We're number one!

The Guardian's headline was appalling, but not really surprising to anyone who has been alive and paying attention in Texas for the past few years:

Texas has highest maternal mortality rate in developed world, study finds

The story that followed gave the shocking facts.

A report in the September issue of the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology gives details of a study by researchers from the University of Maryland, Boston University's school of public health, and Stanford university's medical school. The study found that the rate of Texas women who died from complications related to pregnancy doubled from 2010 to 2014 to 35.8 deaths per 100,000 births in 2014. This represents a maternal mortality rate higher than any other state and higher than any other country in the developed world. 

Yes, we're number one - in women's deaths from the complications of pregnancy.

The report stated that the doubling of mortality rates in the study period was hard to explain "in the absence of war, natural disaster, or severe economic upheaval." But, in fact, there is a war raging in Texas. It is the war against women's health options being waged by the right-wingers who control state government here.

This government has drastically reduced the number of Texas' reproductive health care clinics. At the time that the rise in deaths began, in 2011, for example, the state legislature cut $73.6 million from the state's family planning budget of $111.5. That cut forced more than 80 family planning clinics to shut down across the state. The clinics that survived this cut managed to provide services to only half as many women as before.

Then, of course, there is the state government's well-documented attempts to utterly destroy all Planned Parenthood clinics in the state. They eliminated Planned Parenthood from Medicaid funding that provides poor women with preventive health care. In one fell swoop, they wiped out the main - and, in some cases, only - source available to those women for cancer screenings and contraception. 

Texas is a big state and it is a long way to anywhere here. Closing all those clinics meant that 130,000 women could no longer access the care they needed, or else that they would have to travel long distances to access it - very difficult to do when you are poor to begin with and trying to hold down a job and perhaps care for two or three children. 

And the wrongheaded and downright cruel decisions of our state officials continue. This month Texas' health department allocated a precious $1.6 million of the $18 million that the state budgets for low-income women's family planning to an anti-abortion group that does not even provide basic health services! One shudders to imagine what the maternal death rate here might be like in another couple of years.

A follow-up op-ed that appeared in The Guardian after that initial story had this headline:

Politics is killing mothers in Texas   

For a political party and a state government that brags about its "family values" and its concern for "the health of the mother," this headline and the commentary that follows it testify to the stunning hypocrisy embodied in those Texas boasts.

Dispatches from the war on women

The website iVillage has been compiling data about the condition of women's lives in the United States here in the second decade of the 21st century. They researched such sources as the 2010 U.S.Census, the National Women's Law Center, National Partnership for Women and Families, and the National Network to End Domestic Violence. What they found makes for appalling reading.


They ranked the fifty states according to their protection of women and families and of women's rights. The assault on women's rights is a nationwide policy objective of the right-wing to "put women in their place," and there are few bright spots in the data that they found, but five states were particularly bad. According to iVillage, these five are the very worst of the worst:     

5. Kentucky 

Over 77% of the women in the state live in a county without an abortion provider and nearly 20% of the women live in poverty. Not even a quarter of the women in the state have a college degree.

4. West Virginia

Like Kentucky, West Virginia has a tragically low number of women holding college degrees with just 17.8%. Poverty is also a problem with the median income approximately only $29,651. West Virginia is also the only state that doesn’t protect a woman’s right to breast-feed in either public or private.

3. Arkansas

In Arkansas abortion is pretty much legal in name only. Only 3% of the state’s counties offer them. Just about one-quarter of the population doesn’t have health insurance and the median income is only $29,148 a year.

2. Oklahoma

Oklahoma’s attack on reproductive choice has been relentless this legislative session with personhood measures and restrictive anti-abortion measures. The entire region only has six abortion doctors and the state has outlawed insurance coverage for abortion. As it stands 1 in 4 women in the state already live without health insurance and the state does not have a single female elected official in Congress. The good news is Oklahoma’s overreach was just hemmed in by the federal courts.

1. Mississippi 

Mississippi women earn the lowest average wages in the country and has never elected a woman to Congress or as governor. 22% of the women of the state live in poverty and 68% of Mississippi women are overweight or obese.

For me, about the only surprise here is that Texas isn't among the five worst. In fact, it only ranked 38th. Just wait until our state legislature meets again. I'm betting they can win the race to the bottom.

