-Mexico Border Crossings Go Both ways

The Huffington Post
Gloria Feldt BIO I'M A FAN OF THIS BLOGGER

Border Crossings, Both Ways

Posted October 2, 2007 09:42 AM (EST)
Mention the U.S.-Mexico border and you set off political hot buttons. Everyone knows the two countries share complex historical, economic, and cultural relationships. But one relationship is seldom acknowledged: the movement of women across the border in both directions to obtain abortions over the years.

Sarah was a 22-year-old law school student at the University of Texas when she became pregnant in 1964. Her future husband was planning to attend law school after she graduated and got a job. They agreed they didn't want to have a child before marriage and felt they both deserved the chance to finish school. Together, they went to Piedras Negras across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas, where she had an illegal, but thankfully safe, abortion.

Jane was a young housewife with three preschool children in a southern Arizona ranching community in pre-pill 1958. The thought of caring for four children on a budget that strained hard to feed three had stressed her relationship with her husband almost to the breaking point. As much as she loved her children, Jane cried for days and thought she would either go insane or kill herself if she had to have another child. Three women friends who had made the journey previously accompanied Jane across the border to Nogales, Mexico, where abortions were illegal, as they were then in Arizona and every other state in the U.S, While the women had heard of doctors in Phoenix who would terminate pregnancies for $1,000 or more, Jane couldn't begin to afford that. So for the U. S. equivalent of $100, Jane had an abortion. She bled profusely and was treated for infection after she returned -- but she regained her emotional balance, and was able to hold the family together. She later volunteered for the local NARAL affiliate determined that American women should not suffer the humiliation, indignities, and sheer terror she experienced.

Jane is a composite of women who have told me their stories over the years. Sarah is Sarah Weddington, a Methodist minister's daughter who at age 26 became the youngest woman to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court. Her winning case was the 1973 Roe v Wade decision that legalized abortion throughout the U.S and has since saved the lives, health, and dignity of millions of women. She later served in the Texas legislature and the Carter administration; she remains a leading advocate for women.

Since Roe, and until very recently, Mexican women of means have routinely traveled to the U.S. for safe, legal abortions, much as Sarah and Jane traveled to Mexico in a previous generation for illegal ones.

A seismic shift occurred last April when Mexico City decriminalized abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. While they wait for what they predict will be a favorable ruling by the Federal Supreme Court, reproductive rights activists are consolidating their gains by training medical and social workers in counseling women respectfully about all their pregnancy options.

According to Maria Luisa Sanchez Fuentes, executive director of GIRE, Grupo de Informacion en Reproduccion Eligida/Information Group on Reproductive Choice, they are also working to ensure that public hospitals meet the law's requirements to provide abortion services free of charge as part of routine healthcare, and that the law's provisions for universal access to birth control methods and sexuality education to prevent unintended pregnancy from occurring in the first place are fully in force.

Abortion remains illegal in most of Mexico, except for cases of rape, incest, and in some states certain other reasons. Activists like Sanchez Fuentes are working to change that, heartened by public support in Mexico City, where the slogan is "Women decide, society respects, and the state guarantees."

Abortion, legal or not, exists in all societies because women the world over want a few simple things: to make a decent life for the children they have -- in the U.S., over 60 percent are mothers with one or more children when they choose abortion --and the right to their own lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. And because unintended pregnancies inevitably occur for a variety of reasons.

The difference is that when abortion is clandestine, women die or suffer debilitating illness such as infection or infertility. And in a profound sense, the psychological stigma of going to the back alley instead of the front door of a medical facility is harder to bear than the risk of infection, for it signals complete disregard for women's moral capacity to think and make responsible decisions.

Will women's rights activists in Mexico learn the lessons from U.S. that "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance" as Thomas Jefferson famously cautioned, so that the organized backlash against reproductive self-determination for women does not bring political setbacks like those in the U.S.?

Will we in the U.S. learn the lessons from Mexico, and make sure women have not just legal affirmation of the human right to make their own childbearing decisions, but also access to preventive services that reduce the need for abortion and full access to abortion services regardless of ability to pay? Or will we reach a point that American women must resort once more to crossing the border to Mexico for essential health care and respect they can't get at home?

Next: Safe, Legal, (accessible) and Rare

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malcolmfriedberg (See profile I'm a fan of malcolmfriedberg)
Sending women to Mexico to get the vital health-related services they need sounds criminal.
Log in posted 10:39 am on 10/02/2007
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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

August 26, National Women's Equality--oops--Toilet Paper Day

"Another of those silly jokes she forwards to her whole list," I thought as I warily opened the e-mail from my friend and former U. S. Senate candidate, Claire Sargent. But this was no joke. Claire had forwarded a message from another long time tiller of the women's equality fields, Paula Cullison, who reported that when she went to AOL's greeting cards seeking to send Women's Equality Day greeting cards in honor of the 87th anniversary of women's right to vote, August 26, she found instead a card honoring National Toilet Paper Day . http://greetings.aol.com/display.pd?path=62352&bfrom=3&prodnum=3079182

Not to disparage toilet paper, given its importance to human comfort and cleanliness, but I was, pardon me, wiped out at the thought that AOL/American Greeting Cards offers a card for every single day in the year but absolutely nothing to recognize Women's Equality Day.

