Hard-working families across the country have a lot on their minds these days. They care about good schools for their kids, earning enough at work to cover ever-growing expenses and keeping their health care affordable and accessible when they need it. These are the concerns of the Pennsylvania families I talk to every day. Yet there are still some politicians who would rather spend their time waging ideological battles instead of helping families get ahead.

Recently, we’ve seen a nationwide trend of disturbing bills designed to restrict women’s ability to make decisions about their own families and access the health care services they need. These attacks are spreading despite the fact that they undermine women’s status as equal members of our society and can make it more difficult to raise a family. In Oklahoma, legislators have presented a bill that would require women to get written consent from the fetus’ father before getting an abortion. In Arkansas, the governor signed a law that allows husbands to sue their wives’ doctors in order to stop their spouses from getting a particular type of abortion. In Wyoming, lawmakers assigned two anti-abortion bills to the Senate Agriculture committee — literally treating women like pigs.

Each of these examples shows politicians wasting time debating whether women deserve the right to make decisions about their own families rather than focusing on policies that would put more money in the family bank account.

I can’t change what happens in Oklahoma, Arkansas or Wyoming. But as governor of Pennsylvania, I can do something when similar restrictions crop up in my home state. Here, it’s my job to put the needs of Pennsylvanians ahead of partisan ideology. As a father and a husband, I believe that women should have the same opportunities as men. That’s why I am ready to veto a plan moving through the state legislature that would criminalize abortion, even in cases of rape and incest, and drastically restrict women’s access to health care.

This legislation, Senate Bill 3, has been pushed through the state legislature without a single public hearing that would allow Pennsylvanians the ability to express their concerns. I’ve heard from women across Pennsylvania who shared their heartbreaking stories with me. This bill would criminalize very personal and difficult decisions that should be between a woman and their doctor. This bill is also opposed by the Pennsylvania Medical Society, but that hasn’t stopped politicians in Harrisburg from pushing it through the legislature.

The legislation is wrong and the people of Pennsylvania deserve better from their elected representatives.

I’m proud to support the women I represent and to advance reproductive freedom and equality for every member of our society. I don’t pretend to know what’s best for a woman and her health, but everyone can get behind the idea that all women should have the same opportunity as men to make their own health care decisions.

If the politicians behind this unconstitutional bill truly want to help Pennsylvania’s families, they should champion policies that are proven to lift up women and families. This means expanding access to affordable health care, protecting pregnant women from discrimination at work and giving working people access to paid family leave so they can take care of their families without risking their jobs.

Until that happens, I will keep standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the vast majority of Pennsylvanians who support a woman’s constitutional right to make her own decisions about her body. It’s not my place to judge a woman’s personal decisions or to try and make them for her — and it’s not the state legislature’s place to make those decisions for other people, either. And if they try to do so, my veto pen will be ready.

Source: Motto

http://motto.time.com/4767933/pennsylvania-governor-tom-wolf-on-anti-abortion-bill/

Earlier this month, Donald Trump quietly signed a bill allowing states to withhold federal family planning funds from organizations that provide abortion services.

Proposals like this aim to make abortion inaccessible for as long as it remains legal. They can be incredibly effective, and there will be more of them. The United States is already a country in which one in four women with Medicaid coverage subject to the Hyde Amendment report carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term due to lack of insurance coverage for the procedure. A country where a lack of affordability or regional access or both means that women delay the procedure or come up short on rent, groceries, and utilities just to cover the expense.

Anne got pregnant at 25 and wasn’t ready to have a kid. Brittany got pregnant at 22 and wasn’t ready, either. Anne could afford the abortion. Brittany couldn’t.

These are their stories.

Anne, 38, Brooklyn

They gave me a pregnancy test at the hospital and it was negative, but they wrote me a prescription for the morning-after pill. Still, their pharmacy didn’t stock it. I still can’t get over that all these years later— it felt almost mean-spirited, making you jump through hoops like that. But because I had just been told I wasn’t pregnant, I didn’t rush to another drug store right away.

I took another home pregnancy test. Of course, I was pregnant.

I had just lost a job, and I didn’t have any insurance. I lived in a 400 square foot apartment. My boyfriend was living 3,000 miles away. I wasn’t ready to have a baby in any practical or emotional sense, so I went to Planned Parenthood and had an abortion.