The pattern that the researchers found in their study was that states where women do not have access to affordable higher education, reproductive health care, and representation in Congress are the most virulently and shamelessly anti-women in their policies. This war - and never doubt that it is, in fact, a war - is not just about abortion. It is about women's ability to control their lives and their destinies. It is about the most basic right of women to control their own bodies.

In countries around the world, sociologists find that the improvement of economic conditions, as well as the health of the population, is tied to the ability of women to receive education, health care, to control the size of their families, and to participate in government. Thus, the most advanced societies on the planet are generally considered to be those of northern Europe, particularly the Scandinavian countries, where women are most free to control their own destinies. The United States, in this as in so many other arenas, threatens to fall back into the status of a Third World country. This is where the right-wingnuts want to take us. Let us hope that, in this election year, women will be cognizant of this threat to their autonomy and that they will flood the polls and vote for those who represent their interests. Otherwise, by the next election, we may not be able to vote at all. 

Contraceptives and religious freedom as the press sees them

The rule promulgated by the Obama administration regarding the coverage of contraceptives by insurance companies continues to make news. But most of the news that it makes has been about the shouting of the Catholic bishops over what they think is their right to impose their religious beliefs on everybody regardless of the individual's religious or non-religious beliefs. Much less attention has been paid to the rights of women to control their own bodies and their own sexuality and their right to use contraceptives should they choose to do so.

The Republicans and their overlords at Fox News have gone to great pains to obscure and fail to report the simple fact that the right to contraceptives is overwhelmingly popular in this country. Instead, they obsess about the poor downtrodden bishops being forced to provide contraceptives and pay for the coverage. Which, of course, they aren't. Under the rule, the coverage has to be offered and paid for by the insurance company. Meanwhile, the churches get to keep all their government goodies - their tax-free status and government grants - which ARE PAID FOR BY ALL OF US REGARDLESS OF OUR RELIGIOUS BELIEFS! That means you and me, sister. Yes, poor downtrodden bishops.

Even when contraception is discussed on cable news networks, it is almost never discussed as a women's health issue, which it clearly is. This chart from Media Matters for America shows how the issue has been covered recently by the three major news networks. It is clear that the main concerns have been political and religious. Only one network, MSNBC, has had any public health experts (one!)  discussing the issue.

Today, Rep. Darrell Issa, (Wingnut, CA) convened his committee to discuss the issue, again as a religious freedom concern. Here is a picture of the "experts" who were called to testify about whether covering contraceptives is a violation of religious freedom:

Do you see anything odd about this panel of "experts"? They are all men! 

Issa refused to allow a woman called by Democrats to testify. That's when Democratic women on the committee walked out.

Darrell Issa says, "Don't worry your pretty little heads about this, women. The issue is much too complicated for you to understand."

It will be very interesting to see how the news networks handle this story!

The war against women

The war against women's rights in America has taken a nasty turn in the past year, especially since the election of 2010 when the Republicans made such inroads into state governments as well as the House of Representatives. They took that as a mandate, as confirmation that the nation was behind them in their attempts to put women in their place, which in their worldview is at home, homeschooling the children.

The strong-arm tactics of these people who bill themselves as "small government conservatives" and their attempts to insert themselves between women and their doctors has been an especially troubling aspect of this war. They have attempted - and succeeded in all too many instances - to roll back access to women's preventive health care in virtually every state where Republicans now hold power in the government. From access to abortion to access to contraceptives, they have made it their business to stick their long noses into women's business everywhere.

Even so, when the Susan G. Komen Foundation story about defunding Planned Parenthood broke early last week, it was a bit of a shock. Like most people. I had assumed that foundation was non-partisan and was interested only in health issues and saving women from breast cancer. More fool I! It turns out that the foundation is run by right-wing ideologues who seem to be more interested in pushing the Republican agenda against women than in actually saving women's lives.

After the story broke, the storm broke. Planned Parenthood backers, like myself, reacted with fury and many of us did what we could to help make up the shortfall caused by the withdrawal of Komen grants. What we could do individually was little enough, but when you multiply that little by thousands of individuals and throw in a couple of $250,000 gifts from some rich people, you find that you really can make a difference. Most importantly, you find that speaking out through letters or petitions or tweets or however you can DOES add up and, in the end, you CAN change things.

