Anti-abortion activist Charmaine Yoest, whom President Donald Trump on Friday named assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, has gone on record as saying she believes that having an abortion increases a woman’s risk of breast cancer.

From 2008 to 2016, Yoest, herself a breast cancer surivor, served as president and CEO of an anti-abortion organization that makes the same claim, in all caps, on its website. “Abortion is associated with an increased risk of breast cancer,” according to Americans United for Life (AUL), an Arlington, Va.-based group that describes itself as the “legal architect of the pro-life movement.”

“The association between having an induced abortion and a subsequent increased risk of breast cancer has been examined in 70 studies,” according to AUL. “Of these studies, 57 showed a positive association between having an abortion and developing breast cancer, 34 of which were statistically significant.” In part because of model legislation drafted by AUL, five states require that women be counseled about the purported breast cancer link before they undergo an abortion.

And yet, the National Cancer Institute (NCI)–which, like the rest of the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, falls under the HHS umbrella–has concluded that induced abortion does not affect breast cancer risk. So have the World Health Organization, the American Cancer Society, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and Susan G. Komen. (Interestingly, Komen decided to defund Planned Parenthood as a result of a 2011 AUL report entitled “The Case for Investigating Planned Parenthood.”)

As far as I can tell, only anti-abortion organizations such as AUL, the American Association of Prolife Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American College of Pediatricians claim research shows that having an induced abortion–one performed surgically or with medication–increases a woman’s breast cancer risk. These groups argue that since a full-term pregnancy at a young age appears to protect against breast cancer, terminating a pregnancy must increase a woman’s risk of the disease.

The confusion, say the scientific bodies that found no connection between abortion and breast cancer, stems from the fact that earlier studies of a possible link between the two were flawed.

For the most part, that research took the form of “case-control” studies in which scientists would compare the abortion histories of breast cancer patients and women who did not have the disease. These studies sought information about medical history from the women themselves, not from their medical records. The problem is that women diagnosed with breast cancer, eager to find an explanation for their illness, are more likely to reveal that they had an abortion than healthy women, a tendency referred to as “recall bias.”

Newer studies, on the other hand, collected data about abortion history and other purported or known breast cancer risk factors from large numbers of women who had not yet been diagnosed with the disease. Scientists then followed the women over time, collecting information about their health from their medical records. These prospective studies have consistently found no connection between induced abortion or miscarriage–which, of course, also ends a pregnancy before it is full term–and breast cancer risk.

As described on the HHS website, the assistant secretary for public affairs “serves as the principal point of contact regarding communications and press issues” for the department, raising concerns that, under Yoest’s direction, agencies such as the NCI will scrub their websites of scientific information that is not politically correct under the Trump administration. After all, HHS Secretary Tom Price, an orthopedic surgeon, has been a member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, which opposes abortion.

“Someone who opposes abortion and contraception, along with other forms of reproductive healthcare, has no business shaping policy or handling communications for our nation’s health department,” Andrea Miller, president of the National Institute for Reproductive Health, said in a prepared statement about Yoest’s appointment.

Yoest’s beliefs shouldn’t supersede the science, says Dr. David Grimes, a retired obstetrician/gynecologist who formerly served as chief of the abortion surveillance branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One chapter in Grimes’ 2014 book, Every Third Woman in America: How Legal Abortion Transformed Our Nation, is entitled “Breast cancer: the jury is in.”

“I don’t know about the claims of Yoest, but her beliefs are unimportant. As are mine,” Grimes told me. “The important thing is the evidence…and the judgments of major medical and public health organizations around the world.”

“What insight might Ms. Yoest have that has escaped notice at the WHO, CDC, NIH, etc.? And by virtue of what special training and expertise does she reach her opinion? What are her scientific credentials? What research has she done in this field?”

“Women rely on HHS for accurate information about their health,” Cindy Pearson, executive director of the National Women’s Health Network, a nonprofit advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C., told me. “How can we trust HHS if their spokesperson  has supported requiring doctors to lie to women” about an abortion-breast cancer link?

