Closing Maternity Wards: Costly and Risky
Article in Daily Yonder – Keeping it Rural
04/27/2011
Maternity wards are closing in rural areas already underserved by physicians. Rural women need a new model for prenatal care and more options for birthing.
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Filed under reproductive health, rural women
By Jane Lane
This Sustainable Rural Living section of the Rural Womyn Zone website is in the process of being updated after a couple of years of neglect during what I call “my cancer year” and the year after it, while I regained my energy, my focus, and ability to do more than one thing at a time.
During that time, three women, Kim Donehower B.A. Ph.D, Charlotte Hogg B.A. M.A. Ph.D., and Eileen E. Schell B.A. M.A. Ph.D., published a book called Rural Literacies which addresses one of the intersections that is most interesting to me — place (rural), gender, and public memory. How do we see women in rural America? This is the reason for Rural Womyn Zone.
I first had a chance to get on the Internet at the office at the family farm. I could hardly wait to look for information about other rural women doing things that I was doing – working on a family farm, and working around women’s and social issues. What a disappointment it was for me to discover that there were organizations for rural women in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Third World Countries, but none in the United States. There were local and regional organizations, and some of the big agricultural entities had created what looked like no more than auxiliaries for the women, who were relegated to separate forums where they discussed recipes and children, not the financial and agricultural management of the farms, for example.
If we thought the United States was so advanced that it didn’t need any movements or organizations that focused on rural women’s issues, then why were we still being treated as second class citizens?
Women were doing hard work on farms, but didn’t own the land. If they were married and their name was on the property, the United States didn’t count them as a farmer or owner of the farm, because it only counted one owner per farm, and it counted the husband, not the wife.
I contacted some of the larger “global” women’s organizations that were active in Third World Countries to see what they might offer in the United States, and was told that they did not work in the U.S. What was the assumption? That rural women in this country did not have any of the problems – access to land ownership, protection of water resources, ability to grow healthy food, involvement in planning rural communities, access to women’s reproductive health services, exposure to pesticides and other chemicals, chemical-based agriculture, lack of social capital, access to justice for victims of gender-based violence, access to credit, isolation from services, etc. — that rural women did elsewhere?
So when I was coming up with names for the web site that would become the Rural Womyn Zone, I first called it the Third-And-A-Half-World because it seemed that no one knew we even existed. Or that the problems existed.
At that time, I was reading about people who settled in North Dakota, and how it was understood that the sons would inherit the land, and the daughters would find husbands. How prevalent was this, outside of North Dakota? No woman had ever served as a county commissioner where I lived; so throughout the development of this area, no woman’s perspective was ever considered. The county commissioners appoint members to several boards and other commissions that essentially run the services in a multi-county rural area. Men were appointed to positions that impacted long-range planning and development and women were appointed to the bookmobile board. There was no woman on the city council, and when it became legally inaccessible, the comfortable old brick Carnegie-style library was abandoned, and there was discussion of building a metal building – similar to the implement dealership and the machine shed on the farm – to house the new library on an empty lot out at the outskirts of town where there were no sidewalks.
These are examples of what I believe happens when women’s vision, voices, and needs aren’t considered in community planning. Women aren’t making the news, they are quietly serving their communities, so their voices aren’t recorded, their stories are lost, and younger women who look for mentors and models are left with the prevailing masculinized versions of what it means to be a female in a rural setting – - the entrenched gender roles that complete the vicious circle.