With the run up to the 2008 elections already big daily news in no small part because the presidential field includes our first truly viable woman candidate for commander in chief, it is well to recall that America’s Constitution denied the right to vote to women and slaves when it was adopted by the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

The movement to get women the right to vote first seriously began during the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, NY. It took 72 years of diligent organizing, continuous campaigning, and courageous speaking out before the 19th amendment to the Constitution was adopted. Only one attendee of the Seneca Falls convention—Charlotte Woodward—was still alive by then; she cast her first vote at age 81.

Yet even in the face of allegations that giving women the vote would cause the demise of the family, and of charges that women were much too emotional to be entrusted with the serious act of voting and other such nonsense, the suffragists persisted until they prevailed, and female citizens of our nation achieved that basic right of all free people: to have an equal voice in electing those who represent us in making the laws and policies that govern our lives.I called Paula Cullison, who is President Arizona Women's Partnership, inc. a non-profit organization that funds grass roots charities that assist at risk Arizona women and children, to ask her why she had been moved to send her message around to 10 of her friends. She fumed, "What has happened, when one of the most important events in American History, Women's Suffrage Day, is denigrated by American Greetings to Toilet Paper Day! As an American woman who values the right to vote, I am ashamed of this corporate giant who profits from women, who buy the majority of greeting cards."So I decided to check other e-card services. None of the others suggest Toilet Paper Day cards for August 26, but few offer cards for Women’s Equality Day. Hallmark doesn’t have one, Blue Mountain doesn’t have one though they make it easy to create your own, and 123 Greetings has Women’s Equality Day cards but they are inanely devoid of content related to the day’s true meaning.

Cullison sent her message to 10 friends who use AOL's e-mail service and encouraged them to join the company's web chat where they could express their dismay. AOL can also be e-mailed at its “Give Us Your Feedback”link. If you use AOL, let them know what you think. If you use some other e-card service, check out whether they offer Women's Equality Day cards. Complain to those that don't. Thank those that do, and send their Women's Equality Day Cards to every woman in your address book with a reminder to cast her vote in every election.

Because unless women actively exercise equality at the ballot box, we lose much more than any greeting card can give and we'll have a bigger mess than all the toilet paper in the world can clean up.

© Gloria Feldt 2007

Letter the Washington Post Didn't Publish re Hillary's Cleavage

My friend Friedrike Merck suggested that I create a section on my website called "Salon Refusee", in which we could archive the many letters-to-the-editor that we write but they don't publish. Perhaps I will someday, but meanwhile, here is my latest letter that didn't get published:

To the Editor, Washington Post :

Re: “Hillary Clinton’s Tentative Dip Into New Neckline Territory”, Robin Givhan, Washington Post, July 20, 2007

When women of my age and Hillary’s began to achieve “firsts” in what had always been exclusively a man’s world, we were told to dress for success in the female equivalent of men’s dark business suit, stiff shirt, and bow tie. It was a given that we should appear sexless. Heaven forfend our pulchritude should distract the men from their terribly serious work.

That was over 30 years ago, but apparently women’s attire—or should I simply say “women?”-- remains a distraction, particularly if the woman in question is breaking some “first” barrier. The focus on physical appearance, especially sexuality, is a time-honored way to demean women. It’s the verbal equivalent of patting them on the head dismissively.

I acknowledge we had a national conversation about whether Bill wore boxers of briefs. But that seemed to have a note of lightness and fun about it. It made him seem more human. Instead, Givhan’s analysis of Hillary Clinton’s cleavage makes it a metaphor for aspersions Givhan proceeds to cast on Clinton's character.

Nancy Pelosi got the same treatment (“the Armani Grandma”, Newsweek called her) until she showed without doubt that she has the chops for her job.

As will Hillary Clinton when she becomes President.

Sincerely,
Gloria Feldt

The First Ever SWIA Award

I am mentioned 10 times—more than even Jane Fonda or Betty Friedan--by the anti-feminist Kate O'Beirne in her book Women Who Make the World Worse: and How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports, which was endorsed--surprise--by Peggy Noonan, Rush Limbaugh, and Laura Ingraham, This must mean I am doing something right. With those credentials as well as being an afficionada of Keith Olberman's nightly "Worst Person in the World" shtick, I have decided to start my own award for the stupidest women in America (SWIAA ™).

O'Beirne, has the hubris necessary to claim the right to worldwide judgment. Humble person that I am, I'm planning to highlight only the stupidest women in America. And because as everyone knows I am inherently biased toward liberals, I'll let Olberman slide this time.

