by Shaker Elizabeth in Chicago
My Planned Parenthood story is a simple one, but I imagine it is rather common. When I was in college, I had a terrible experience in my student health center on campus where a nurse slut-shamed me during my examination. After I recovered from this incident, I sought out my local Planned Parenthood to get information and to receive birth control pills.
Even though the clinic had a rather cramped and crowded waiting room, both the receptionist and the doctor I worked with treated me with respect. After I reported my income (which was almost nothing), Planned Parenthood gave me my birth control pills for free.
I was a young adult who, without Planned Parenthood, would have not had easy, no-cost access to birth control.
Shaming me would not have stopped me from sleeping with my boyfriend at the time, but it could have prevented me from seeking safe birth control, had I not had access to this organization. I was able to prevent pregnancy, and prevent the need for an abortion, because of Planned Parenthood. And for that, and for everything they do, they will always have my gratitude and support.
Read the rest of the My Planned Parenthood Carnival posts here.
My Planned Parenthood: A Simple Story
More Kansas News
We all remember what's going in in Kansas, right? The first bit of news is that there are some serious privacy concerns in regards to those new regulations:
One regulation says "all records shall be available at the facility for inspection" by the secretary of health and environment or his staff. Abortion-rights advocates said giving such access allows health department officials to review highly personal information, and they don't trust Republican Gov. Sam Brownback's administration because he is a strong opponent of abortion.Oh really?
"It's totally unjustified and an invasion of patient privacy," said Bonnie Scott Jones, an attorney for the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights, which is representing two doctors in the federal lawsuit.
The new licensing law declares information in medical records must be kept confidential, and another statute makes it a misdemeanor for health department employees to disclose such data publicly. Department spokeswoman Miranda Myrick noted that federal law also applies.
She added, "When surveyors are inspecting facilities, the medical records do not leave the facilities."
Abortion opponents say access to medical records is necessary if the department is to provide proper oversight.
[...]
"That struck me as a pretty standard provision, that regulatory agencies would have access to records," said Kansas House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lance Kinzer, an Olathe Republican who opposes abortion.
Mary Kay Culp, executive director of Kansans for Life, said the privacy issue is "the only tool" abortion-rights supporters have in trying to prevent scrutiny of providers.
"If health and law enforcement inspectors aren't allowed access to abortion records, how exactly is legal abortion any different from illegal abortion?" she said.
You may or may not recall that earlier this year former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline faced an ethics hearing. Kline outright said:
[H]e and his subordinates had the right to deceive other state agencies and didn’t have a duty to immediately correct flawed information provided to a trial judge as they started investigating abortion providers.Kline actually has two ethics hearings to face and the next one is scheduled for July 19th.
So, you see, there is great concern regarding Kansas's ability to keep patient information private.
In Kansas, when it comes to oversight of clinics and doctors and hospitals, there are two separate offices that handle it. The Health Dept. oversees hospitals and surgical centers--of which Planned Parenthood is considered. The state Board of Healing Arts, however, oversees the other two clinics (Aid for Women and Center for Women's Health). The Board is also what licenses doctors.
Well, Gov. Sam Brownback just appointed Rick Macias, an attorney who has been affiliated with Operation Rescue to head the Board.
The Board of Healing Arts has been under fire in recent years for moving slowly to deal with bad doctors. At one point, the board ranked 41st nationally in its discipline of doctors.Operation Rescue's president, Troy Newman, said:
A 2006 audit found that the agency was slow to discipline doctors and didn’t investigate many complaints.
The problem came to a head in 2007 when federal authorities accused a Wichita-area doctor of illegally distributing medications. Fifty-six of his patients died of overdoses. Victims and their families had complained to the state board for years about the doctor, but nothing was done until federal charges were filed.
Burkhart [Julie, president Trust Women] questioned whether Macias could regulate doctors when he defended abortion opponents who protested at clinics.