Brittany Mostiller, 32, Chicago

It wasn’t anything I wanted at that time, but she was coming and ain’t a thing I could do about it. That was just it. To even say that aloud, even now—you don’t wish that on anyone. I wanted to have a happy experience, I wanted to look forward to seeing my child and meeting her. There was no moment when it felt like “This is OK,” there was no moment when I felt, “Let me get happy.” There was no switch for me to turn on. It’s still something I struggle with, that feeling. I struggle with it now even trying to talk about it.

The pregnancy was hard for me. I was stressed, I was in a lot of pain, and I would just cry. I was depressed. It was just not a good space for me, mentally or physically. And I’m still trying to be a parent through all of this. I think it all had an effect. My water broke early—32 weeks—and I delivered at 33 weeks. She was my tiniest baby.

I love her dearly, but I know that wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t have an option. After she was born, I guess I went into autopilot. That was the story of my life for a long time, being a parent, being a black woman, trying to support my family. I couldn’t feel or process anything, any emotion. I needed to make sure I had diapers, that I had onesies, that I could get on food stamps. I had to make sure I was able to physically take care of my children. That was it. There wasn’t room for anything else.

When she was two months old I had to call back my previous employer at a local grocery chain and literally beg for my job back. I had left the job when I was 19, walked out like, “That’s it.” I was young. But I begged them for my job back, told them I had grown and matured and that I had a larger family and really needed the work. It wasn’t an option to hit the pavement with a newborn and two small children.

After that, I got another job, something full-time. I worked both jobs for a while and then eventually quit the grocery store and kept my full-time job as a manager at a bagel joint. I was still sharing an apartment with my sister, and now it was five of us in the two bedroom house.

This is my first time talking about this. I have spoken to a few folks about it briefly because I am trying to figure out how to tell this story. I don’t want my daughter to ever think that she is not loved. She doesn’t feel that way, I don’t think, but I don’t want her to read or hear about it at some point in her life and ever think it.

I struggle with this a lot, though. I’m still trying to figure out the language around it. I know people will try to take this and of course tear me down. You are damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. People will use my story however they want. I love my daughter, but if I’d had the money I would have had an abortion. I did not choose to have a child at that time. And that takes a toll on you—mentally, emotionally, physically, financially. Everything.

And people who are anti-abortion will try to use my story to say, “See, you can make it work. You struggle through it.” I don’t even have the language for that, but I want to counter it by saying it’s wrong. That’s not the truth. If people want to have an abortion, they should be able to.

Not everyone is resilient. I know it’s a feel good story—build yourself up! Overcome those obstacles! That work is taxing. It is hard. It is also not everybody’s story. Things can go a lot of different ways other than choosing to love a child that you did not choose to carry.

I think it gets even stickier because people can try to use it to feed a narrative that black people—especially black women—are bad parents. Someone is going to take all of your circumstances and frame it however they want to. That’s what I mean when I say you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

Now I hear stories from the women who call the Chicago Abortion Fund and they are so similar to mine. It’s not just that they can’t afford or access abortion, but I can hear their despair. God, the desperation of it. They are tired of struggling. This is not just about abortion or carrying a pregnancy to term. Folks are out here really struggling financially, mentally, and emotionally just trying to be a person. Some don’t have running water, they have no support.

I hear these everyday experiences of folks where carrying the pregnancy to term is just not an option for them. But sometimes they do it because they simply couldn’t afford an abortion. It’s such a disservice to people. I feel them, and I feel like I am listening to myself when I was 22 and pregnant with my third child.

I love my babies. And I hate having to say that—I obviously love them. Anyone who has met me or my children can see that they are loved. And I feel, right now, like the total opposite of the person I was 10 years ago. I have been mentored by an amazing community, by amazing people. I really learned to love myself, and that helped me love my children in an entirely new way. But if someone else is experiencing what I went through ten years ago, and I can be any sort of comfort to them, then that’s what I want.

My third daughter was not something I chose, but then she was here. I needed to make sure she was loved. But I had just blocked out so much, stuffed my emotions so far down just so I could survive that time. That was my defense mechanism, to shut down. People who saw me parenting through it thought I was doing great, but inside I felt like I had to shut down just to make sure we could all see another day.

Source: Fusion

http://fusion.kinja.com/neither-of-these-women-wanted-to-be-pregnant-only-one-1794668225

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/