My first SWIAA™ award goes hands down to Harriet Miers. Miers, the former White House Counsel who was George W. Bush's obviously underqualified and clearly doomed token female nominee for U. S. Supreme Court who was quickly withdrawn so he could pick the white male Justice he really wanted. She continues to stand by her man with her mouth clamped shut while Congress slaps her around.

The House Judiciary Committee, on July 25, ruled her in contempt of Congress for failing to respond to their subpoena for information related to the use of blatant political influence in the firing of a whole slew of U. S. Attorneys general. These AG's failed in one way or another to tow the administration's line.

But Miers is the Tower-in-Chief. She is the always good little girl seeking the big boys' approval, the woman who meekly does as asked when George W. Bush or his minions do the asking, the unmarried woman who so needs to be part of the hierarchical rightwing male bastion of power that she subordinates herself to men to whom she is not married but is clearly tethered in unholy alliance. These are men, not coincidentally, for whom abrogating women's Constitutional rights to equality in everything from salaries to sports to reproductive self-determination is just their breakfast cereal.

And what do you bet than faster than Scooter Libby was pardoned, Miers will swing in the wind, with that frozen I'm-a-good-little-girl smile still on her face?

Maybe someday I'll expand this award to men (SMIAA ™), but since Miers inspired me to start this SWIAA ™ list, I'm going to start by recognizing women like Miers who have no sense of their own best interest. Or perhaps they erroneously think their best interest is in identifying with their oppressors. "Ventriloquists for the patriarchy", Jane Fonda has aptly called such women.

Miers deserves my first SWIAA™ so much that I am thinking about naming it after her: the Harriet Miers Stupidest Woman in America Award. What do ya'll think?

Elle Magazine : "The Incredible Shrinking Woman"

ELLE magazine has a terrific section (its title, “The Incredible Shrinking Woman”, came from the original title of my article in it!)on the impact on women of the Gonzales v Carhart decision. Take a gander at he photo of the Supreme Court. It is the perfect visual metaphor—Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the sole woman looking so tiny among the male justices. Here are three links:

My essay entitled “The Time Is Now”
My Elle.com exclusive Q and A “You Don’t Choose, You Lose”
The full article “The Incredible Shrinking Woman”

Turn Down the Heat on Clinic Protests

It’s the sweltering heat of summer. We can count on seeing ads for escapes to the beach, reminders to wear sunscreen, and the extreme anti-reproductive rights, homophobic Operation Save America's annual attempt to turn up the political heat by mounting a media-circus demonstration at a high profile women's health center that provides abortions. This summer, July 14-22, the target-of-choice is the New Woman, Every Woman Healthcare Clinic in Birmingham AL.

If the location and clinic name ring a bell, there’s good reason. In 1998, Eric Robert Rudolf detonated a firebomb of dynamite and nails at the clinic’s front door, killing police officer Robert “Sandy” Sanderson on his beat and seriously wounding clinic nurse Emily Lyons. In addition to sustaining first, second, and third degree burns covering the front of her body, Lyons lost her left eye and her right was seriously damaged. A hole the size of a fist was blown in her abdomen and her left leg was shattered—just for starters.

There's something else we can count on too during these heated summer encounters. The doctors and women's health groups subject to these demonstrations, along with their allies in pro-choice organizations such as NOW and the Feminist Majority that flock to defend women from OSA's intimidating harassment, will be joined together with their adversaries in the Kabuki theater of irreconcilable opposites locked into predictable but intractable battles.

"Both sides"--to use the media's favored way of telling that story of those who line up for or against women's right and moral capacity to make their own childbearing decisions--are urged on in their performances by reporters terrified to appear to take a stance yet eager to have a controversy to report on.

The only way to stop the Kabuki dance that resolves nothing is for the community around all of these player to decide enough, stop, we're changing the story. Three groups bear a special responsibility to cool things down.

Community leaders of good conscience, regardless of where they stand on the abortion issue, must see themselves as part of the story, whether they want to be or not. It is they who must set the standard for what constitutes freedom of speech versus what constitutes harassment, intimidation, possible incitement to violence, and definite interference with providing and receiving health care services. Do not accept these demonstrations as just normal free speech because they are most certainly not, neither in intent nor practice. Give groups like OSA their platforms for expression to be sure, but not at a location where women can be hurt--and especially not a place where their own allies have killed and maimed in the past. Every city council should pass two resolutions: one to set a tone of civility and the other to establish alternate ways for dissenters (and they are dissenters—fully 2/3 of Americans want abortion to remain legal and safe) to express themselves away from the health care facility. And there must be zero tolerance for violence against the women, the doctors and other staff, or the facilities. That’s terrorism, plain and simple. Name it and confront it.

