What family planning has to do with the economy

Katha Pollitt wrote an article in the Nation about the connection between family planning and the economy. She said,

The stimulus will pass, and Republicans will get no credit. Low-income women get the shaft, but they should be used to it by now.

Thank god someone is writing about why family planning belongs in an economic stimulus bill. It’s time we began looking at women as an integral part of our economy, not just some marginal human beings who are expected to have indirect access to the “shovel jobs” by making sure they are married to a man who has a shovel.

So the question: what does family planning and contraception have to do with an economic stimulus plan?

Is birth control tangential to the stimulus? Only if all health spending is, but no one (so far) is arguing that the massive sums for health care be removed from the bill. In fact, when it comes to keeping women hale and hearty contraception is right up there with childhood vaccines and antibiotics. So, given that the stimulus bill contains other health provisions, including 4 billion dollars for preventive care, why is contraception different? Because anti-choice Republicans say so? If health care belongs in the bill, and birth control is health care, then it is not “tangential.” QED.

I would go further: expanding access to contraception does indeed help the economy. The production, prescribing, buying and selling of birth control is an economic activity — funding more of it means more clinics, more clinic workers, more patients,more customers, more people making the products. Moreoever, the provision removed from the stimulus bill would spend money now– about 550 million, over ten years, a drop in the bucket — to save the government much more money later, as the Congressional Budget Office estimates would happen within a few years. (Actually, according to the Wall Street Journal blog, it would save an annual $100 billion, but I’m putting that in parenthesis because it such a huge amount I keep thinking it has to be a typo.)

More important, what about the economics of actually existing women and families? This is no time to be saddling people with babies they don’t want and can’t provide for, who will further reduce the resources available for the kids they already have and further limit parents’ ability to get an education or a job. In a Depression, birth rates go down for a reason. People.Have.No. Money. Furthermore, when people lose their jobs they lose their health insurance. A year’s supply of pills is around $600 retail. That’s a significant amount of money to low-income women.

It is refreshing to see someone present information about this. We’ve heard a lot of ridiculous things this week from the Republican men who couldn’t take the idea seriously enough to keep from winking and making jokes because the words “contraception” and “stimulation” appeared together in a concept. Removing this type of WM politician from contolling women’s lives and reproductive health was one of the major accomplishments of this election.

Pollit urges her readers to contact the House (too late – the vote was today) and the Senate, which may still be a good idea.

Either way, it’s way past time to have an intelligent conversation about this.

Read the article in The Nation

When women are still pawns

Last night on Rachel Maddow, David Sirota said Democrats had the votes to pass the stimulus bill without making any concessions to the Republicans on tax cuts. His opinion was that every dollar we lost from the stimulus package to tax cuts would cost taxpayers in the long run because it meant fewer dollars to restore the economy.  Others have also said there are enough votes to pass this bill without compromising with Republicans.

Yet, it appears the Democrats feel they have to compromise with Republicans — by eliminating the money in the bill that would extend family planning services.  Poor women, rural women, women of color, women without health insurance, women trying to keep their jobs so they can have employer-based health insurance: your access to family planning is seen as “pork” or part of a social agenda and even though it was included to help out the states with their Medicaid expenses, no one has articulated the direct impact on the economy. So bye-bye, family planning! What were we thinking!

I have been one of the loudest critics of people who have complained about what President Obama has or has not accomplished already or how or when he accomplished it. I’ve gotten frustrated with the pundits and the bloggers for their completely unrealistic expectations of what a new President should do in less than a week in office, or for the lack of appreciation for the number of things he has done in his first few hours and days.

Bloggers wanted the global gag rule repealed  – but they wanted it done on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.  People were appreciative when President Obama made it one of the things he did in his first few days in office. But some people were still upset because it didn’t happen in their time line.

I think we have all become vigilant about what our government has done or failed to do and the rights that the government took away from its citizens over the last eight years. We’ve gotten into the habit of fighting for ourselves and others, and raising hell about everything, and laying blame.  With the election of President Obama we are prepared to re-learn coalition-building skills, working across the ideological lines, and starting to trust again.

I have repeatedly said, step back. Take a deep breath. Be patient. Give the man a chance. Learn a new way of doing things, watch him put together coalitions that accomplish what is in our common interests.

But I was severely disappointed and frustrated to see the lack of support for the family planning part of the stimulus bill and to learn that it will probably be cut WHEN THE BILL COULD BE PASSED AS IT IS. 

I don’t think we can ever build coalitions with Republican male politicians around women’s reproductive health because they have an entirely different agenda for women and their wombs. The only way to compromise with them has been to give up women’s rights, including deciding for ourselves when we are open to having a child and when we are not.  It isn’t that they want government to stay out of our reproductive lives. THEY want to be in charge of our reproductive lives. 

Women who don’t have health insurance, poor women, rural women, women of color, the women who have the most need for information and contraception methods to help them carry out their own decisions to prevent unwanted pregnancies – these are the women who will suffer. 

The big secret is this: when women have access to education and family planning services, it boosts the economy in their country. When they don’t, the government pays in many ways.

I had enough of the anti-woman policies during the last eight years. People like John Boehner and Congressman Wexler will never understand how anything that is good for women has a connection to the economy because they don’t see women in that context.  They have no idea how women’s access to reproductive health care benefits anyone else. They think of “women’s issues” only in terms of social programs that they think cost them.  Wexler said on Hardball that he ought to stop talking because his wife would get after him when he got home. Maybe the men who run things ought to pay more attention to their wives. Better yet, maybe it’s their wives who should be in charge for a change.