“We are especially concerned about Mr. Macias’ apparent conflict of interest in regulating health care providers when he has been so involved with those charged with blocking and disrupting clinic access and violating the privacy of patients,” she said.
“Elections have consequences. Deal with it. Now, Sam Brownback gets a chance to appoint who he wants to lead these organizations and staff these committees."Fan-fucking-tastic, eh?
My Planned Parenthood: Today's Visit
Posted as Part of the My Planned Parenthood Blog Carnival.
I went to Planned Parenthood today. I went alone.
I am a man. I am gay. I am sexually active. I went to Planned Parenthood for an HIV test.
There is a myth, one promoted by the anti-choicers that Planned Parenthood is some kind of abortion factory, killing babies with tax-payer funds, but, apart from the facts that abortions don't kill babies and the Hyde Amendment already prevents the use of tax-payer funds for abortions, Planned Parenthood offers so much more than abortion services. And Planned Parenthood doesn't only serve women. Services are available to men, too.
I was able to walk in, ask for a HIV test, and within minutes the staff was drawing my blood. Fifteen minutes later, I had the results.
The horrendous cuts to their funding, the anti-choicers' (very successful) attempts to shut down Planned Parenthood affects more than just women. It does more than just stop Planned Parenthood from performing abortions. It also affects gay men like me who need access to STI screening. It affects entire communities.
Read the rest of the My Planned Parenthood Carnival posts here.
[Cross-posted.]
I'm So Glad We Elected a Democrat, Part One Billion and Five
President Obama is pressing congressional leaders to consider a far-reaching debt-reduction plan that would force Democrats to accept major changes to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for Republican support for fresh tax revenue.What the everloving fuck. That was a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad plan when George W. Bush proposed it, and it's a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad plan now.
At a meeting with top House and Senate leaders set for Thursday morning, Obama plans to argue that a rare consensus has emerged about the size and scope of the nation's budget problems and that policymakers should seize the moment to take dramatic action.Yes, it would be a real mistake for Democrats to let pass the opportunity to unwind all that socialist claptrap instituted by that loser FDR. Why let the Republicans get all the credit for ruining the country?!
As part of his pitch, Obama is proposing significant reductions in Medicare spending and for the first time is offering to tackle the rising cost of Social Security, according to people in both parties with knowledge of the proposal. The move marks a major shift for the White House and could present a direct challenge to Democratic lawmakers who have vowed to protect health and retirement benefits from the assault on government spending.
"Obviously, there will be some Democrats who don't believe we need to do entitlement reform. But there seems to be some hunger to do something of some significance," said a Democratic official familiar with the administration's thinking. "These moments come along at most once a decade. And it would be a real mistake if we let it pass us by."
For the record, although I sincerely doubt there's any confusion about this outside the White House: All the times I've written some variation on, "I hope Obama is a more successful president than Bush," that did not mean, "I hope he is more successful at DISMANTLING THE SOCIAL SAFETY NET."
My Planned Parenthood: PP Saved My Life
by Shaker Angie
Planned Parenthood quite possibly saved my life.
Like many women, I turned to Planned Parenthood for my regular well-woman check up and birth control when my previous OB-GYN retired. I didn't have the time or interest in doing the research necessary to find a new OB-GYN, so I went to Planned Parenthood because I knew that I could trust the nurse practitioners and doctors there.
During a routine well-woman exam, the nurse practitioner at Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region found abnormal cells on my cervix. Planned Parenthood also provided me with all the follow-up care I needed to make sure that that diagnosis did not progress into cervical cancer. Another nurse practitioner at Planned Parenthood did a colposcopy and cervical biopsy. They also provided the pap tests needed to make sure the cells didn't come back.
Routine. No big deal. This is what they do. They provide the quality, affordable care women, men, and teens need and deserve. I am sure they have provided the exact same care to thousands of other St. Louis women who owe their health to the dedicated, professional staff at Planned Parenthood.
