Using Pseudo-science At HHS

By Kathleen C. Barry

I thought the battle for women's rights had largely been won but the extremists are coming out of the closet with their real agenda, the assault on birth control. This fringe has won converts for its warped pseudo-science at the Department of Health and Human Services, where a proposed rule would codify that anyone receiving federal funding could not be required to provide birth control under the basis that it might violate their religious views.

The new rules would mean that all health care providers -- including pharmacists and medical staff at hospitals and clinics, medical schools and even family planning centers -- could refuse to provide all forms of contraception. Women’s rights are being put at the whim of their providers who could now claim a “conscience” clause to refuse to cover birth control in medical plans or provide pregnancy prevention to rape victims.

It seems the debate over women's reproductive rights has come full circle, so that women are once again forced to argue for their right of self-determination. Every day, Americans face important life decisions, with outcomes that will reverberate for years: how to afford health care; how to die with dignity, how to talk to teenagers about sex; when and what kind of contraceptives to use; when to have a baby and whether it is safe to have more than one child. This debate is really about more than contraception, it's about life decisions and whether women get to make them for themselves.

How did this happen? With nine out of every ten American women using contraceptives, you'd think we were out of the Dark Ages. It's a small minority of activists who are pushing for these extreme measures. The Women Donors Network, together with Communications Consortium Media Center, conducted research and found that 91 percent of voters agreed that couples should have access to birth control. Voters believe, by 83 percent, that we should respect people's ability to make their own life decisions, including when to have a child -- and not impose our values and views on them.

The extremists' agenda is designed to strip woman of self-determination. We cannot allow the intractable debate on pregnancy termination to overshadow our right to prevent a pregnancy. Under the proposed HHS rule anyone -- the doctor, the pharmacist, the receptionist -- could deny a woman the right to contraception.

Given that contraceptives prevent unintended pregnancies, you would think that the anti-abortion crowd would be the biggest promoter of birth control. Not so, because their real target is to end family planning. It's time to move on to the critical issues about reproductive health and sexuality that face all of us every day -- issues such as access to contraception and cervical cancer prevention. Let's agree to disagree about abortion, but certainly prevention of unwanted pregnancy can be a common ground goal most Americans can agree upon.

The public has only until September 25 to send comments to HHS about the proposed rule. Send your comments to consciencecomment@hhs.gov. The proposed HHS rule should die a swift death and the anti-women activists should back off, allowing the rest of us to move on.
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Barry is a board member of The Women Donors Network, a national network of progressive women donors, and a founding member of their Reproductive Rights Initiative.

HHS Proposal Undercuts State Birth Control Laws

By Cristina Page

The Bush administration's Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has been called "ground zero for the ideological wars in this country," and a new HHS proposal leaked this week proves why. In a spectacular act of complicity with extremists on the right, HHS is proposing to allow any federal grant recipient to obstruct a woman's access to contraception.

The American public is nearly unanimous in supporting contraception: 90 percent favor wide availability for birth control, and 90 percent of sexually active women of reproductive age are using it. It is simple common sense: the average woman spends nearly three decades of her life attempting to be sexually active without getting pregnant, and access to contraception is the only proven way to avoid an unintended pregnancy.

For most women, birth control is a basic health care need. But with this new proposal, the Bush administration plans to hand over the gears of health care to the few extremists who want to impose their deeply unpopular right-wing doctrine on the many. The "Pill Kills" fringe has generally been ignored for its warped pseudo-science, but not at Bush's HHS. Its new proposal would make agencies receiving HHS funding promise not to discriminate in hiring against anyone who objects to abortion -- and then redefines abortion so as to include most commonly used forms of birth control including oral contraceptives and IUDs.

This is the latest -- and now incontrovertible -- proof that the anti-abortion movement, and the administration that appears beholden to it, opposes basic pregnancy prevention and is firmly committed to control over Americans' sex lives. If the HHS proposal is approved, anti-contraceptive operatives will seize health financing, one of the most important levers of control. The regulations would be vast in scope and serve as an open invitation for local extremists to directly meddle with your most important life decisions.

Under the new rule, any health care provider who receives federal funding and would like to prevent women from having access to prescription birth control would have federal protection for doing it. State laws requiring hospitals to give pregnancy prevention to rape victims would be automatically invalidated. Pharmacies nationwide could be granted instant permission to refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control. Health centers may be forced to hire religious extremists who would refuse to provide contraception to their patients, even if contraception service is the main focus of the facility.

The new regulation would overrule laws in 27 states requiring health insurers to cover contraceptives. Keep in mind that reluctance of Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) to cover contraception was what led to these state mandates in the first place. Health insurance plans would likely be able to eliminate contraceptive coverage, re-imposing on women 68 percent more in out-of-pocket health care expenses than men pay.

President Bush has been committed to restricting Americans' access to pregnancy prevention since his first days in office. In 2001, he attempted to eliminate contraceptive coverage for federal employees and soldiers. At the request of the anti-contraception movement, he has obstructed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's process of approving proposals for wider access to contraception; appointed self-described anti-contraception leaders to oversee the nation's federal contraception program for the poor; eliminated funding for international family planning programs; appointed anti-condom activists to the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS; promoted programs that withhold information about birth control from sexually active teens; and sunk unprecedented sums of public funding into these no-sex-until-marriage programs, even after witnessing, as governor of Texas, that the result there was the highest teen birth rate of any state in the union.

The proposed regulation is just one of many campaigns against contraception, all led entirely by the anti-abortion establishment. Few Americans know that not one anti-abortion organization in the United States supports contraception. Even fewer understand that every effort to ensure Americans' access to pregnancy prevention is met with fierce, well-financed, and increasingly successful opposition by anti-abortion groups.

The Bush administration has been able to implement these deeply unpopular attacks against birth control and family planning because the American public doesn't really believe that an anti-contraception movement even exists. Under the cover of public denial, behind the banner of "Who could be against contraception?" ideological extremists have accomplished much of their agenda. Approval of the HHS proposal would be the most encompassing and far-reaching attack on the right to contraception they could hope for. What the anti-birth control extremists need now is for the public to continue to believe it can't happen.
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Page is the author of How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America: Freedom, Politics and the War on Sex and spokesperson for BirthControlWatch.org
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Copyright (C) 2008 by the American Forum. 7/08