"Pregnancy Centers", family planning faux pas Options

[PalePhoenix]

OK, so you're distracted by Hezbollah and North Korea. That's understandable. Let's not forget that life--such as it is--goes on here in the US, with all its attendant erosions of civil liberties and back-door attempts to undermine legally protected rights. Speaking of the Right, fundie religiopaths are gettin' muthafukkin' crafty, and now they're doing it with Federal funding. So, while you're staring, aghast, at the literal fallout of secretly armed military groups building and firing missles in the general direction of their neighbors, please take a moment to remark upon the deep level of hypocrisy inherent to the treatment of a woman's right to her own body, right here in America:

Pregnancy Centers Found to Give False Information on Abortion (click for full article - WP)

Federally funded "pregnancy resource centers" are incorrectly telling women that abortion results in an increased risk of breast cancer, infertility and deep psychological trauma, a minority congressional report charged yesterday. The report said that 20 of 23 federally funded centers contacted by staff investigators requesting information about an unintended pregnancy were told false or misleading information about the potential risks of an abortion.

The pregnancy resource centers, which are often affiliated with antiabortion religious groups, have received about $30 million in federal money since 2001, according to the report, requested by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.). The report concluded that the exaggerations "may be effective in frightening pregnant teenagers and women and discouraging abortion. But it denies the teenagers and women vital health information, prevents them from making an informed decision, and is not an accepted public health practice."

A spokeswoman for one of the two large networks of pregnancy resource centers, Sterling-based Care Net, said that the report is "a routine attack on us that's nothing new." Care Net's Molly Ford said the centers criticized by Waxman received federal grants for abstinence-only programs they conduct, but not for pregnancy counseling. "The funds are kept entirely separate," she said.

Entirely separate. Hmm, isn't that how we finally jailed Al Capone? Tax audits for everyone (rather, 20 out of 23). I couldn't believe this when I read it. I still find it offensive. The intentional misuse of scientific data would be enough, but I don't think for an instant that there's a real way to keep subsidies from infiltrating the entire operation of a business...whether it's a clinic or a coffee shop.

Let me put it this way. The government gives a coffee shop five thousand dollars, but tells them, "You can only use this for making, advertising, and selling decaf." So, do you really believe (1) That if the manager only likes decaf, there isn't going to be disproportionate use of man-hours and counter space for this blend; (2) That where distribution of decaf is responsible for keeping the business afloat, it isn't effecting the entire operation; and (3) That if you're telling all your customers the caffeine is poison, it's not pretty fucking obvious that you've got an agenda in the first place?

[Archemini]

I took a theology class two years ago that had a guest speaker come in from a pregnancy center. She fed us the same lines, increased chance of breast cancer, depression etc. One female student and I, both bio majors at the time, went ballistic on her and demanded proof of such claims because they make no sense. She claimed that the mother produces breast milk and then when the baby is aborted the milk has nowhere to go and creates cysts and tumors and cancers. I didn't buy that, since mothers who have kids and don't breastfeed have no known problems. She backtracked quite a few times and just kept saying "No its immoral and wrong and it's not good for women, ladies don't even think about it the only safe sex is no sex."

Typical bullshit, now they just pretend they are scientists when they spew their lies.

[PalePhoenix]

Well, now they appear to be dropping the front that they're anything but "antiabortion clinics" (two words that don't make much sense together). Offering sonograms in the belief that seeing a fetus will discourage the desire to terminate it (there is some psychological merit to this ploy), I wonder what "services" they'll present next. Perhaps, a puppet show, so "Mr. First Trimester" can plead in a high-pitched voice not to be removed from god's great plan.

Antiabortion Centers Offer Sonograms to Further Cause

On June 6, Cheryl Smith took her last $600 and drove her teenage daughter from Baltimore to Severna Park to get an abortion. When they got there, a receptionist told them the clinic had changed hands. The abortion provider had moved a few miles away, she said, but the new clinic would offer a pregnancy test and sonogram for free.

The Smiths stayed. After they saw a picture of the fetus at 21 weeks with arms and legs and a face, their thoughts of termination were gone.

"As soon as I seen that, I was ready. It wasn't no joke. It was real," Makiba Smith, 16, said. "It was like, he's not born to the world yet, but he is inside of me growing."

With its ultrasound machine and its location, the Severna Park Pregnancy Clinic demonstrates two of the most important tactics in an intensifying campaign to woo women away from abortion clinics. Antiabortion organizations in recent years have added medical services to hundreds of Christian-oriented pregnancy counseling centers nationwide. Many of these antiabortion clinics have opened in or near places where women go to end pregnancies.

The new Severna Park clinic's operators say their strategy is akin to a business plan. "Just like McDonald's and Starbucks look for competitors to be next to," the pregnancy centers look to set up "where women will be seeking abortions," Pam Palumbo said.