Clergy, regardless of where they stand on abortion, must join hands preemptively, before the demonstrations start, and declare their own open microphone day to decry violence and intimidation of women. Pro-choice clergy have an especially important role to publicly support the women who are making decisions they believe as fervently are moral and responsible ones as their detractors scream are otherwise. Pro-choice people of faith need to create a supportive welcome to the women and courageous staff and volunteers by their public words and deeds.

Clinics are vulnerable to violence and harassment precisely because they are isolated from the rest of medical practice. And how ironic it is that these very same clinics are so often women’s main source of medical care, in particular family planning services that prevent unintended pregnancy and abortion. So the medical community has a role to play too. Abortion should be defined and practiced as part of women's health care, and that would in itself diffuse much of the confrontation.

It’s the heat of summer. Time to go to the beach slathered in sunscreen. Time to take a new look at an old story and cool down the script so that our passion can be spent not on fighting intractable battles but on assuring that women have the health care, information, and social supports to make their own childbearing decisions without fear.

Gloria Feldt is the author of The War on Choice: the Right-wing Attack on Women’s Rights and How to Fight Back and former president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She frequently lectures on the history and future vision for reproductive rights, health, and justice.
Published by American Forum 7/13/07
© Gloria Feldt 2007

Take a look at this study from the Women's Campaign Forum Foundation

Note from Gloria: I think this new report from the Women's Campaign Forum Foundation is worth a read so I am posting the introductory information and link to it below.

Dear Friend:
We are pleased to announce the completion of the Women’s Campaign Forum Foundation’s premier report, “Vote With Your Purse: Harnessing the Power of Women’s Political Giving for the 2008 Election and Beyond.” As you’ve been hearing, after the completion of the 2006 election cycle, WCF Foundation set out to understand women’s political giving, to determine how women make political spending decisions and to develop methodologies to motivate greater financial political action from women. Our findings from extensive research, polling and focus groups are attached. Click here to view the full report.
In conjunction with the report release today, we are also launching an online poll to capture a snapshot of the smaller donor community and their ideas about giving politically. A number of our partners have agreed to post a link on their website to our online poll or send a blast email out to their contacts to get the word out and we invite you to do the same. We will be able to track where each poll participant linked from and send you data from your list. If you are interested in participating, please send Lissy Moskowitz an email at: lissy@wcfonline.org and she will get you the relevant information.
We hope you take the time to review the attached study and share these findings with others. As “Vote With Your Purse” demonstrates, women have the opportunity to dramatically impact the 2008 elections – together, we can make a difference.
Sincerely,
Ilana GoldmanPresident
734 15th St NW, Suite 500Washington, DC 20005

On abortion and breast cancer, New York Times gets headline right, story wrong

How do I even begin to comment on all the fallacies, misuse of language, and out-and-out false dichotomizing of “Breast Cancer Not Linked to Abortion, Study Says” (4/24/07) by Nicholas Bakalar in the New York Times? Though the headline is accurate, the article itself offers false balance at its worst, both creating controversy where there is none and weighing ideology against scientific facts as though they were equal.

Perhaps I’ll just start with the one and only pull quote from the piece: “New findings and a new abortion ruling may sharpen a debate.” Excuse me, but isn’t the reportage in question yet another in a long and distinguished line of peer reviewed scientific studies — published by such credible sources as the New England Journal of Medicine and the National Cancer Institute — that collectively followed millions of women over a generation and consistently found no causal link between abortion, induced or not, and breast cancer? Shouldn’t the new information diminish the debate since there seems to be little or nothing to debate about?

The newest study was published by The Archives of Internal Medicine and tracked 105,716 women, almost 40,000 of whom reported having had an induced abortion or miscarriage. The lead researcher is Karin Michels, associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard.

This builds on widescale and widely accepted scientific research that, according to the New England Journal of Medicine in 1997, induced abortions have no overall effect on the risk of breast cancer, based upon a review of the study in Denmark of 1.5 million women. (For more information, see the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy’s “Beyond the Cancer Myth,” which exlains the anti-choice movement’s use of this unproven and untrue breast cancer theory in court cases and legislation restricting access to abortion.)

Yet despite the weight of this newest, additional evidence, the reporter chose to give equal weight in the piece to Joel Brind, professor of biology and epidemiology at Baruch College , who opposes abortion and has long been trying to create the myth of a link between abortion and the incidence of breast cancer. This is clearly media seeking what I call false balance, and it is an example at its most harmful to women’s health. What the data actually shows is that full term pregnancy affords some protection against breast cancer. So the fact is that women who have not been pregnant at all also fail to get the protection against breast cancer that full term pregnancy confers—a very different conclusion which Brind turns on its head.

The Times quotes Michels as noting this very important point that illustrates the connection between state-mandated propaganda and your health: “There are still some states that require women to be informed about the risk of breast cancer if they get an abortion…that may not be justified based on the current evidence.”