Source: Forbes

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ritarubin/2017/04/30/trumps-new-hhs-appointee-yoest-thinks-abortion-raises-breast-cancer-risk-but-wheres-the-evidence/2/#d54467d5aacd

Kaylie Hanson Long is the national communications director for NARAL Pro-Choice America

With the TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, people across the world will get a visceral preview of what happens when a regime defined by misogyny, cynicism, and a distaste for facts rises to power. Atwood’s dystopian vision depicts a fictional world in which women are nothing more than childbearing vessels, nothing more than domestic servants, and nothing more than wives whose sole claim to power rests in the hands of their husbands. Women who think, who rebel, who choose — and also women who fail to bear children, who fail to live up to an idea of “womanhood” that has nothing to do with humanity and everything to do with biology — are declared “unwomen.”

Sound familiar?

If you’re a woman in 2017, you might recognize this world thanks to the rise of politicians who have felt less and less pressure to hide the misogyny driving their attempts to control the most intimate aspects of a woman’s life. And this rise has been made possible by none other than President Donald Trump.
The government of The Handmaid’s Tale is fueled by a misogynist agenda and systematically enacts policies that rob women of their autonomy. After the leadership’s rise to power, the main character of The Handmaid’s Tale stops by a convenience store to pick up a pack of cigarettes before work only to learn that her bank account has been shut down. When she arrives at work, she learns that this isn’t a fluke: the government has not only frozen every woman’s bank account but has also made it illegal for women to hold a job and hold property at all.

“It’s only a job,” the central character’s husband says when she returns home that day. “You know I’ll always take care of you.” It is clear that he has missed the point.

In our reality, women are already treated like second-class citizens in so many ways: women of color make as little as 58 cents for every dollar their white male counterparts make. Pregnant women lose their jobs because they need an extra bathroom or water break. Republicans in Congress want to drag us back to the days of charging women more for our health care and when being a woman was considered a pre-existing condition. And the onslaught of antichoice legislation in this country has chipped away at our fundamental right to control our bodies and decide whether, when, how, and with whom to start or grow a family.
President Trump’s misogynist agenda only promises to pull us backward and erase the progress we have made on the road toward gender equality. He has laid bare the real motive behind the war on reproductive rights waged by antichoice politicians and extremist groups: it has very little to do with abortion and everything to do with keeping women in our place by limiting our options and freedom.

Trump let the cat out of the bag last year when he matter-of-factly claimed “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who choose abortion. Of course the people who cheer him on are the same people who believe that birth control pills and IUDs — the most basic tools women use to control their futures — should be illegal. One even claimed that a world without these forms of contraception would be “ideal.” And antichoice state legislators from Wyoming to Missouri make their real feelings about women clear when they compare us to livestock and quip that we should go to zoos to access basic health care.

The examples are endless, and it is clear that the rise of a reality where women do not have basic rights is made possible not only by politicians bent on controlling women, but also by a populace that tells itself, “That can’t happen here.”

“There were marches, of course,” writes the unnamed narrator of The Handmaid’s Tale, reflecting on the protest movements women led against the rise of this catastrophic and misogynist theocracy, “but they were smaller than you might have thought.”
The good news for us is that our marches have not been small. Across the country and the world, people have made it clear that the majority does not believe in the dystopian worldview peddled by extreme antichoice groups and politicians like President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence. Seven in 10 Americans believe abortion should be legal and accessible, and the same number think the Supreme Court should not overturn Roe v. Wade. This majority is fueling the resistance against the dangerous antiwoman, antifamily agenda pushed by President Trump and his Republican allies from Washington to the state legislatures.

Luckily, leaders at every level of government are getting the message, and they understand that Americans will support those who stand strong behind reproductive freedom and gender equality. In states like Nevada and Washington, legislators are leading a proactive resistance by working to make birth control even more accessible. States like Massachusetts, Oregon, and Tennessee are also working on laws that would require insurance providers to cover a broad range of birth control, not just certain types or brands.

It is no surprise that America’s appetite for dystopian fiction skyrocketed after President Trump’s election. We must look to it not only as a warning of what could be, but also as a guide to how we can push history in the right direction. We must stand up, stand strong, and stand together in support of the fundamental idea that every woman deserves the same opportunity and freedom as men to control her body and her future.