God's great plan apparently includes setting up these centers like Starbucks or McDonalds. One thing they're not appreciating about this analogy, people often hate these personality-free, corporate usurpings of local eateries and coffeeshops. It's an irony only the single-minded could miss. You want to preach to pregnant teens that their possible offspring have spiritual meaning, but you want to do it from the most soulless pulpit available?

This is why religious advice is offered in churches and temples, not in hospitals, clinics, and other bastions of Science. It's also why I don't go to supermarket butchers expecting to have a PETA table next to them, or to clothing stores picketed by nudists. That such facilities may also have the State's blessing is also immaterial. Legislating Faith doesn't work for the Taliban, didn't work for the Nazis or Communists, and certainly isn't welcome as a pretext for a free market economy on a woman's right to choose.

[Xaotrix]

It is my hope that, as someone is passing the sweet potatoes during today's celebration of genocide, a teenage girl in America is announcing her unplanned pregnancy...because they hiked the costs birth control pills at your college health clinics:

In health centers at hundreds of colleges and universities around the country, young women are paying sharply higher prices for prescription contraceptives because of a change in federal law.

The increases have meant that some students using popular birth control pills and other products are paying three and four times as much as they did several months ago. The higher prices have also affected about 400 community health centers nationwide used by poor women.

The change is due to a provision in a federal law that ended a practice by which drug manufacturers provided prescription contraception to the health centers at deeply discounted rates. The centers then passed along the savings to students and others.

Some Democratic lawmakers in Washington are pressing for new legislation by year’s end that would reverse the provision, which they say was inadvertently included in a law intended to reduce Medicaid abuse. In the meantime, health care and reproductive rights advocates are warning that some young women are no longer receiving the contraception they did in the past. (New York Times)

[PalePhoenix]

Yes, you can has abortion now. Except that it's just a word, and someone already tried to remove it from a list of searchable terms in a reproductive health database used by millions of people.

Johns Hopkins University said Friday that it had programmed its computers to ignore the word “abortion” in searches of a large, publicly financed database of information on reproductive health after federal officials raised questions about two articles in the database. The dean of the Public Health School lifted the restrictions after learning of them.

A spokesman for the school, Timothy M. Parsons, said the restrictions were enforced starting in February. Johns Hopkins manages the population database known as Popline with money from the Agency for International Development.

Popline is the world’s largest database on reproductive health, with more than 360,000 records and articles on family planning, fertility and sexually transmitted diseases. Employees who manage the database instructed their computers to ignore the word “abortion” as a search term.

After learning of the restrictions on Friday, the dean, Dr. Michael J. Klag, said: “I could not disagree more strongly with this decision, and I have directed that the Popline administrators restore ‘abortion’ as a search term immediately. I will also launch an inquiry to determine why this change occurred.”

The school is named for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, a Hopkins alumnus who has given millions of dollars to the university and the school.

Ted Miller, a spokesman for Naral Pro-Choice America, an abortion rights group, said: “The public has a right to know why someone would censor relevant medical information. The Bush administration has politicized science as part of an ideological agenda. So it’s important to know if that occurred here.”

In an e-mail response on Tuesday, Johns Hopkins told the librarians that “abortion” was no longer a valid search term.

“We recently made all abortion terms stop words,” Debra L. Dickson, a Popline manager, wrote. “As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now.” Ms. Dickson suggested that instead of using “abortion,” librarians could use other terms like “fertility control, postconception” or “pregnancy, unwanted.”

Gail L. Sorrough, director of medical library services at the medical center in San Francisco, said it was absurd to restrict searches using “a perfectly good noun such as ‘abortion.’ ”

Under the rule, Popline ignored the word “abortion,” just as it ignores terms like “a” and “the.” Ms. Sorrough and a colleague, Gloria Won, reported their experience on an electronic mailing list, and librarians protested the restrictions.

“We sent this out on a listserv, and it just exploded,” Ms. Sorrough said. “Eliminating this term essentially blocks access to reports in the database and ultimately to information about abortion. Unwanted pregnancy is not a synonym for abortion...”

It is probably worth mentioning at this juncture that an abortion, or other pregnancy termination, remains the right of female citizens in this country. Trepanation, an early psychological therapy for expelling demons and evacuating foul humors from the skull by drilling directly into it, is not a "right" so much as a "last ditch effort of an extremely skilled neurosurgeon if cranial tissues are swelling, in extreme cases." You can, nonetheless, defer worry about its removal from scientific databases and historical texts on medicine. If this practice is too arcane, then please see Transnasal Lobotomy, Appendectomy, and Enlargement Mammoplasty.

While it is very difficult to imagine this representing the tacit position of Johns Hopkins as an institution of higher learning committed to the dissemination of scientific data, such events make you wonder (1) Whether it is truly as singular as it would seem; and (2) If it was so easy, then what other "terms" have been similarly omitted?

[ganymede]

All the world loves a clown? (your tax dollars at work, folks) At least this shit has an end in sight.