Compounding his errors, Bakalar uses the recent U.S. Supreme Court’s recent Gonzales v Carhart decision upholding a federal abortion ban statute as the take-off point for asserting the non-existent controversy. But in saying the court’s ruling is premised on the legitimacy of outlawing a procedure if it posed a threat to women’s health, when the ruling actually eviscerated a central and often-reaffirmed precedent that the woman’s health must be weighed more heavily than potential fetal life in abortion law, the New York Times went beyond false balance and head-standing to pure fiction.

Partial Truth Decision

"[The] partial birth abortion ban is a political scam but a public relations goldmine...The major benefit is the debate that surrounds it."

So said Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, a militant anti-choice group that blockaded abortion providers, in 2003.

Today's U.S. Supreme Court's Gonzales v Carhart decision upholding the federal abortion ban is based that pubic relations goldmine. It is a travesty of language bought and repeated endlessly by journalists who were sometimes uninformed and sometimes just too lazy to get it right.

Indeed, the travesty of language around abortion is so pervasive that even Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing the decision for the Court's majority, in addition to using the term "partial birth abortion", also used the term "abortion doctor" repeatedly in the ruling. Opinion (Gonzales v. Carhart) Why did he not simply refer to doctors as "doctors", or if ob/gyns call them "ob/gyns"? If another surgical procedure were under scrutiny, would he have he referred to "tonsillectomy doctor" or "hysterectomy doctor"? Of course not. But those who want to take away a woman's human right to make her own childbearing decisions entirely have for so long used the term "abortion doctor" as an epithet that they have succeeded in getting even the highest court in the land to use their language.


But such bias is just the tip of the iceberg in the battle over what losing plaintiff Dr. Leroy Carhart has called "partial truth abortion". There is no such thing as partial birth abortion. The term will be found in no medical book. It was made up in 1995 by Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right-to-Life Committee, and former U.S. Representative and current Florida appeals court judge Charles Canady explicitly to confuse, horrify, and deceive--to manipulate language with the intent of sensationalizing the abortion debate. In particular, they intended to take the focus away from the woman and place the attention and the greater value on the fetus instead. The leading medical associations all agreed this was a misleading term, but the media never checked their language and by 2001, 90% of articles were using the term without so much as a "so-called" attached. As I reported in my 2004 book The War on Choice, an AP managing editor admitted when challenged that "partial birth abortion" was emotionally loaded, but said they continued to use it because it was instantly recognizable. Another major daily newspaper editor admitted it wasn't correct but said it was easier to use than alternatives.

Though an almost identical abortion ban was found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the past, it was a different Supreme Court. Elections have consequences. Since then, President George W. Bush has had the opportunity to appoint two new justices to the Court, justices who are ideologically in synch with the biased language. That shift made all the difference to women today and tomorrow.

Now we have a landmark Supreme Court decision, built upon the counterfeit foundation of a made-up term that the media accepted and used uncritically, and that has propelled the highest court to issue a ruling allowing to stand a law which at a minimum:


1. Does not provide adequate exceptions for a woman's health, which means that a fundamental legal principle of the primary importance of women's health has been overturned.
2. For the first time upholds a federal law which steps directly into the physician's exam room and tells him or her what medical technique cannot be used even if the physician's judgment is that it is the safest to protect her health and future fertility.
3. Will not reduce the number of abortions but will over time, according to the doctors who know women's health best, cause an increase in medical complications, and possibly even deaths.

The public relations goldmine of those who aim for nothing less than to eliminate reproductive justice at all times from all women has paid off for them today. Language, after all, has consequences too.

xxx

Here's the Center for Reproductive Rights complete background on the ruling and the arguments in the case:

http://www.reproductiverights.org/crt_pba.html



For a little more context, here's an article I wrote about a recent case that took another step backward for women's health; it will probably be the next thing to come back before the Court.
High Court Case Takes Aim at Heart of Roe

Thank You, Imus, for a Teachable Moment

This is a Moment with a capital "M". The opportunity for fundamental social change doesn't come often, so let's take full advantage of it.

Shock jock Don Imus's racist and sexist remarks about the Rutgers University women's basketball team didn’t go beyond his typical bottom feeder discourse, but in this age of YouTube and internet rapid response capability, his sleazy pot shots against a target so clearly undeserving of epithets have captured the nation's attention. We’ve been riveted to the story and it has brought us together. Interest soon turned to outrage; the outrage continues to mushroom into new social expectations. Suddenly it is Imus who’s shocked. Even Oprah is talking about it, and when a story reaches that level, you know Imus had better head for rehab fast because the times, they are a-changing.

Racism and sexism are so pervasive that too often we allow them to wash over us without pricking our consciousness let alone our consciences. But Imus's little tete a te with his executive producer Bernard McGuirk-who is equally culpable-was so awful, so blatant, so gratuitous it created a tsunami that might just wash away the toxicity regularly spewed by destruction derby talk shows.

Some of the current media chatter addresses important principles such as free speech, the difference between political speech and hate speech, and the appropriate punishment for Imus given that many rappers--not to mention other Limbaugh-like talk show hosts--have said similar things. This is a useful conversation, but should not divert us from the opportunity afforded by this Moment to expose the consequences of racism and sexism in real people's everyday lives.