I hate to think how this story might have ended had Planned Parenthood not been in St. Louis. I was young and invincible, I might have put off my well woman exam indefinitely had there not been someone I trusted available. I had insurance; I chose Planned Parenthood because I knew that I would get quality care from them. The well woman exam is a very intimate exam. I would not trust just any doctor or nurse with my reproductive health.
This past February I gave birth to my first child, a daughter. Had the nurse practitioner at Planned Parenthood not found my precancerous cells and protected my cervix from cancer, it might not have been strong enough to support the weight of my growing uterus, fetus, and amniotic fluids. While maintaining the ability to grow and birth a healthy baby is not the only reason I am glad I didn't get cancer, it is definitely one of the big ones.
My story all-too common. HPV, the virus that causes most cervical cancers, is so common that 50% of sexually active Americans have it (accessed: 3 July 2011). Hopefully this statistic will decrease with the widespread availability of the HPV vaccine (which, by the way, is available for all genders at Planned Parenthood).
I want Planned Parenthood to be there for my daughter when she needs them. These state and federal attacks on Planned Parenthood have got to stop. They are really an attack on every man, woman, and teen—both Democrats and Republicans—who needs Planned Parenthood to stay healthy.
Some say that there are other places to go for the care Planned Parenthood provides. I also go to a doctor who works in a community health center for my primary care. She is an excellent doctor, but the wait to see her is often long and the waiting room is always packed. Our safety-net public health system is stretched to its limits.
If Planned Parenthood were gone, their patients wouldn't go somewhere else for care because there is just not the infrastructure available to absorb them.
Read the rest of the My Planned Parenthood Carnival posts here.
My Planned Parenthood Carnival
Today is the My Planned Parenthood Carnival, which I am co-hosting with Tami of What Tami Said. The hub for the carnival, at which links to all the individual posts of people participating is here, and Shakesville will be running My Planned Parenthood Stories all day today, underlining how important Planned Parenthood is and what will be lost if it continues to be defunded across the nation as it has been in Indiana, the state in which Tami and I both reside.
It's not too late to participate! The hub post will be updated throughout the day with new links, and you are still welcome to submit a guest post to run at Shakesville or at What Tami Said. Raise your voice in support of Planned Parenthood.
Please share the carnival links to this post and the hub post far and wide, and tweet about it using the hashtag #MyPP.
And please consider donating to Planned Parenthood Indiana or a Planned Parenthood near you.
Question of the Day
What is your favorite daydream?
Other than my recurring fantasy of winning a Willy Wonka-style contest to inherit and oversee Rip Taylor's confetti empire following an extended apprenticeship with the man himself in his glitter castle, I guess I'd have to say I daydream a lot about having a fenced-in backyard. #boring
Thank You, Mr. President
[Trigger warning for self-harm and sexual violence.]
The Obama administration has made an important policy shift in presidential condolence letters:
Most families who lose a loved one in the war zones receive a letter of condolence from the President of the United States. But there are a few who do not receive this honor. It's long standing policy - going back many years - that troops who commit suicide in war do not get the president's acknowledgment.This is a much more compassionate and fair policy, which acknowledges that the service of someone who ends hir own life is no less valuable than the service of someone whose life is taken by an enemy, especially since, in most cases, it's effectively the war that kills them either way.
...Under a decades-old White House policy, inherited by the Obama administration, military families received letters from the president only if their loved ones died on the battlefield or in accidents in war zones.
Now, the policy is changing. ... We're told the policy affects all military families whose loved ones die in war zones, regardless of how they died.
It's also of particular importance for the families of female soldiers like Pfc. LaVena Johnson, whose deaths are reported as suicides despite the distinct likelihood of their having been killed by fellow soldiers who raped them, and other survivors of soldiers whose deaths are staged as suicides for various reasons.
