Guest commentary: Reflections on an anti-choice agenda
By Kelley Brooks and Allison Baron Arizona Daily Wildcat
Thursday, September 30, 2004
The term "family planning service" includes abortion, but more importantly encompasses a much wider range of healthcare options for women and their families. It includes contraceptive healthcare, including condoms and birth control, gynecological exams, counseling services and more.
The current administration is attempting to severely limit family planning services that are provided to millions of women and families in the United States every day by cutting funding to public healthcare programs as well as the availability of contraceptives provided by your local drugstore.
In addition, extremely conservative judges are being packed into the Supreme Court in order to make it virtually impossible for equity to exist for women within the public healthcare system.
The government offers Title X funding in order to help provide family planning services as well as breast exams, pap smears, testing for high blood pressure, anemia and diabetes, screening for HIV and STIs (sexually transmitted infections) and counseling services in communities throughout the United States.
Despite this, Title X is extremely underfunded, receiving $278 million for the fiscal year of 2004, with no increase whatsoever for 2005.
Taking inflation into account, this funding is 57 percent less than it was 20 years ago.
This is interesting, considering that for pregnancy and newborn-related costs, federal and state governments save three dollars in Medicare costs for every one dollar spent on family planning services and community education, according to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
In addition to declining funding for Title X, comprehensive sexual education is being strongly challenged by the current administration.
Comprehensive sexual education promotes abstinence as the most certain way to prevent pregnancy and infection, but also provides accurate information about contraceptive use and disease prevention.
Rather than focusing on the negative consequences of sexual relationships, it promotes a healthy expression of personal sexuality.
Abstinence-only sex education, on the other hand, teaches that abstinence is the only acceptable means for adolescents to prevent pregnancy and infection and does not provide contraceptive information. It also teaches that sex outside marriage is always wrong and leads to harmful psychological and physical consequences.
Instead of funding comprehensive sexual education, the White House is proposing to double federal money devoted to abstinence-only education to $273 million for the 2005 fiscal year. Little evidence exists to show that teens who receive abstinence-only programs abstain from intercourse longer than others.
Teens who participate in comprehensive sexual education programs are more likely to use contraception, including condoms and birth control, than those who have had no education about these methods.
U.S. teens are contracting HIV faster that any other demographic in the country. American teen pregnancy rates are higher than in any other developed country in the world.
This is why the availability of emergency contraception (EC) over-the-counter is desperately needed, especially because it must be taken within the first 24 to 72 hours of intercourse for the prevention of unwanted pregnancy.
EC, the "morning-after" pill, helps prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterus, which has been scientifically proven to be the point of conception.
It is not to be confused with RU-486, deemed the "abortion pill." Rather, it is a safe combination of the hormones found in birth control pills.
The FDA recently turned down a request to make EC available without a prescription because of politically conservative influence. There is no scientific reason to restrict access to this safe, effective backup method of regular birth control. Comprehensive scientific data shows that Plan B meets the FDA's criteria for over-the-counter status.
No matter what your political or religious affiliation, family planning services in general are vital to the basic healthcare of women and their families.
One person's opinion should not dictate or control an entire community's access to safe and affordable basic healthcare.
As you are thinking about this upcoming election, consider how you, as an educated adult, can make the right decision for all people regarding this access to medically accurate healthcare.
Especially consider what you would do without the availability of condoms or birth control, vital tools for protection within healthy sexual relationships.
While this idea may seem far-fetched, the current administration is doing everything they can to slowly chip away at basic reproductive health rights and freedoms. If we don't stop these erosions today with the ability to have our voices heard, what will be the consequences on our sexual freedoms in the future?
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Kelley Brooks Guest columnist
Allison Baron Guest columnist
Kelley Brooks is an elementary education junior and Allison Baron is a physiological sciences sophomore. They are co-chairs for Students For Choice, a UA club. All information in this column was compiled by www.plannedparenthood.org [ http://www.plannedparenthood.org/ ] and www.choiceusa.org [ http://www.choiceusa.org/ ].
Editorial: Cairo countdown/Hoping for health by 2015
September 27, 2004 Last update: September 26, 2004 at 7:02 PM
Ten years ago this month, world leaders made a promise: By the year 2015, they resolved, poor women in every country would have access to reproductive health care. Fulfilling that pledge, they knew, would avert millions of maternal and infant deaths. And it would do a great deal to advance the hopes of families in the developing world -- all while curbing a population surge that threatens the health of the planet.
It was an indisputably great idea, but how much progress has been made toward the destination? Far too little. So said participants at last week's Countdown 2015 Global Roundtable in London, convened to assess global health a decade after Cairo's International Consensus on Population and Development.
The problem, oddly, isn't lassitude on the part of developing countries. Most have followed through on the pledges to invest in reproductive health. What's troublesome is the obstinacy of wealthier nations -- most notably the United States, a chief crafter of the 1994 pact. U.N. Foundation president Tim Wirth, a former senator from Colorado who led the U.S. delegation to Cairo, expressed real grief about the American turnabout: "On issue after issue," Wirth said at the London meeting, "the current administration has placed ideology above evidence and bias above science."
This lamentation has been echoed by policy analysts everywhere, all of them dismayed over President Bush's recent decision to drop U.S. support for the Cairo agreement because it fails to condemn abortion. The president has also nixed funding to global family-planning groups that even mention abortion --and for three years running has refused to hand over tens of millions Congress has approved for support of the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA). There's also great worry about the administration's policy of promoting abstinence over condom use in countries besieged by AIDS.
So how far along the Cairo road are we? The progress can be measured in dollars, as UNFPA's just-released annual report seeks to do: At Cairo, it notes, wealthy countries pledged $6.2 billion annually for reproductive health by 2005. As things stand, they're giving only half of the promised yearly sum. Meanwhile, developing states are showing real commitment: By 2003, they were mustering $11.7 billion a year for reproductive-health programs.
But if the United States continues its shirking -- thereby letting smaller rich nations off the hook -- there's no way the Cairo goals can be met. The very poorest countries depend entirely on the well-off for health-care help, and over the last decade, donor funding for contraception and condoms has dropped drastically --even though demand is rocketing.
It's by no means dramatic to say that the dream of Cairo is turning into a nightmare. Conservative calculations suggest that at least 200 million poor women lack all access to contraception. That deprivation is largely to blame for 23 million unplanned pregnancies, millions of abortions and half a million maternal deaths in the developing world each year. It has helped fuel the spread of HIV, which last year infected 5 million more people around the world. And if birth-control access remains limited, the population in the world's 50 poorest countries is expected to triple by 2050 -- multiplying suffering as well as the number of sufferers. All this because a decade-old promise is well on its way to being forsaken. But though the promisers have strayed, they need not persist in their abdication. There are still millions of lives to save --and many hearts to be kept whole --through the speedy keeping of a pledge.
A public town meeting on the Cairo goals, moderated by Arvonne Fraser and featuring leaders from U.S. population and environmental groups, is scheduled for Tuesday, 1 to 3:30 p.m. at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute -- 1301 19th Av. S. in Minneapolis.
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