That’s why it is overall a very good thing for a man who is such a symbol of the last bastion of unfettered white male supremacy to get canned for so clearly overstepping the bounds of appropriate speech, legally protected or not, political speech or not. I say, pour it on and grab his employers by the short hairs while the public's short attention span is focused on that vulnerable spot.

At the same time, the Scarlet Knights will better serve the cause of righting the injustice done to them by playing the role of teachers rather than victims. Based on my own experience, I generally counsel people in these situations to toughen up and not take media attacks personally because it's never about them; it's always about power: the bully’s fear of losing his power over them. Goodness knows, during my 30 years in the public eye advocating for women’s reproductive rights, I received the gamut of such ad hominem attacks from picketers wielding signs at my home to being called unprintable names on the airwaves to having a political cartoonist caricature me as a Nazi. The last felt to me like the equivalent of Imus calling the Rutgers women "nappy headed ho's".

But toughening up does not mean that those who are attacked should isolate themselves and refrain from fighting back in a positive way, especially when we are in a Moment.

Imus unwittingly gave his would-be victims a bully platform from which to teach America the wrongness of mindless bigotry. He attacked individuals rather than ideas, actions, policies. Imus wasn't talking issues at all. He gratuitously disparaged young women who were just playing basketball. He did it because he thought he could. His power to do so had never been challenged. Perhaps now he will learn along with the rest of us that it's fine to rough up ideas, but not to rough up people simply because of attributes they were born with. The difference is in category, not just in gradation.

So let's give a big round of thanks to Don Imus for awakening the nation to this distinction. He created a teachable Moment in which we have the opportunity, if we act on the conversation we are now having with ourselves, to make change for the better, both in our culture and in our own hearts.

The Great Scrotum Flap

Did you read the New York Times front-page article by Julie Bosman on school librarians’ censorship of a Newberry Award-winning children’s book “The Higher Power of Lucky”?

It’s creating quite a flap as well it should. I wrote the following letter to Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz in response to her excellent column “One Word Ignites Some Librarians’ Ire”:

Re: Your great column on the great scrotum flap

Dear Connie,

Yesterday morning when I read the piece about "The Higher Power of Lucky" in the NY Times, I immediately sat down to write an op ed myself. But I could not come close to the one you wrote and I want to thank you for it. In particular, your sharing of the personal story is always the most compelling truth.

Honestly, is this flap not the lowest denominator of silly? What an illustration of what I call America's difficult relationship with sex! I thought about my four grandsons, age 9-13, just about the age range for this book, and hoped to goodness that they and their female peers know and can use correctly the word "scrotum" by now.

Sadly, this whole fracas will continue to repeat itself until our society does come to terms with sex and sexuality in a healthy way, until we boot the abstinence only people out of our schools and the real perverts--those who would rather keep people ignorant than informed--out of our school's libraries.

All best,

Gloria Feldt

There's also another great article by Rabbi Marc Gellman about it in Newsweek this week.

Just a couple of days previously, I’d received this post from Rev. Debra W. Haffner’s blog. She said:

I want you to look carefully at the sign for this theater in Atlantic Beach, Florida...what's showing tonight and through the weekend?

That's right. "The Hoohaa Monologues."

The WHAT?

It turns out that a woman passing by complained to the manager of the theater that the sign read "The Vagina Monologues." According to him, she explained that she didn't want to tell her daughter, who is old enough to read, what a vagina was.

I'll forgive you if you're smiling about now....but it really isn't funny. In fact, it basically proves the point of Eve Ensler's play. By denying women the names of the parts of their body, we in essence are denying their sexuality. If you've read my book, "From Diapers to Dating", you know that I believe that even the smallest children need to learn the names of the parts of body -- all the parts. It teaches them that all body parts have value, that we can talk about sexuality in our homes, it doesn't instill shame, and it equips them to tell if someone tries to touch them inappropriately. I'd be happy to have the Religious Institute buy that mother a ticket to the play...I think she needs it. And her daughter needs to know not only that she has a vagina, but a vulva and clitoris as well.

Right you are, Debra! Ignorance has never been bliss, and in fact it almost guarantees unhealthy decisions simply because people do not have a clue what their choices mean. And as I said in my letter to Connie Schultz, the solution is to create a healthier relationship with sex in our culture. We’ll save ourselves as adults a lot of angst, but more important, we’ll save our children a lot of heartbreak and disease.

Nancy Pelosi's Greatest Asset

After two days of pounding Washington’s marble hallways last week while the 110th Congress was sworn in, my flat-heeled boot clad feet were killing me. That Nancy Pelosi manages to do it in Jimmy Choo heels was enough to convince me of her resolve.