Source: Pop Sugar

https://www.popsugar.com/news/Handmaid-Tale-Reproductive-Rights-43473588?utm_source=nar.al&utm_medium=urlshortener&utm_campaign=Facebook

The Senate bill passed out of committee, despite both women voting against it

Two weeks after President Donald Trump signed a bill that will make it easier for states to defund Planned Parenthood, the South Carolina Senate has taken a major step in conservatives’ effort to make abortions impossible within their borders.

The personhood bill is very unlikely to be passed by the time the 2017 legislative year ends next month. When the full Senate Judiciary Committee convenes next year, the bill will be held under consideration.

Critics of the bill claim that it will effectively outlaw abortion in all circumstances (including during rape, incest, or when the life of the mother is in jeopardy). They also note that the bill would have far-reaching ramifications beyond the issue of abortion, potentially undermining access to birth control, in vitro fertilization, and even cancer treatments that could potentially harm a fertilized egg. The state lobbyist for Planned Parenthood, Vicki Ringer, has also argued that it will be very expensive for the state of South Carolina to defend the personhood bill against the inevitable judicial challenges if it passes. Nevertheless, Ringer also told The Post and Courier that she recognized her testimony against the bill on Wednesday was “an exercise in futility.”

Source: Salon

http://www.salon.com/2017/04/27/south-carolina-is-close-to-basically-outlawing-abortion-through-a-personhood-bill/

President Trump’s appointment legitimizes the former president and CEO of Americans United for Life, an anti-choice copycat legislation mill looking to restrict access to comprehensive reproductive health care.

President Trump on Friday installed virulent anti-choice activist Charmaine Yoest as assistant secretary for public affairs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

The appointment vaults Yoest to one of the top positions at HHS, the agency that sets public health policy in the United States. She will report to HHS Secretary Tom Price, serving as his “principal counsel on public affairs—providing executive leadership, policy direction, and management strategy.”

In other words, Yoest will communicate the policy decisions of her boss, who believes “there’s not one” woman who can’t afford birth control, to the press and the public.

Yoest’s record on reproductive rights is arguably even more extreme than Price’s.

Trump’s appointment legitimizes the former president and CEO of Americans United for Life (AUL), an anti-choice copycat legislation mill looking to restrict the right to access comprehensive reproductive health care nationwide. The federal courts have largely blocked AUL’s efforts.

By tapping Yoest, the Trump administration sends a clear signal that it plans to use HHS to restrict reproductive rights as much as possible, no matter how much money that will cost taxpayers.

“It is unacceptable that someone with a history of promoting myths and false information about women’s health is appointed to a government position whose main responsibility is to provide the public with accurate and factual information,” Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of Planned Parenthood Federation America, said in a statement. “Charmaine Yoest has spent her whole professional life opposing access to birth control and a woman’s right to a safe, legal abortion. While President Trump claims to empower women, he is appointing government officials who believe just the opposite.”

As Emily Bazelon wrote in a 2012 profile of Yoest for the New York Times, the anti-choice activist’s “end goal isn’t to make abortion safer. She wants to make the procedure illegal.”

“She leaves no room for exceptions in the case of rape or incest or to preserve the health of the mother,” Bazelon wrote. “She believes that embryos have legal rights and opposes birth control, like the IUD, that she thinks ‘has life-ending properties.’” Yoest reportedly dismissed using contraception to bring down the abortion rate as a “red herring.”

Yoest worked as a senior adviser to Mike Huckabee’s failed 2008 presidential campaign. Huckabee holds a hardline opposition to abortion rights, and in 2015 suggested he would be open to the idea of using federal troops to stop legal abortion. Yoest also worked as vice president at Family Research Council, which has been classified as an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Yoest served on the Trump campaign’s anti-choice advisory council. She came to Trump’s defense when he faced allegations of sexual assault.

Yoest is one of many anti-choice advocates installed at HHS since Trump took office. Paula Stannard, who ProPublica reports was hired to the agency as a “beachhead” in January, worked at HHS in the George W. Bush administration. Anti-choice activist Hadley Arkes has claimed that during Stannard’s time at HHS she worked on dubious “born-alive” efforts.

“Trump has broken nearly all of his promises to the American people in his first 100 days, but he has certainly stuck to his pledge to erode the constitutional right to abortion, punishing women in the process,” said Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. “This nomination helps fulfill that twisted promise and speaks volumes about the Trump administration’s continued disdain for reproductive freedom and women’s rights.”

