Reproductive Rights Blog

Today's News - Still catching up

Of course there's stuff going on, but none wackier than this.

State News:
Illinois has a law requiring pharmacists to dispense emergency contraception (Plan B).  This law is being challenged in Illinois Supreme Court.  According to the article, this may become a procedural issue, one of standing, rather than on on the merits.  Nonetheless, it will have ramifications on similar state laws, or on state legislatures considering similar laws. 

Kansas is considering some restrictive laws, New Hampshire is looking at mandatory counseling for teens, 

Foreign News:
Abortion rates in Australia are declining.  The abortion debate in Jamaica continues.

That's all I'm going to post for today, and every day I'm going to try to post a bunch more stories that I have bookmarked for y'all.

News Round Up (Jan. 15)

Reproductive Rights:
So, I guess this comes as a surprise, but women who have abortions think about the kind of life they could provide for a child, and the lives they want to provide for their existing children.  I'm not sure how I feel about this report.  I think it's still in that vein of "abortion is a hard decision" and tries to un-demonize women who have abortions.

I can't find the original article, but a letter to the editor in a Massachusetts newspaper criticizes a man whose girlfriends had four abortion for his "conversion" to anti-choice advocacy.  The author writes that the man should have been responsible then, not now, and includes being responsible to mean sticking around.  The author seems to imply that if men would stay with women more, they would continue their pregnancies, which I'm not so sure about.  I do, however, agree that anti-choice advocates could emphasize the role of men in unplanned pregnancy as much as the abortion itself. 

Kentucky is considering a bill that would require women seeking abortions to have an ultrasound.  At my old clinic, every woman had an ultrasound, at the least, to measure fetal size/age.  I would think that's important for knowledge of the type of abortion needed, the amount of drugs, etc.  But I also am not a doctor, so I don't know.  Nor is Senator Jack Westwood, so I don't know why he's bringing this up. 

For information on what it's really like to be an abortion doctor, read "This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor" by two doctors from Montana.

In other state news, Tennessee is thinking about amending its Constitution to shrink abortion rights.  The Constitution has been interpreted to provide greater abortion rights than the U.S. Constitution, and therefore invalidated a law requiring a waiting period.  The amendment would read that nothing in the Tennessee Constitution protects a right to abortion. 

Of course, reproductive rights are about more than just abortion - parenting, birth control & etc.  In that vein, the Alaska Pro-Choice Alliance has renamed itself the Alliance for Reproductive Justice.

The American College of Ob-Gyns has released a new ethics opinion on doctor refusals, calling for limits on conscientious refusals, especially those that impose religious or moral beliefs, or are not scientifically based. 

Science & Health:
Following a Mediterranean diet when pregnant lowers the risk for the babies to have asthma.  That could be better worded, but it's not.

I'm reading this book called The Humble Little Condom, and I'm learning a little more about syphilis, which, apparently, Christopher Columbus brought back to Europe with him.  The New World syphilis wasn't fatal, I guess, but it mutated somewhere along the way to a potentially deadly disease.

International:
Illegal abortion "clinic" found in South Africa.

Kids Today: 
A state representative in Wisconsin would like to end Wisconsin's family planning waiver to 15, 16 & 17 year old girls, which pays for their birth control.

Generally, we know that young college-educated women are waiting to have children, and, often putting less emphasis on romantic relationships.  Additionally, the idea that couples in love must get married is no longer a given, as almost half of Americans say they don't need a marriage certificate to prove their love.  The Post writes about those who aren't waiting to have kids - but these are still women in their late 20s.  My friend RJ & I wonder if the model of college/graduate school/marriage/family really works for women.  We're in our 30s by the time we're having kids, with fertility issues, less energy, and a body that doesn't bounce back as easily.  I wonder if the college/marriage/family/graduate school model wouldn't be better?