When Pelosi accepted her gavel, she said she was “breaking the marble ceiling.” But what difference does it make that Pelosi has become the first woman speaker in our nation’s history? After its first 100 hours in which the House is taking up ethics reform, raising the minimum wage, lifting restrictions on funding stem cell research, lowering interest on student loans, permitting the Feds to wrestle Medicare drug prices down a few notches, and nipping subsidies for oil and gas producers—all measures on which the new Democratic majority agrees and can even pull a few Republican votes—will Pelosi do things differently, fulfilling her pledge of civility and partnership over partisanship?

Shortly after being sworn in to cheers from a packed gallery, Kirsten Gillibrand, new Democratic congresswoman from upstate New York’s 20th District, was, she said, “on cloud nine. I’m so aware of the historic significance of this moment and thrilled to be part of it.” Gillibrand’s victory over a long-time Republican incumbent was one of the pivotal wins that tipped the majority to the Democrats.

We were standing amid a chaotic mass of constituents waiting to get pictures taken with their member and the speaker outside the Rayburn room—named for legendary Texan, Sam Rayburn, who presided for 17 years as speaker during the 1940s and 1950s. Washington is obsessed with the photo op because leadership is about the creation of meaning. The now ubiquitous photo of Pelosi brandishing a giant wooden gavel and smiling among her own and other members’ children and grandchildren telegraphed her message precisely: I am a woman, a liberal Democratic pro-choice feminist woman no less, and I love children. My agenda will be about the future not the past. So get off my case, all of you who want to brand me as lacking those values. I’m a mom, and I know how to run a house. I’m taking this Congress forward. (Gracious smile here.) Do come with me.

I waited among another group of family, staff, and friends for the swearing in of Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat representing Southern Arizona’s 8th district and one of the youngest of the new congresswomen at age 36. Giffords was in constant motion, excited at the prospect of presiding over the House session from 11 pm until midnight that evening—prime TV time for C-Span watching constituents back home. Pelosi has made a number of smart moves like this: giving new members from swing districts plum assignments—Gillibrand and Giffords are both on the prestigious Armed Services Committee—and substantive speaking roles to help them keep their seats in ‘08. Pelosi photo accomplished, the Gifford contingent went down to the Capitol rotunda for a private swearing in by former Governor Bruce Babbitt—before a statue of John C. Greenway, a mining magnate whose widow Isabella become Arizona’s first congresswoman in 1933. Giffords promised to follow in Isabella’s footsteps as she thanked women who paved her way and pulled her up.

Later, Giffords told me she had worked with a woman speaker before, a Republican who led the Arizona legislature. A feminist in today’s terms, she thinks, is “a woman who is strong, self-sufficient, [and] moves beyond a gender focus.” She said Speaker Pelosi “surrounds herself with smart, good people. She knows being a Washington insider isn't a good thing. When we had a briefing on Iraq, she had all the freshmen ask questions first. And she is giving freshmen women roles not considered typical to women. I don’t know whether a man would have that sensitivity.”

Pelosi has more women to consider for assignments than available to her predecessors. Though still far from parity, this Congress includes 74 women in the House and 16 in the Senate, marking a recovery from the setbacks of the 1994 Gingrich revolution that wiped out gains made during the 1992 “year of the woman” elections. No victory is forever. And Giffords is only Arizona’s third woman member of Congress—an illustration that more women need to be in the pipeline if the next generation is to achieve gender balance.

Speaker Pelosi may well inspire more women to become candidates. Newly elected Congresswoman Mazie Hirono of Hawaii cited a growing body of research that finds most women run because other people encourage them, whereas men “think it’s their God-given right to seek office.” Hirono spearheaded a political action committee to raise money for women candidates, named in honor of the late Congresswoman Patsy Mink. “If you never see a woman leading, it is very hard to envision a woman as speaker of the House and second in line of succession to the presidency,” said Hirono. “The very fact that Pelosi is there makes a difference.”

Hirono is a role model herself. She served in the state legislature before she was elected lieutenant governor. She then ran for governor and lost one of the few statewide races that have pitted two women against each other. But Hirono came right back, barely winning a hotly contested Democratic primary for her Congressional seat before coasting to victory in the general election. Women have to learn to take those risks and not be deterred by defeat, she says.

Encouragement can work both ways. The new congresswomen are a stellar bunch who can be a huge support to Speaker Pelosi. Democrats are far more diverse and far less trusting of power than Republicans tend to be. But if the speaker is as smart as I think she is, she will spend less time cultivating the “Blue Dog” Democrats and recognize the progressive women as her greatest asset.

Sam Rayburn was fond of saying, “Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build it.” Pelosi has the enormous challenge of being the right woman for this time—the carpenter who builds a better future for those fresh-faced children surrounding her in that iconic photo.