Photo of the Day
The above photo, which shows part of a 50-mile wide dust storm as it traveled over a Phoenix neighborhood last night, was taken by @JordanDepot and found via the Atlantic, which has a collection of videos and images of the storm. Adam Clark Estes notes dryly (no pun intended):
Now, we have a new reason to compare the Great Recession to the Great Depression: Steinbeck-style dust storms. Tuesday evening, a massive cloud of darkness known as a "habub" overtook Phoenix. The National Weather Service reports that the wall of dust towered 8,000 to 10,000 feet high before it hit the Phoenix valley, and local meteorologists estimated the storm to be about 50 miles wide when it struck the city.Swell.
Environmentalists remind us that the conditions that create dust storms can be linked to climate change and poor farming practices. Today, the Earth is twice as dusty as it was in the 19th-century. At least we have YouTube and Twitpic to document the incredibly terrifying consequences?
Nero tweeted while Rome choked on dust, or whatever.
Quote of the Day
"It's the hope of Servicemembers Legal Defense Network that this favorable ruling will not be challenged by the Defense Department. In fact, this whole matter could have been avoided had we had certification back in the spring. It's time to get on with that important certification, end the DADT confusion for all service members, and put a final end to this misguided policy."—Aubrey Sarvis, Army Veteran and Executive Director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision today to order "the U.S. government to immediately cease enforcing the longstanding ban on openly gay members of the military."
In other words, the court ordered the government to stop making excuses, pull its thumb out, get with the fucking program already, and officially end DADT.
This is so the worst thing you're going to read all day.
This WaPo profile [trigger warning for virulent gay hatred and misogyny] of GOP presidential wannabe Michele Bachmann (R-Etchinducing) and her husband, Dr. Marcus Bachmann, Professional Gay-Hater, is one of the most depressing things I've ever read.
They are terrible people with miserable lives who make other people's lives a misery because of their intensely stupid and exhaustively compassionless belief system.
If they weren't such influential assholes, I'd feel sorry for them.
Open Thread on the Obama Townhall
I wasn't going to even post anything about this because ARGH. But then I started watching it and following it on Twitter, where you can ask Obama questions using the hashtag #AskObama, and then I had to post about it because ARGH.
Wednesday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by Shaxco, makers of Deeky's Bacon-Scented Buttplugs.
Recommended Reading:
Matt: Barack Obama's Dangerous Embrace of Economic Fatalism
Eleanor: [TW for war, violence, and sexual assault] War Resisters Inject Truth into Military Recruitment
Resistance: [TW for racism] Embracing Diversity
Andrew: Obama Names Lesbian To West Point Advisory Board
I read these last two pieces back-to-back. Another "interesting" juxtaposition.
Renee: African American Romantic Comedies: Colorism
Melissa: Forbes 2011 List of the Highest Paid Actresses
Leave your links in comments...
Seen
Television Host and Grown Man Ty Pennington playing with toys in
his bathtub while giggling uproariously, in People magazine.
Every conceivable thing about this picture annoys me—which has nothing to do with Ty Pennington himself (although, for the record, I find him insufferably annoying, too). It just invokes so many different horrendo narratives of the Patriarchy: Boys will boys (and men will be boys, too); women are grown-ups but men are children; it's adorable when men are immature/refuse to grow up/are just Big Kids, etc. All of which have dire consequences for women (and lots of men, too), perhaps especially straight/bi women disconnected from advanced feminist ideas who partner with infantile men in an emotionally discordant relationship that our culture incessantly assures them is adorable and fun.
And there's a lot of intersectional and class privilege stuff going on there, too, especially in the context of the larger article, which is all about the custom redesign of his Manhattan condo.
I could spend the next hour deconstructing all this stuff, but it would really just be a long way of saying this picture aggravates the shit out of me.
I don't know to whom it's supposed to appeal, exactly. But it ain't me.