Yoest has already influenced the U.S. Supreme Court for decades to come, per White House pool reports. Yoest, along with other prominent anti-choice activists who helped guide the process, convened at the White House on February 1, the day after Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch’s nomination.

Congressional Republicans are already pressuring HHS officials to wield regulatory power undermining reproductive rights.

A day before Yoest’s appointment, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives met with Price to discuss so-called conscience protections, according to a press release from House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). McCarthy, House Budget Committee Chair Diane Black (R-TN), Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), and other prominent anti-choice lawmakers swayed Price to examine the Weldon Amendment, which prohibits states that receive federal family planning funding from discriminating against health-care plans based on whether they cover abortion care.

Congressional Republicans have falsely alleged the Weldon Amendment doesn’t go far enough and forces doctors to provide abortion care. They sought to codify and expand it last year in a successful House vote, but the legislation failed to advance to the U.S. Senate.

McCarthy said the Republicans are “fully confident” that their meeting with Price would yield a “fresh look” at the “controversy and other conscience violations.”

Source: Rewire

https://rewire.news/article/2017/04/28/breaking-trump-appoints-anti-choice-extremist-prominent-hhs-post/

The Montana GOP’s “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act” relies on junk science claiming a fetus can feel pain at 20 weeks’ post fertilization.

Montana’s Democratic governor plans to veto legislation that outlaws abortion care at 20 weeks, a spokesperson told Rewireon Thursday.

Gov. Steve Bullock “strongly believes a woman’s medical decision should stay between herself, her doctor, her family, and her faith,” said Bullock’s press secretary, Marissa Perry.

SB 329, known as the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, relies on junk science claiming a fetus can feel pain at 20 weeks post fertilization—which doctors call 22 weeks’ gestation, calculated from the first day of a person’s last menstrual period. The bill bans abortions at 20 weeks’ fertilization, except in cases of serious physical health risk or life endangerment. In those instances, the emphasis remains on the fetus, with medical practitioners instructed to end the pregnancy in a way that gives the “best opportunity for the unborn child to survive.”

Violators of the Republican-backed measure could face fines of $1,000 or up to five years behind bars.

Perry said Bullock had not yet seen the bill, but said the governor has a record of vetoing anti-abortion legislation. Bullock has ten days from when legislation reaches his desk to veto it, or the bill becomes law without his signature, Perry said.

Republicans control both of Montana’s legislative chambers. The bill’s lead sponsor, state Sen. Keith Regier(R-Kalispell), has backed various anti-choice bills over the years. He sponsored failed legislation to make abortion a homicide, and an unsuccessful ban on administering abortion pills via telemedicine. Regier was behind a 2012 fetal homicide bill, which went into law without the governor’s signature.

The influential anti-choice groups Americans United for Life and the National Right To Life Committee drafted the first “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Act” for Nebraska in 2010, as Rewire reported. Since then, Republicans and reproductive rights opponents around the country have advanced or enacted unconstitutional 20-week abortion bans under the guise of preventing a fetus from “feeling pain.”

The medical establishment holds fetal pain is unlikely before the third trimester.

Source: Rewire

https://rewire.news/article/2017/04/27/montana-governor-says-hell-veto-20-week-abortion-ban/

Restrictions on abortion perpetuate economic inequality.

 

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) took a firestorm of criticism over the weekend for campaigning for an Omaha mayoral candidate who supported abortion restrictions. In the slew of coverage following Sanders’ support of Democratic Nebraska lawmaker Heath Mello, media outlets and Sanders himself framed abortion access as separate from economic issues — when in reality, abortion restrictions hurt low-income people the most.

In 2009, his first year in Nebraska’s state legislature, Mello supported a bill mandating doctors offer an ultrasound before performing an abortion, which he said was a “positive first step to reducing the number of abortions in Nebraska.” Mello also sponsored the final version of a 20-week abortion ban and voted for a law banning insurance plans from covering abortion, Rewire reported. Mello’s campaign manager told The Huffington Post that he received a 100 percent rating from Planned Parenthood, but Planned Parenthood Voters of Nebraska said the statements about a 100 percent rating were misleading.

Understandably, Sanders’ support for Mello was seen as running counter to progressive values.