The Rural Womyn Zone was created to build a safe online community where rural women could help each other fulfill their visions in the rural spaces where they lived, and to add their women’s voices to the public memory, as the book, Rural Literacies, describes The Rural Womyn Zone:
. . . The Rural Womyn Zone (RWZ) is a technological network that seeks to critically educate rural women. The RWZ describes itself as a “grass-roots international network of rural women which started using the Internet in 1997 to provide information, outreach, support and a networking base for rural women and their nonprofit organizations and grass roots activities” (“First Chance Project). The RWZ also seeks to “publish news and information for rural women and by rural women” and help rural women utilize technology, make connections with other rural women, and access news and other resources. Through providing access to resources that would take rural women hours to amass on their own, the RWZ demonstrates one way technology can endorse and support literacy and education can be a critical, public pedagogy of place. Despite the expense and unavailability of Internet technology, particularly high-speed access, for some rural citizens, the site explains its intention as an on-line space to gather:
One challenge faced by scholars involves how to avoid colonizing the voices of rural women, and how instead to seriously face and understand the different contexts of women’s lives. . . .Feminist theorists. . .remain caught in a bind. We call for marginalized groups of women to enable subjects to speak for themselves, but we realize that the academic and literary worlds are closed or alien to many of these women. (Carolyn Sachs, qtd. in “Why RWZ is Online”.)
The RWZ stands out from other examples in that it begins from the assumption that dominant ideologies in mainstream rural culture and the United States more broadly are to be questioned and examined: it begins from a position of decolonization . . .
. .the RWZ remains inclusive to those who may not hold the same ideologies: “You do not have to identify with the women’s movement or with feminism in order to belong to this group. But the (Ruralwomyn Email List) assumes the validity of the women’s movement and explores the gap between feminism and rural women’s experience.” Its decolonization goals are also clear on the home page in its emphasis on political action, featuring news articles . . .such as. . . .“It’s a Long, Long Way to Towanda, Kansas: The Price of Neglecting Rural America.”
The book goes on to describe the Rural Womyn Zone as “a rich and vibrant resource for rural women that facilitates discussion and analysis of a host of issues . . . In and of itself, it serves as a kind of critical, public pedagogy and scrutinizes various rural issues to highlight power and privilege.”
And, as a detractor to the idea that Wendell Berry is the final authority on agrarianism and The Great Plains, I was surprised and delighted to read, “What might it look like to read essays by RWZ contributors alongside memoirs from the Paxton women and also Wendell Berry, for example? How much richer could conversations about place become for students and researchers when the issues these women attend to conjoin those traditionally associated with agrarianist writing?”
My cup runneth over. When I started the Rural Womyn Zone web site, I said we rural women had been “hollering out the back door into the night.” It was like Judy Blunt said in her book Breaking Clean, “you can yell and scream out here until you’re purple in the face, and nobody will hear you, even if they are listening.” To know that feminists and academics are hearing the voices of the many women of substance that make up the Rural Womyn Zone over these years, is completely fulfilling to me.
I am so glad that when my focus and energy returned, I found this book. I only wish I could personally thank the authors for what they wrote.
According to a Washington Post article, the only doctor in a small West Texas town of 3,500 tells a stressed out mother “you’re doing the Lord’s work,” gives her a hug, and moves on to his next patient.
We had a young lawyer like that one time. We couldn’t send victims of domestic violence to him for legal assistance because he pulled out his Bible and counseled them to go back to their husbands.
“Do you feel anxious?” he asks. “Almost like a panicky feeling?”
“The stress with the kids,” she tells him, beginning to cry. “It’s always there. I’m always jumpy. I’m always anxious.”
“You’re doing the Lord’s work,” Edwards assures her after listening for a few more minutes. “They can be the death of you, but you’re doing the best thing for those kids.”
Then he hugs her and hurries on to patient No. 10, who is waiting in Exam Room 4.
The point of the story is that if we have health care reform, people waiting to get health insurance so they can see a doctor will not have anyone to see, because in small towns like this, the doctor is already seeing 2,000 patients and can’t take any more. No mention of the programs in place to recruit doctors to rural areas by helping them pay off their student loans in exchange for promising to stay in a rural area for a certain number of years.
What do you think about a doctor who tells an anxious women she’s “doing the Lord’s work”? I wonder if he feels like a missionary?
Filed under health care reform, rural women
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.
Filed under economy, feminist, reproductive health, rural feminism, rural women
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
Filed under politics, reproductive health, rural women
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.