The UK's Phone-Hacking Scandal, and Why You Should Care About It (Plus Teaspooning)
So, as you may—or may not, for reasons that will become evident—have heard, there is an exploding phone hacking scandal in Britain, comprehensive coverage of which by the Guardian can be found here. The broadest gist is that a British tabloid hired a private investigator to hack into the voicemail boxes of famous or otherwise newsworthy people—and, in at least one particularly awful case, the voicemails of a murdered girl were deleted. More on that in a moment.
Although this happened in Britain (and only in Britain so far as we know), it's also an important story for the US and elsewhere, too, because the tabloid at the center of the story is the News of the World, which is owned by the UK subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, the same company that owns Fox in the US.
Shaker Richard Gadsden, who's a UK-based Shaker, put together a great summary of the phone-hacking scandal and its history, which I am publishing with his permission. First, some background:
Mobile phones (cellphones) have voicemail. You can access the voicemail from any other phone by dialing the call centre and putting in the phone number of the mailbox you want and the PIN. Unless the user has positively selected a PIN when they set up the phone, the PIN defaults to 0000 or 1111, depending on the network. Most people only ever call their voicemail from their own phone, and they don't need the PIN to get in from their own phone, so they never find out that the PIN even exists.Fast forward three years, and Andy Coulson, after having become Director of Communications for the Conservative party, is now Director of Communications for the Prime Minister. The story might have died altogether, were it not for the fact that a 2009 Guardian investigation uncovered evidence of police malfeasance.
A Private Investigator, called Glenn Mulcaire, discovered that he could listen to the voicemails left for well-known people by calling into the call centre and putting in the right PIN. (It is believed that a number of other PIs were doing the same for other newspapers, but this has never been proven.)
He started selling the recordings he took of the voicemails to the News of the World, a tabloid newspaper here in the UK, owned by News International (the UK subsidiary of News Corp, which is the Murdoch media empire, including Fox in the US, and Sky here in the UK).
This originally came out in 2006, when it was found that he'd gained access to the voicemails of members of the Royal family; there was a police investigation at the time, Mulcaire and Clive Goodman (royal editor of the NoW at the time) were arrested and served time in prison. The editor at the time, Andy Coulson was sacked.
Back to Richard:
In 2009, the Guardian discovered that the police had ignored evidence collected from Mulcaire that lots of other people had been "phone-hacked", had not informed hundreds of other victims (including senior politicians and journalists at other newspapers). This became a political scandal, especially because [of Andy Coulson's prominent position in the Prime Minister's office]. There was a Select Committee enquiry, and a number of out-of-court settlements between NoW and alleged phone-hacking victims.Again, the story may have effectively died here, as a shady tabloid unethically digging into celebrities' private lives is terrible, but sadly not particularly shocking. And, the wheels of justice seemed to be turning.
One of the reasons that the story continued in 2010 was that [the actress] Sienna Miller refused any out-of-court settlement with a confidentiality clause and insisted on extensive discovery in the courts; the other main reason was that the New York Times investigated it and found more connections between Andy Coulson as (then) editor and the scandal, which resulted in him resigning as Director of Communications on 21 January 2011.
The police have now restarted their investigation - it seems that they deliberately down-played the investigation originally because they have a close relationship with the NI papers that they didn't want to damage - but they started arresting people in bunches (at which point Sienna Miller accepted an out-of-court settlement as it looked like the facts were coming out anyway).
But the phone-hacking was even worse than it originally appeared.
On Monday, the Guardian published a heartbreaking update on the scandal in which it was revealed that the News of the World's private investigator, the aforementioned Glenn Mulcaire, had, in 2002, hacked into the voicemail of a missing 13-year-old girl named Milly Dowler, who had been, it was later discovered, murdered by a man named Levi Bellfield, who was convicted and sentenced to life last month for murdering Milly.
Mulcaire did not stop at merely listening to the messages on Milly's phone, though. From the Guardian's Monday piece:
As her friends and parents called and left messages imploring Milly to get in touch with them, the News of the World was listening and recording their every private word.Truly contemptible, just an absolute abdication of even the merest traces of decency.