After all, teens start having sex at 15 nowadays (wow, I sound old) and reaching sexual maturity earlier.  So we have an increase in the time between sexual maturity and marriage, making the idea of abstinence, frankly, near to impossible. What's also interesting in the cyclic nature of abortion for teens, showing that opportunity, especially in the form of school vacations, not much to do, and no parental supervision. 

And, lastly: elks on birth control.

News Round Up (Jan. 4)

I'm not going to blog too much right now - I'm really not feeling well.  Here are a few things to tide you over until Monday.

United States

• AGI released a report on family planning (.pdf) services in the United States.
• Missouri is really swinging anti on abortion: The governor has created a task force to study abortion, and a ballot proposal that would outlaw most abortions.
• A Montana pharmacist will stop dispensing birth control pills, meaning that women will have an 80 mile drive to the nearest pharmacy, or mail order their pills.
• North Carolina may be implementing comprehensive sex-ed.  The Boston Globe runs a strong op-ed against ab-only programs, calling them a waste of money.

Foreign

• The Chief Rabbinate of Israel has apparently come out against abortions, calling abortion a "grave sin."  According to the Torah, the fetus is not a full-fledged person. Interestingly, while the fetus isn't considered a person for the first 40 days, a boy is not a member of Jewish society until he's 8 days old, and a girl at 30 days.
• Malawi may be liberalizing abortion laws.

Gender Roles
The Beeb covers the whole Female Chauvinist Pigs thing, asking if flashing is really empowering?  The Economist talks about the value of beauty, saying the intelligence may be linked to beauty.  ScienceDaily is also running the same information, I think, but a few weeks later.

Science
Glaxo's cervical cancer vaccine, Cervarix, is on hold for the time being as the FDA has requested more information.  Speaking of cervical cancer, the NCI has said that not having a clean margin after cervical surgery raises the risk of recurrence.  Which I thought was old news.  I thought the point of cancer surgery was to remove as much cancer as possible...no?  How we screen for cervical cancer is changing, as we learn more about HPV.  Oh, by the way, the AP decided to run a story saying that the cervical cancer vaccine, a shot, hurts.  Ground breaking reporting: shots can hurt.

And your animal story: sterilizing dogs in Kathmandu

Happy New Year

It's a new year, and a new legislative session, not to mention that a whole bunch of laws go into effect this week. 

As for me, I'm getting over a cold which had me on the couch watching the History Channel's marathon The History of Sex, which has a few errors in it, but was overall an enjoyable quick tour through the ages.  My New Year's resolution is to cut out dairy, and start eating more organic food.

So anyway, what do you need to know for this upcoming year?  First, vote (make sure you are registered to vote in your state).  Today are the Iowa Caucuses, then the New Hampshire primaries, and February 5th is Super Tuesday.   Do I really have to tell you what's at stake (like, Roe)?

So let's talk about local laws:

• Virginia will hear about increased penalties for domestic violence offenders and repealing the requirement that women take lie detector tests when they report a rape.
• Oregon's contraceptive equity act goes into effect this week.
• The Montana initiative regarding life beginning at contraception may be voted on this year.
• New Jersey just started testing all pregnant women for HIV (it's an opt-out law)

For more on state issues, see Who Decides?

Federally, we'll be working on a fix for the cost of contraception on college campuses, again, hopefully led by Mr. Crowley (D-NY) and Mr. Obama (D-IL).

We'll see more about jurisprudence for civilians serving overseas, as more stories like this one come to light.  Congressman Poe's office tells me that the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act is the law on the books that would cover this, but many others have said the law is too narrowly crafted to create any kind of legal punishment.

And now for part one of this week's News Round Up:

Science
An enzyme naturally found in semen may aid in the furtherance of HIV infection.  There's also a marker on the sperm that inhibits the female's body from attacking the sperm as foreign invaders, which will be useful to study in combating infections and cancer.

Abortions & miscarriages may indicate a higher risk of future miscarriage.  While TIME runs the full on headline, only a few sentences down it admits that the study has numerous flaws.  Speaking of procreation issues, children of obese mothers have higher rates of infant mortality. 