I liked it better when President Obama just said, “I won.” I don’t like it that Democrats are still courting the Republicans who are putting forth the same old line and policies that put this country into the tank.  They aren’t going to change. They aren’t going to learn anything. They are still The Wrecking Crew. 

Why do we have to sacrifice family planning services to appease them?

Here’s the first article I read this morning:

WASHINGTON — House Democrats are likely to jettison family planning funds for the low-income from an $825 billion economic stimulus bill, officials said late Monday, following a personal appeal from President Barack Obama at a time the administration is courting Republican critics of the legislation.

Several officials said a final decision was expected on Tuesday, coinciding with Obama’s scheduled visit to the Capitol for separate meetings with House and Senate Republicans.

The provision has emerged as a point of contention among Republicans, who criticize it as an example of wasteful spending that would neither create jobs nor otherwise improve the economy.

Under the provision, states no longer would be required to obtain federal permission to offer family planning services _ including contraceptives _ under Medicaid, the health program for the low-income.

Democrats considered the politically-potent change as congressional budget experts estimated it would take slightly longer for the overall legislation to achieve an impact on the economy than the administration projects.

The Congressional Budget Office said the economy would feel the effects of almost two-thirds of the money over the next year and a half. The administration claims 75 percent of the funding would be absorbed in that period of time, and Obama has pledged that the bill he signs will meet that target and either save or create up to 4 million jobs.

While the debate surrounding the overall impact of the measure pits economists and their statistics against one another, Republicans quickly seized on the family planning money as evidence that the Democrats were advancing an agenda that went beyond the economy.

“How you can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives how does that stimulate the economy?” House Republican Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio said on Friday after congressional leaders met with Obama at the White House. “You can go through a whole host of issues that have nothing to do with growing jobs in America and helping people keep their jobs.”

Article Source: Huffington Post

Are women’s interests going to be sacrificed again?

Why is the most controversial part of the stimulus bill about family planning? Whenever money and women’s wombs are connected, it seems to make people a little, uh, hysterical.

Chris Matthews became one of the latest people spreading misinformation and ridiculous uninformed personal comments on this subject when he said, “I don’t know.  . it sounds a little like China, doesn’t it?”

A complete and reasonable discussion about women’s reproductive health and freedom has been rendered almost impossible because of the fundamentalist right’s narrow focus on abortion. But that’s no reason for someone like Chris Matthews to be so uninformed when he raises the issue with the guests on his own show. There is plenty of information available on how providing education and access to family planning not only increases well-being for women, but for the economy of their country.

House Republican Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio brought the issue to the forefront when he made the rounds of the political shows complaining there was “$200 million for contraception. What does that have to do with the economy?”

And some of the “religious right” topped it off by making up a lie out of whole cloth by saying the money was for contraception and abortion.

Now news reports today indicate that the Democrats may be willing to jettison this part of the stimulus package.

So why is it that women’s issues are always the first to be sacrificed by Democrats?  

The other compelling question tonight is why so much is being said and written that reinforces the question – what does family planning have to do with the economy – but practically nothing is being said in response.

First of all, the family planning money was to extend help to states with the rising cost of services, including family planning. Each dollar invested in Title X family planning saves $3.80 in Medicaid costs for pregnancy-related health care, including care of newborns.

From a Guttmacher report:

Researchers estimate that one in five women of reproductive age were uninsured in 2003–a 10 percent increase in uninsured women since 2001–and roughly 400,000 more women joined the ranks of those needing publicly subsidized care in just two years. However, 27 states and the District of Columbia have seen family planning funding decline or stagnate since 1994–a trend that could be exacerbated by new Medicaid cost-cutting proposals and greater hostility to reproductive health issues in Congress and state legislatures.

Today, half of all women who are sexually active and fertile but do not want to get pregnant need publicly funded services to help them access birth control,” said Rachel Benson Gold, director of policy analysis at The Alan Guttmacher Institute. “Yet in Congress and the states, we are facing a potential ‘perfect storm’ that could make it harder for these women to get contraceptives, counseling, and STD testing that help them plan their pregnancies and protect their health.”

In 2002, 16.8 million women are estimated to have needed publicly supported contraceptive care, yet clinics were able to serve just 4 in 10, or 6.7 million women. As funding for programs dedicated to family planning–such as Title X of the Public Health Service Act–has decreased or leveled off, the burden of meeting women’s health care needs has shifted to Medicaid. Medicaid funding for contraceptive services has tripled since 1980, and the program now accounts for almost two-thirds of all federal and state family planning funding nationwide.

Suiting up, showing up

The Rural Woman Zone is responding to President Obama’s call to service by turning our web site into a blog where rural women are invited to participate directly to discuss the problems we confront as individuals and in our rural communities, what we are engaged in doing about it, how that is working, and how it intersects with national issues.

The diverse and talented group of rural women that has gathered behind the scenes at the Rural Woman Zone over the years is already involved in community organizing and service in their real time communities. They are confronting racism and sexism, working with victims of gender-based violence, learning to grow healthy food, sharing new ways of living more simply, advocating for reproductive and other health care, and writing, teaching, and training on these issues.

Now we make a move to bring the discussion about this work out from the safe places we created on line into the public discourse by changing our format from a web site to a blog and opening it up for discussion.  We are also challenging ourselves to use social media to reach more rural women and invite them to participate.