But the journalists at the News of the World then encountered a problem. Milly's voicemail box filled up and would accept no more messages. Apparently thirsty for more information from more voicemails, the paper intervened – and deleted the messages that had been left in the first few days after her disappearance. According to one source, this had a devastating effect: when her friends and family called again and discovered that her voicemail had been cleared, they concluded that this must have been done by Milly herself and, therefore, that she must still be alive. But she was not. The interference created false hope and extra agony for those who were misled by it.
The Dowler family then granted an exclusive interview to the News of the World in which they talked about their hope, quite unaware that it had been falsely kindled by the newspaper's own intervention.
Naturally, the deletion of the voicemails not only gave Milly's family false hope; it also interfered with the police investigation.
Back to Richard:
This has now broken the story from the media pages onto the front pages of the newspapers, and much higher up the public consciousness.It's just beyond the beyond. I spent last night reading a ton of coverage of the phone-hacking, and it just left me feeling light-headed with revulsion and what I can only describe as dismay, though the word seems insufficient, at the entitlement, the callousness, the chilling lack of empathy which led to these actions.
In rapid succession, a number of other high-profile victims of crime have been found in the Mulcaire files - the victims of the Soham murders (another pair of young abducted girls) and some of the 7/7 victims too.
And I fear that we have yet seen only the tip of this decidedly grim iceberg.
What we can do in response, however, is lift our teaspoons. Richard notes that advertisers have started pulling their ads from News of the World, and suggests: "One useful teaspoon would be to write to those advertisers and ask them to pull advertising from all News Corp owned media world-wide. Ford, as the first advertiser to pull out of NotW, would be a good one to start with, as they are big sponsors of Sky TV in the UK and of a number of Fox TV properties over there. Hitting the entire Murdoch empire, rather than just one newspaper (which they could just close down and then relaunch under a new name) would achieve far more in driving to some kind of responsible journalism."
For US Shakers, here's a list of Fox News sponsors here, for a start.
And here is a sample letter, which you are free to borrow in whole or in part:
Dear Fox News Advertiser,Please feel welcome and encouraged to leave in comments other ideas for teaspooning and/or additional advertisers in global Murdoch properties for contact.
I am writing to inform you that I will not purchase your products as long as you continue to advertise on Fox News.
As you are certainly aware, Fox News is a property of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, the UK subsidiary of which is deeply embroiled in a phone-hacking scandal in which his employees engaged in profoundly unethical ways, and, in least one case, possibly criminal ways, by interfering with a police investigation of a missing teenage girl. Nonetheless, Murdoch continues to stand behind those employees.
Your advertising dollars are supporting irresponsible, unethical, and dangerous journalism, abroad and very likely at home, too.
I urge you to stop advertising on Fox News immediately.
Sincerely,
[Name]
My thanks to Richard for his valuable contributions to this piece.
Two Facts
1. Someone is still paying Jonah Goldberg to write a garbage column.
2. Jonah Goldberg uses this week's garbage column to write some shambling deposit of tommyrot in which he mendaciously deconstructs an NPR piece about the ubiquity of the phrase, "That's racist!" which the younger set uses as an absurdery to mock racial sensitivity, in order to assert that conservatives are like kids, man: They don't get all sensitive about racial stuff.
Goldberg's right that (many) conservatives are like (many) kids, in the sense that neither one has a particular sensitivity toward covert racism. Thing is, kids have the excuse of youth and inexperience: White kids also have privilege making them insensitive to race; and some kids of color experience something similar to what I did growing up as a girl in a feminist age—the promise of equality that makes social justice seem quaint and antiquated until you run headlong into evidence of the promise unfulfilled.
Conservatives like Goldberg, however, who fancy themselves beyond the tedium of racial sensitivity, do not have the excuse of youth and inexperience. They're just assholes.