In response to Sanders’ support of Mello and the resulting criticism from progressives, the Atlantic ran a story with the headline “Rifts over abortion and economic populism threaten to divide Democrats.” In the article, a former Sanders campaign staffer calls the support of abortion rights an unreasonable standard:

I don’t think the senator is anointing anyone or imposing a litmus test on candidates, and I don’t think he sees it that way either. He’s always cared about a core set of economic issues, which is why people flocked to his campaign, and he wants to make sure he supports people who believe in the same things.

The New York Times published a similar piece about how the Omaha election is “pitting abortion rights activists against economic populists.” The Times piece poses this question:

But the ferocity of the dispute this time reveals a much deeper debate on the left: Should a commitment to economic justice be the party’s central and dominant appeal, or do candidates also have to display fealty to the Democrats’ cultural catechism?

Last week, Sanders told NPR that in order for Democrats to get control of the House and Senate, they have to “appreciate where people come from.”

“But I think you just can’t exclude people who disagree with us on one issue,” Sanders said.

The low-income people most affected by abortion restrictions might disagree with Sanders and the media on the characterization that abortion is just “one issue” or a social or cultural issue, rather than an economic one.

Seventy-five percent of abortion patients were poor or low-income in 2014, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Due in part to barriers to contraceptive access, poor women and other people trying not to conceive are three times more likely to get pregnant than higher income people and five times more likely to give birth, according to a 2015 Brookings Institution paper. Abortion rates were also lower for the poor, because although middle-class women abort more of their pregnancies, they have less unintended pregnancies, and thus fewer abortions overall, Slate explained.

With lack of access to affordable abortion options — thanks to the Hyde Amendment, which officially prohibits federal taxpayer dollars from paying for abortions — many women have attempted to induce their own abortion. Only 17 states direct Medicaid to pay for all or most medically necessary abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, but the national average for an abortion in the first trimester is around $500 and as much as $2,000 for the second trimester.

The Hyde Amendment has restricted abortion access for many economically distressed groups, such as low-income Washington, D.C. residents, incarcerated people, military personnel, and Native Americans.

Alicia Hupprich, whose husband serves in the military and could not use his insurance to pay for an abortion, shared her story for NARAL Pro-Choice America. She became pregnant in 2015 and after 18 weeks, discovered her baby had fetal hydrops, which has a very high mortality rate. Hupprich and her husband had to travel very far to find a clinic that would provide an abortion.

Because of the Hyde Amendment, my husband’s military insurance would not pay anything towards our termination for fetal anomaly. Though every doctor mentioned that termination was an option in our severe situation, our doctors would not perform the procedure, and they would not point us in the direction of a safe and legal place to have it done. We had to travel over 250 miles to a clinic that could help us.

States continued to pass restrictions on abortion last year. Fourteen states passed 30 laws to make it more challenging to get an abortion in 2016. Today, 31 states have at least one restriction on abortion, including waiting periods, requiring doctors to have admitting privileges, restricting health insurance coverage for abortion, and banning abortion after 20 weeks. And these requirements have very real consequences for low-income women and women of color.

A 2016 University of Buffalo study looked at 3,999 intakes from the George Tiller Memorial Fund, a National Network of Abortion Funds-affiliated nonprofit fund, and found that about half of the women who tried to get assistance from the fund were black, which squares with data on black women facing more health care barriers than white women. Thirty-seven percent of the women already had multiple children. The average distance they traveled to get an abortion doubled from 2010 to 2015.

Low-income people face difficult decisions when they don’t have the resources to get an abortion. Somewhere between 100,000 and 240,000 women of reproductive age living in the state of Texas alone have tried to induce their abortion without any medical assistance, according to a 2015 report from the Texas Policy Evaluation Project (TxPEP), a group of researchers at the University of Texas. Most of the women surveyed said they would have gone to a clinic if they had the option.

Sanders was not the only progressive who faced blowback for his support of Mello. Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez, who has been traveling the country with Sanders on what they’re calling a “Unity Tour” to address political differences between Sanders and DNC supporters, did not attend the event but has also supported Mello.

Sanders, Perez, and others who ignore the economic realities of abortion — or pit the two as separate issues — would do better to reconsider.

Source: Think Progress

https://thinkprogress.org/abortion-is-economic-1b05be2b3d