While Andy Hammond continues his enlightened viewpoint that women who want birth control are nothing more than promiscuous miscreants who want the federal government to subsidize their totally unnecessary sexuality, people in the reality-based community are measuring the impact of conservative social policy on the health of women, and the results are deeply troubling.
Now if this were just Andy, it probably wouldn’t matter. In Montana, unfortunately, we are seeing the ideology translate into policy. In recent months
- Broadus pharmacist John Lane has announced his intention to “save humanity” by denying access to birth control;
- Snyder Drug in Great Falls has announced plans to stop filling birth control prescriptions for “moral and business” reasons;
- College students faced enormous increases in the cost of contraception;
- Representative Rehberg voted to deny federal funding for family planning services for hundreds of thousands of low-income Americans.
What happens when a nation, dominated by a conservative orthodoxy about sexuality, restricts access to safe contraception? The very abortions conservatives decry. Increased teenage birth rate. Increased infant mortality. Health complications for women. The social burden of unwanted children. Financial instability.
When the United States lags behind Croatia and Cuba in terms of the safety of pregnancy and childbirth, it doesn’t take much of a social scientist to realize that we need to do more, not less, to ensure safe, affordable access to family planning in the United States.
Despite the tone of Andy’s posts, access to family planning is not a joke. It’s a serious subject with repercussions for real people and society as a whole. Andy and social conservatives may be “astounded” that people believe affordable access to health care should exist for everyone, but isn’t it more astounding that we would tolerate denying access to family planning to satisfy a minority, conservative opinion?
It’s not my fault this time.
I’m having some errors on the site, and switched temporarily to a simpler theme that actually loads.
Update: Nothing to see here, move along.
After a weekend of dealing with outsourced technical support from Sony and customer service from XM Radio, I thought that outsourcing couldn’t get any more ridiculous until I read this article from CNN about outsourced childbirth:
But if commercial surrogacy keeps growing, some fear it could change from a medical necessity for infertile women to a convenience for the rich.
“You can picture the wealthy couples of the West deciding that pregnancy is just not worth the trouble anymore and the whole industry will be farmed out,” said Lantos.
Or, Lantos said, competition among clinics could lead to compromised safety measures and “the clinic across the street offers it for 20 percent less and one in Bangladesh undercuts that and pretty soon conditions get bad.”
We’re getting closer to science fiction every day.
I wonder, if while writing news stories about low name recognition of political candidates, Montana’s political reporters ever consider the possibility that the reason candidates aren’t better known is because of their lack of coverage?
I’m sure that Mike Lange is happy that no one know who he is, though, so he is unlikely to complain much.
Patrick Smith, writing for the New York Times, has one of the best critiques of the current airline security regime I have read:
In the end, I’m not sure which is more troubling, the inanity of the existing regulations, or the average American’s acceptance of them and willingness to be humiliated. These wasteful and tedious protocols have solidified into what appears to be indefinite policy, with little or no opposition…
Americans can now pay to have their personal information put on file just to avoid the hassle of airport security. As cynical as George Orwell ever was, I doubt he imagined the idea of citizens offering up money for their own subjugation.
How we got to this point is an interesting study in reactionary politics, fear-mongering and a disconcerting willingness of the American public to accept almost anything in the name of “security.” Conned and frightened, our nation demands not actual security, but security spectacle.
A few notes from the world of education news.
- America’s top schools are struggling with an amazing crop of applicants who they simply don’t have enough room to hold, says Joseph Berger in the New York Times. Working with some of these students, I have come to see the often absurd logic of the admissions process at elite schools, who stubbornly cling to admitting legacies, which compounds the problem.
- Would a Giuliani administration have a Bush education policy on steroids?
- President Bush’s Reading First program is under Department of Justice investigation for cozy relationships between schools and publishers. Don’t hold your breath on that investigation. On the bright side, Bush is cutting funding for the program, one of the hallmarks of the non-punitive side of NCLB.
- Can you teach reading with comic books? On first glance, it looks like another educational fad without much academic research supporting it.
- James Heckman and Paul LaFontaine argue that the dropout rate is worse than we are being told in this working paper (PDF).