The Times reviews a book on a fertility diet, and not very favorably.  I guess people are more interested in fertility, as it seems birth rates are on the rise in the US.   The article says that more affluent people are having more children, and calls children a luxury good.  I'd be curious to see more about the rates related to income, and if the US has a higher rate of fertility than many other industrialized nations because of our immigration policies.

Schizophrenia may start in utero, and may be linked to maternal diseases like the flu.

Foreign
Teen will have access to birth control over the counter in Britain.  Meanwhile, South Africa is taking the opposite tactic, and outlawing teens kissing in public.  (The actual law, all 80 pages of it, is here as a .pdf.  I didn't read it, so I don't know the exact language used.) 

You all, I'm sure, have been following the rape case in Saudi Arabia.  Slate asks why there isn't more of an uproar over how Saudi (and many other countries) treat women, generally.  The article references the huge boycotts of South Africa regarding its policy of apartheid.

Syphilis is back in Europe.   

Tomorrow I'll have more on birth control and abortion.  But today I'll end with the animal story: Pigeons in Hollywood on the Pill.

News Round Up (Nov. 25)

So I'm watching the post-Thanksgiving morning news shows, debating with myself whether or not it would be a good thing if Roe fell, as many Presidential candidates hope for. On one hand, Roe being overturned would certainly be bad for access to abortion. On the other hand, if voters continuously choose to elect anti-choice legislators, why should they be immune from the consequences of those bad choices. Were Roe to fall, voters as well as legislators would have to walk the walk. Right now, for example, there's a man in Ohio that continuously gets re-elected, and his only issue is abortion. The people of Ohio are insulated by his election in part by the other Ohio legislators, but also, to a large extent, by the federal judiciary, upon whom we too greatly rely on for the protection of our rights. It's probably a little Old Testament of me, but I'm wondering if actually giving these anti-choicers more leeway won't actually mean that people eventually vote against them, once they have to deal with the consequences of the vote...

Anyway, the news:

U.S.
Denver, due to its high teen pregnancy rate, is considering making birth control available in high schools.
The Guardian explores the seeming change in Hollywood's depiction of abortion. A sociologist who writes for the Huffington Post, Lisa Wade, said that "It is as if all decisions to have an abortion are fraught with internal conflict, and then follow all women around like a dark cloud until the day they die." This is something we've discussed on this blog repeatedly: abortion isn't always a hard decision, and it's not always the wrong decision, and we don't have a lot of room in our discussion to admit that abortion can be easy, happy and/or freeing.
No surprise to most of us, but a good article on the strategy of the anti-choice movement that involves expanding the definition of "personhood". A good example is the Texas feticide law, which was upheld in a recent court decision regarding the killing of a women and her 4 - 6 week old fetus. On a more insidious note, Colorado is considering adding a provision regarding life beginning at conception that would make abortion illegal.
There's been a lot more coverage of the Crowley/Obama solution to the line in the Deficit Reduction Act that has raised the cost of birth control on college campuses. Make sure your legislator supports these efforts through ChoiceUSA or Planned Parenthood.

Parental Rights
In Kansas, a gay man agreed to donate sperm to a friend for artificial insemination. She filed papers to terminate his parental rights, which is appears is the default for Kansas sperm donors. He is fighting, and wants to be involved with the children and pay child support.
In the UK, a woman has received court permission to keep her pregnancy a secret from the man who impregnated her, as it was a one-night stand. The court ruled that she alone has the decision-making power regarding the adoption she seeks.

Foreign:
Regardless of the fact that abortion is legal in the UK, there is nonetheless a black market for herbal abortifacients. Speaking of, a website is selling what I think is RU-486 to Irish women; the drug is, as are abortion procedures, illegal.
RHRealityCheck has a whole section on one of our topics of conversaion, sex selective abortions.
I wish I had a better news source, but it appears that Sweden will allow foreign women to get abortions, up to 18 weeks gestation.

