feminist blogs

Don’t you just love how much “pro-lifers” care about babies once they’re born?

The Bush administration violated federal law last year when it restricted states’ ability to provide health insurance to children of middle-income families, and its new policy is therefore unenforceable, lawyers from the Government Accountability Office said Friday.

Anti-choice Republicans were concerned that the children’s health care program would “crowd out” private insurer’s ability to make lots of money. And so the White House rejected a proposal from New York that would have covered an additional 70,000 children.

Gotta love the GOP: Where the concern for life ends at birth.

Elizabeth Edwards responds to a McCain campaign spokesman’s dismissive assertion that she “did not understand the comprehensive nature of the senator’s proposal.”

I would be seriously remiss if I didn’t highlight Meowser’s terrific post, at Shakesville and cross-posted at Fat Fu, in response to this comment by Barack Obama:

“If we could go back to the obesity rates of 1980 we could save the Medicare system a trillion dollars.”—Barack Obama during Democratic Presidential Debate, 12/13/07

Says Meowser:

But we have an election coming up next year, and strictly from a fat perspective, I worry about who is going to replace him. When I found out Barack Obama (much like Hillary Clinton, who has made similar remarks in the past) wanted to disappear me solely because of my weight in order to save the government money, I had to ask: Just how far are they willing to go to make that a reality?

No, really, I want to know. I’m willing to sacrifice a lot in order to make life better for poor people, gays, Muslims, waterboarding victims, and a whole lot of other folks who have been personally kicked in the rear a lot more severely than I have by the current administration. I’m willing to sacrifice a lot for a cleaner environment, safer food, no war, no wiretapping or torturing just because you don’t like someone’s mustache, and more affordable housing for all. Which is why I’m a Democrat. They may not be perfect, but at least they make a pass at giving a damn about those issues.

But I still think I have a right to know just how much agency they are willing to remove from people—and especially fatasses like myself—in the name of “health care cost containment.” You’d think the Democrats would be all about personal agency and individual freedom. They damn well ought to be. But I’m afraid that when it comes to nosing around in people’s body autonomy, they’re just as guilty as the people they want to replace; they just want to nose around in a different part of our bodies, that’s all.

Getting the vapors about health care costs and blaming the fatties for driving up the cost of health care seems to be the very latest fashion. And here’s the thing: I haven’t seen one reliable study that shows that fat people, over a lifetime, actually have higher healthcare costs than other people. (more…)

Several of Hillary Clinton’s campaign workers were held hostage yesterday at her headquarters in Rochester, New Hampshire, and Ronald Reagan bears at least part of the blame.  Richard Kim explains at The Nation - Reagan started to dismantle state-funded mental health care without creating an alternate system, and subsequent administrations have only made the problem worse.

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Those of us in the reproductive rights crowd have been talking about the increase in birth control prices on college campuses for some time, now. The change came about due to new rules passed in the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 and went into effect a few months ago. Don’t let the name of the act confuse you, though — going back to the old rules and lowering the price of contraception for college students wouldn’t cost tax payers a dime, though it would force the pharmaceutical industry to lose out on a tiny portion of they’re already-monstrous yearly profits.

Lawmakers say that the change was unintentional. Seeing when it was passed and the track record on support for contraception from our government, I don’t quite buy it. But I’m also not even sure how much that matters, anymore. What’s important is fixing the problem.

Finally, the NY Times has published an article on the subject. It’s late, but I’m also thrilled to see the issue getting some press coverage. I do know that Planned Parenthood has recently been hyping the story to the media like mad. The affiliate that I work for has held several media events in the last week and we had a local news team in the building the other day. Thank god someone is finally listening.

A couple of paragraphs in the article, though they didn’t surprise me, did make me laugh (bitterly) out loud:

Not everyone is troubled by the price increases. Some people said they wondered why college students, many of whom manage to afford daily doses of coffee from Starbucks and downloads from iTunes, should have been given such discounted birth control to begin with, and why drug companies should be granted such a captive audience of students. Others said low-priced, easy-to-attain contraception might encourage a false sense of security about sex.

“From our perspective, this does bring to light a public health concern, but for a different reason,” said Kimberly Martinez, the executive director of the Abstinence Clearinghouse, which advocates abstinence from sex until marriage. “These young women are relying on this contraception to protect them. But contraception isn’t 100 percent — for pregnancy or for disease.”

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Sarah Blustein’s got the reasons why, especially if you’re a woman of color:

Good news! if you are an ordinary mortal living in the United States, your chances of staying alive are better than ever. According to new government numbers, the rate of Americans dying in 2004 (the most recent year to be calculated) hit a record low, while life expectancy — for blacks and whites, men and women — hit a record high. Men were closing their historic life-expectancy gap with women, and African Americans were closing their life-expectancy gap with whites. Even the babies were doing well: The infant mortality rate dropped, too.

Sadly, however, if you are a pregnant mortal living in the United States today, your chances of dying appear to be greater than ever. Yes, the total number of women who die in childbirth in America is low. But according to the Centers for Disease Control’s new “National Vital Statistics Report,” the number of women dying in or around childbirth has risen — putting the United States behind some unsurprising countries, like Switzerland and Sweden, and some surprising ones, like Serbia and Macedonia, Qatar and Kuwait, in its rate of maternal mortality. In rankings calculated on 2000 numbers, the World Health Organization (WHO) ranked the United States at No. 29 on the list, even though, according to the most recent statistics, there is only one country, Tuvalu, that spends more on health care as a percentage of gross domestic product than the United States.

Be sure to read the rest.

The US healthcare system is irrevocably broken. There’s no reason at all that the maternal mortality rate should be so high in a country with world-class healthcare facilities, except for the fact that we don’t have world-class access.

I knew people in my very first job, where few people made over $30,000, and only because they’d been hired away from union papers, where pregnancy and birth care wasn’t covered because the pregnant woman’s husband had been hired after she’d become pregnant and it was considered a pre-existing condition. And that was in 1990; it’s much worse since then.

Even I don’t have health insurance ATM, and I make somewhat more than the Frosts, with no kids. But I have student loans, and a mortgage, and unless you work for the kind of law firm that I turned my back on long ago, you’re not going to make a hell of a lot. I also have no dependents to consider taking a gamble on; the only person’s health I’m taking a chance on is my own. But I’ve priced health insurance in the private market, and thanked my lucky stars that I qualify for a couple of different group plans. If I could spare the cash. And I’m only getting it for myself.

Via Bean, who’s got some more information on a ruling which struck down an injunction against getting pregnant again as a condition for a homeless couple to regain custody of their children.