An Auspicious D.C. Tea Party

Change is in the air this week in Washington, D.C. “This is what happens when they ban smoking in those smoke-filled rooms,” observed Congresswoman Rosa De Lauro (D-CT) as she welcomed some 1,000 women to high tea January 3 in honor of the first female speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

The mood in the Mellon Auditorium on Capitol Hill was buoyant among this gathering of partisans and issue advocates. Many, like me, have tasted both victory and defeat time after time in the struggle to advance liberty and justice for women. Now, with Nancy Pelosi leading a newly elected Democratic majority, a question was raised repeatedly in conversations throughout the elegant hall: “Will this time really be different?”

Change can be elusive in a Washington culture that seems to suffer from attention deficit disorder. But a more enduring transformation could be seen in the nature of the audience itself. Collectively, these women had raised or given millions of dollars and worked millions of hours on behalf of candidates. Women have always been the envelope stuffers and door-knock organizers in political campaigns. Now—thanks to the clout that results from gains in economic equality won through many election cycles—we’re also writing the big checks. And we’re writing them for the causes and candidates we choose from bank accounts we have earned ourselves.

Economic power and political power are joined at the hip, as the guys have always known. And despite some backlash declarations that feminism is dead from those who would like to see it so, the truth is that girls today grow up with an entirely different outlook on their lives than I had as a youth. So Nancy Pelosi’s self-assured, elementary school-aged granddaughter Madeline could say about the woman she calls Mimi: “Because of Mimi, more women can get jobs like this.”

Much of the rhetoric and symbols of the day’s political theater positioned Pelosi as a family-first kind of woman, one who learned her values from family and church and focuses on making life better for others. All that sounds pretty traditional. But maybe, like Nixon going to China, it takes what looks like a traditional woman to make lasting, radical changes in public policy.

“For every little girl who has wondered what she can be when she grows up, the glass ceiling in this institution has been shattered forever,” declared DeLauro. “When women are elected, the agenda changes."

I doubt that because a woman has ascended to the position of speaker, all Americans will suddenly have health care, the war in Iraq will end immediately, Congressional ethics will no longer be an oxymoron, and vicious debates over stem cell research and abortion will be transformed into positive initiatives to improve public health. But each step that takes our nation a little closer to full equality for all its citizens is a change to be celebrated with high tea or other libations, as much for how we have changed ourselves as for how our efforts have changed our government.

Radio Interview with Lisa Birnbach on Greenstone Media on 12/5/2006

Click here to hear Gloria's interview with Lisa Birnbach on Greenstone Media about Bush's appointment of anti-birth control Dr. Keroack to head nation's birth control program.

Humpty Dumpty Keroack

With W, up is down and down is sideways. We've grown inured to the duplicity, the sleight of hand, the wink while Haliburton profits as our sons and daughters die in Iraq, the ruthlessness with which the 1 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, however, this administration and its right wing buddies at least try to obfuscate their Orwellian redefinitions. Not so, however, in the president's latest and most arrogant "in-your-face, voters, ‘cause I'm-the-decider" action. I'm speaking about the appointment of Dr. Eric Keroack to the position of Deputy Assistant Secretary for Population Affairs, DASPA for short.

Keroack, who opposes birth control, will be in charge of the nation's major family planning program, Title X of the Public Health Services Act , which provides contraceptive services to over 5 million American women each year through some 4500 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.

Yes, you read that right. A man who opposes birth control has been put in charge of the nation's major providers of birth control services. Never mind that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention includes family planning as one of “Ten Greatest Public Health Achievements of the 20^th Century” for good reason.

Keroack—a non-board certified ob/gyn—at the time of his appointment was the 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. The methods used by these centers range from showing women misleading photos of fetal development to giving them misinformation about the health risks of abortion. Whatever works, it seems, is their motto. In my own personal experience with these clinics, I've known one to lock women in a room to watch videos for so long that they missed their appointments at a nearby reproductive health center and another that advised women to pray to Jesus rather than to giving her the requested information about birth control. Praying is not a bad idea, but it has not been known to be a very effective contraceptive method.

A policy statement of A Woman's Concern says, “A Woman’s Concern does not distribute, or encourage the use of, contraceptive drugs and devices…A Woman’s Concern is persuaded that the crass commercialization and distribution of birth control is demeaning to women, degrading to human sexuality, and adverse to human health and happiness.”(http://www.slate.com/id/2154249/) The organization supports sexual abstinence until marriage, opposes contraception and does not distribute information promoting birth control at its six centers in eastern Massachusetts. Keroack also serves on the advisory committee for the Abstinence Clearing House and has alleged that pre-marital sex changes the brain chemistry so that bonding to another person becomes difficult.

It's no surprise that the ideological right opposes abortion, but now it should be abundantly clear they also oppose birth control. Down is up. 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.

Keroack's appointment does not require Congressional confirmation. But that doesn't mean his appointment should be allowed to stand. For further media reports and editorial comments: Washington Post, Boston Globe, Associated Press, United Press International , Boston Globe, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, U.S. News & World Report.

With enough public outcry, this Humpty Dumpty can and should fall down.

© Gloria Feldt 2006