In the end, Komen could not withstand the firestorm they had unleashed and they caved.  But they were unable to cave gracefully. Their handling of the reversal of their decision was just as hamhanded as the original announcement and it left no doubt that they had originally decided to cut off funds from Planned Parenthood for nothing more than political reasons. All the other arms of the Republican Party establishment were beating up on the organization so they thought it would be safe to join in. It proved to be one step too far in the war against women in America.

The lesson to be learned, I think, is simple. Never underestimate the power of a group of really angry women. It's a lesson that I hope we can remember and apply to other issues of importance to us, for I can assure you, the war against us will continue.

UPDATE: More fallout and another resignation at Komen in the wake of the debacle.

The war against women

Our new Republican Congress keeps telling us that their number one priority is jobs, but their every action gives the lie to that claim. First, it was revisiting the Affordable Health Care Law. Now they are pursuing their true first priority - seeking to reverse every gain towards equality that women have made in the last hundred years. While Republicans say all the right things, offering empty platitudes about women's equality, their agenda is to legislate women into second-class citizenship. This is true not only at the national level but in state legislatures all across the country.

Republicans are seeking to reverse, through legislative action, the protections of the Equal Pay Act. They insist that the law is no longer needed because the pay gap has all but been eradicated. This is blatantly false, but when were these bozos ever guided by facts?

The big guns of this Republican war against women, though, are trained at women's health issues, specifically reproductive issues. For example, they are doing their best to shut down Planned Parenthood, which is a health care provider - sometimes the only health care provider available - for low income women and men, providing contraception, STD testing and treatment, and cancer screening. The Republicans' argument is that they want to limit abortions, but abortions are a very small part (about 3 percent) of the services that Planned Parenthood provides.

Republicans are also trying to decriminalize violence against women. They wanted, in their H.R.3 bill, to redefine rape. According to their "new rule," it wouldn't be rape unless it was "forcible rape." Statutory rape of a child or rape involving incest where perhaps no actual force was applied would no longer be considered rape and would not be grounds for a woman or a child to receive an abortion to remove the fruit of that act. The Republicans left themselves wide open on this point and they were ridiculed mercilessly as they should have been. Apparently, they have now retrenched and dropped that language from their bill. This does not mean, however, that they are giving up. These enemies of women's rights never give up. They keep pushing and pushing and they will continue to do that until they have managed to reverse every single gain that women have so painfully made.

So, these are the believers in "small government." They believe that government should not regulate commerce to make it more fair; it should not inspect food and drugs to make sure they are safe; it should not provide any social safety net at all. It should keep its hands off everything. Except women's bodies. When it comes to those, government should be as intrusive as all get out, going right into the medical examination room with her and monitoring her conversation with her doctor. The hypocrisy is truly mind-boggling.

UPDATE: Apparently the House GOPers have not changed the language in their H.R.3. And the war continues...

The woman's reporter

So, after forty years of reporting about women, Ellen Goodman is retiring. I guess she's earned a rest. It has been an eventful forty years.

Ellen Goodman and I are contemporaries and I have spent much of those last forty years reading her columns and nodding my heading in agreement. Sometimes I also shed a tear or crumpled the paper in frustration, because a lot of what she had to report on was not progress. It was the story of the continued demeaning of women and women's concerns, "women's issues" - i.e., life, death, the bringing up of children, the dignity of work and the desire for equal treatment in the workplace, health care and the desire for equal treatment in that arena, as well. The list could go on and on, and it has, but it is a list that is too often overlooked by the mainstream media. We are lucky that we had Ellen Goodman there to kick them in the shins and sometimes in the seat of their pants and say, "Hey, fathead, you are overlooking more than half of the human race!"

The things that are close to the hearts and minds of women are things that are essential to the continuation of the race and of culture. They are the things that make life more comfortable and safer, things like clean water, safe food, and air that won't make you sick. These things are not as sexy to politicians, media moguls, and other powerful people as missiles, guns, shoe bombers, and the latest celebrity sex scandal so they get short shrift in the 24-hour news cycle and even in the printed media. But Ellen Goodman never took her eye off the big picture, the things that matter, never got distracted by all those extraneous issues. She wrote about the things that count and she made people care about them.

Thank you, Ellen. Enjoy your retirement.

Now will someone take on her mantle and continue the work? Please?