Science:
I hope you all have heard, by now, that scientists have created embryonic stem cells through adult cells. I wonder what will happen to the legal status of those cells, especially if they are pluripotent and could become a fetus...or maybe I just need someone to explain this all to me. In any case, it looks like scientists will no longer need embryos to do research on embryonic stem cells!
Totally useless news: sleep helps new moms lose baby weight. New moms would love to get more sleep anyway, but thanks for the information.
Apparently Chinese doctors have come up with a new form of male birth control that blocks sperm from travelling to the penis. It is totally reversible, and only takes 10 minutes. On a similar note, it looks like there's a new FDA-approved device that is a permanent method of female birth control. The device is inserted into a woman's fallopian tubes, and within three months the tubes are completely blocked.

There's a whole lot more out there right now, so I'll post again shortly.

HPV Test Payment

Earlier this month, the press covered the results of a study that showed the HPV test being a better diagnostic tool than the Pap test for cervical cancer.  The study, as mentioned in the press coverage, did not use the Thin Prep test commonly used in the United States, so the results may not be translatable to the US population.  Nonetheless, people immediately started asking about payment for the HPV test. 

First, most insurance companies cover the HPV test.  Second, most state Medicaid programs cover the HPV test (see p.14 of the report).  Next, the HPV test is only recommended once every three years and costs approximately $70.  Lastly, Congress is planning to introduce a bill including coverage of the HPV test for Medicare beneficiaries (over 65). [p.s. that is my exciting news]

So anyway, I just wanted to share that information.

Abortion and Birth Control

Sorry all, but today I won't be able to muster up the usual vitriol I would have; I've had a death in my family.  Nothing unexpected, but sad nonetheless. 

So today Slate writes that abortion rates fall when birth control is available, based on a study by AGI.  It seems fairly obvious to me that access to contraception would decrease the need for abortion.  We know that abortion is a universal need, and that the legality of the procedure does not necessarily inhibit its performance; rather, the availability of legal abortions has an effect on the safety of abortion. 

Complications from pregnancy, labor and delivery, are common in developing countries.

And of course, we can circle back around to our domestic policies that restrict access to abortion.  Tom Tancredo, Presidential candidate, has announced that he would cut off federal funding to organizations that perform abortions, if elected.  I won't get into the rest of it now...

News Round Up (Sep. 27)

I hadn't planned on doing another news round up so soon, but I have all these e-mails!

First, though, Happy Birthday to my sister, who, no matter how old she is, will always be my little sister!

Okay, and the news!

So let's go back to some recent news round ups and follow-up on two things.  One, the woman who was suing about having time to breast feed during her medical boards won.  Also, we talked about the Global Gag Rule.  I'm not going to get into it here again, but it's a big political mess, and the chances of President Bush doing right by the women of the world are slim.  Nonetheless, urge him to sign the Foreign Ops appropriations bill, with the Boxer/Snowe amendment, should he ever receive it from Congress.   The impact of the Global Gag Rule has been well-documented by, among others, IPAS and PAI.

And the new stuff:

I was at a friend's house the other day, and while we were flipping through the TV stations, we heard O'Reilly talking about the Maryland case where the woman maybe killed her fetuses and how she can't be prosecuted, and people were all angry about it, but it's not unique to Maryland.  I think all states that have feticide/fetal homicide laws have exceptions for the woman.  Including, recently decided, Missouri.

EC isn't available in all NYC teen health clinics, and a federal court has ruled that dispensing EC to teens without parental consent is legal.   Speaking of constitutional issues, Verizon has denied NARAL's request to use Verizon for a text messaging program.  NARAL already has a campaign going about this. [Ed. Verizon has already reversed its earlier decision!]

CNN gives a run down on gyn disorders and possible treatments, the Beeb tells pregnant women to exercise, but not too strenuously, the oh-so-predictable baby boom 9 months after a blizzard, chewable birth control may become more widely available shortly, enforcement of TRAP law in Missouri blocked.

In Foreign News, Hungary has issued prostitution permits, and the EU has approved GSK's HPV vaccine, Cervarix.  Also, biggest baby ever born in Russia (17.5 lbs!), the Archibishop of the Church of Mozambique says that condoms from Europe are infected with HIV to kill off Africans, the UK health system says women should have greater control over their childbirth, man hit by lighting and told he was sterile is expecting a baby,   

Things I Learned from Magazines

I got a few emails about articles in magazines that aren't about fall fashion, so let's do a little What's In the Magazines Section.

a)  TIME ran a story on the high cost of birth control on college campuses.  Due to a change in reimbursement law, college students will have to pay what looks like about full price for some birth control, and practitioners are worried that young women will substitute less effective methods of contraception, like Plan B or condoms, for the Pill, Patch or Ring. 

TIME also has a piece on the increasing use of Plan B.

b) Speaking of things you can get over the counter, I saw ads for a product that tells you whether you have a yeast infection, or something else.  It costs about $8.

c) Marie Claire has a few good articles, including one on surrogacy in India, a topic readers may already find familiar.  Glamour did another story on surrogacy, but this was a complicated, domestic surrogacy situation.  Another article in this month's issue is about anal bleaching, and other similar nonsensical procedures American women engage in - FGM is horrendous, but plastic surgery on the vulva?  C'mon.

HPV - Vaccines, Developing Countries and Boys

About two weeks ago the Cancer Research and Prevention Foundation held a teleconference on HPV and cervical cancer, with the aim of educating us on the HPV vaccine.  The two speakers were from Merck, a maker of one of the two vaccines, and Moffitt, a cancer center in Tampa, Florida. 

There is a lot of scientific information that I got down, but basically, here's what we know: HPV strains 16 and 18 cause 70% of cervical cancer cases, and strains 6, 11, 16 and 18 combined cause about 50% of more mild cervical changes and 90% of the genital warts cases. 

The Merck vaccine is quadravalent, and contains protection against strains 6, 11, 16 and 18.  It should be used in women who have not been exposed to HPV, so women who are not yet sexually active.  Clinical trials show that Gardasil is over 95% effective in women who have none of those four strains of HPV.  However, women who are sexually active may have at least one of those four strains - clinical trials showed that 73% of sexually active women had none of the four strains, 20% had only one type, 6% had two types, 1.2% had three types and only 0.1% had all four types of HPV in the vaccine.

While there are only about 3,000 deaths from cervical cancer a year, much of those are due to a lack of access to care.  Well, to be more specific, a failure to access federal and state funded cervical screening programs.  The lives lost from each cervical cancer case is approximately 29 years per woman, which means this is affecting fairly young women!  Nonetheless, HPV is fairly ubiquitous, and before the Pap, cervical cancer was a huge killer of women in America. 

Unfortunately, those who are already exposed to HPV will not benefit from the vaccine.  The HPV vaccine, therefore, is not to be used as a treatment, but must be used prophylactically, among women who have not yet been exposed (and preferably, not had sex).  Legislation has been introduced in at least 39 states to fund or require the vaccine, mostly for girls entering about 6th grade.  Only Virginia and Washington, DC have passed such laws.   Federal laws thus far have been focused on prohibiting federal funds from paying for the vaccine, or have been related to access or reimbursement issues.  NPR did a story on it.

We also know that some cases of cervical cancer are not caused by these strains of HPV, which is why HPV testing is not recommended as a screening tool.  It's really the effect of the virus, not the presence of the virus, that I think is the concern.  In poor areas, Pap tests are not widely available, but a much simpler test may get the job done.  The method described is part of a colposcopy, the next medical step in the U.S. for a woman who has an abnormal Pap smear.

And we're still only talking about the vaccine with respect to girls, not boys, which I think is a shame.  Obviously, males spread HPV, but faithful readers will know that men can get cancers from HPV as well.  And, a side note, you shouldn't douche anyway, but lemon juice?  Bad for cervical cancer, and I don't imagine it feels all that great either.