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January 2, 2018

For Foster Teens, Accessing Birth Control Is an Uphill Battle

The country’s most vulnerable youth often aren’t able to access necessary care.

For the roughly quarter-million girls in foster care in the United States, access to contraception is a matter of luck. Without clear oversight and regulations regarding their health-care needs, advocates for foster youth say they often struggle for basic care.
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As an attorney with the Bronx Defenders, Kara Wallis routinely attends permanency hearings, which occur when a foster youth is either being returned to their home, placed with adoptive parents, or beginning independent living. As part of these hearings, judges read a set of directives for the guardian overseeing custody, such as providing the youth with a passport or a driver’s license. For foster youth transitioning to independent living, these directives include things like job counseling.

“Never have I heard an order regarding reproductive rights, though,” Wallis said. She explains that some judges use a standard directive, and others might create their own. But in her experience, without exception, they lack an acknowledgment of contraception or reproductive health needs.

This issue is not confined to permanency hearings, but is rather illustrative of a wide systemic problem. For the roughly quarter-million girls in foster care in the United States, access to contraception is a matter of luck. Without clear oversight and regulations regarding their health-care needs, advocates for foster youth say they often struggle for basic care.

Statistics show that girls and young women in foster care are twice as likely as their peers outside of foster care to become pregnant. While rates of teen pregnancy are steadily declining across the board nationwide, the rate of teen pregnancy among foster youth continues to climb. One study conducted at the University of Chicago of over 700 young people from three states found that of the foster youth surveyed, almost 35 percent were pregnant by age 17 or 18, compared to roughly 15 percent of youth living outside of the system. And by 19, 46 percent of those youth had experienced a repeat pregnancy, compared to 34 percent for youth living outside of foster care who had already been pregnant once. Another study found that almost 50 percent of girls in foster care they surveyed became pregnant by 19. Research shows that unwanted pregnancies and births outnumber wanted pregnancies and births among foster teens. And while federal policies and legal precedent exist to protect the reproductive rights of foster youth, expertsfind that these often fall short of achieving their intended goal, instead creating loose guidelines that are seldom followed.

One of the most consequential cases on the issue was heard in 1988, when the District Court of New York handed down a decision in Arneth v. Gross that cemented the rights of minors in foster care to obtain contraception. Plaintiffs in the case filed a suit against Mission of the Immaculate Virgin, a religiously affiliated foster home, for implementing policies that prohibited minors in its care from using contraception. At the time, the court designated foster youth as a certified class for the sake of litigation, and ruled that as such, requiring the Mission to provide contraception for them was not in violation of the Mission’s religious liberty.

Furthermore, foster youth are entitled to reproductive health-care insurance coverage—including contraception—under Medicaid. According to the National Center for Youth Law (NCYL), states must offer a program called “Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnostic and Treatment,” which specifies a package of benefits, including family planning services, for youth enrolled in Medicaid. Additionally, states are required to cover family planning services with no additional out-of-pocket cost under section 1396d(a)(4)(C) of the Medicaid Act.

But as senior NCYL attorney Rebecca Gudeman explained to Rewire, that doesn’t always translate into access, or the ability to use those services.

In much of the country, foster care is privatized, and the oversight of foster care programs is often handed over by the state to religious organizations like Catholic Charities or the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops; this includes both oversight of foster parents and direct implementation of policies, like running group homes. This means that federal regulations that are opaque at best are left up to interpretation, oftentimes from religious organizations with deep-seated opposition to contraception. Advocates believe this system can place “political and religious ideology” over the ability of foster youth to access adequate education about sex and pregnancy prevention, as Wallis wrote in her law review article, “No Access, No Choice: Foster Care Youth, Abortion, and State Removal of Children.” This, they say, puts youth at an especially high risk for unsafe sex and unintended pregnancy.

New York City, for example, contracts with more than 30 nonprofits to provide foster care, many of which are religiously affiliated. Despite a series of lawsuits in the 1980s and ’90s aimed at ensuring foster youth have access to contraceptive care, it took until 2014 for the city’s Administration for Children’s Services to implement a policy prohibiting agency staff from imposing their religious or moral objections on foster youth. At the time, however, little indication was given as to how this policy would be implemented.

Through her work at Bronx Defenders, which provides “criminal defense, family defense, civil legal services, social work support and advocacy to indigent people of the Bronx,” Wallis sees firsthand how these discrepancies in federal policy and state care play out.

Wallis explains that within a system that is already so depleted of resources, reproductive health care like contraception gets even further marginalized, especially when access is overseen by organizations or individuals who see it as elective or unnecessary. She also points out that while agencies should be affirmatively having conversations about reproductive health with foster youth, they often aren’t. This means foster youth who are living with unfamiliar people are put in a difficult, even impossible situation—self advocating for contraceptive care.

So, while Medicaid ensures that contraceptive care is covered monetarily, actual access is a different story. Everything—from getting to and from an appointment, to being able to safely discuss their contraception issues with an adult—becomes a challenge.

“The law is right,” she said. “But what does that look like?” She explains that the overburdened foster care system in New York City leaves foster youth struggling to get access. And the privatization of foster care in New York state means that foster care organizations are balancing a set of dual incentives: fiduciary—including the responsibilities the state or federal law requires, like providing youth with access to education about reproductive health—and how to abide by any of their religious beliefs. Wallis notes that while access to reproductive health care, including contraception, is fraught both in private and state-run foster care, religious organizations create an added element where foster parents and caseworkers are even more likely to harbor religious biases, and foster youth are going to be even more reticent to bring up issues like contraception knowing that.

Beyond that, she points out that private religious foster care agencies often hand-pick the doctors that they allow foster youth in their care to see—and it is not unlikely that these are doctors they know hold beliefs about reproductive health care that are in line with those of the organization, or that it is assumed foster parents have chosen these particular organizations based on their religious mission statement.

A lack of specificity in policy allows for negative judicial and organizational intervention as well.

“I get very concerned about the bench weighing in on reproductive access,” Wallis said. For example, although judges may not issue directives ordering parents to allow youth access to foster care, she says she has seen discussion of reproductive rights hinder a biological parent’s case. She says that depending on the caseworker, a biological parent discussing birth control with their teen can be deemed to be encouraging risky behavior, and can be used against the parent at any time during their case. Caseworkers act, in many cases, as a liaison between the family and the courts: making visits to the homes, and then reporting back with suggestions, usually to a family court judge. For example, if the state is deciding whether to remove a teen from their home, or if a teen is ready to return to their home, the caseworker assigned can argue that a parent’s discussion of contraception should count against them.

“This is where the difference between privatized and state-run foster care really comes into play,” she explained. Wallis says that while there are a number of barriers to accessing birth control in state-run foster care, like a lack of mandating affirmative conversations with foster youth, and the omission of reproductive health care from the directives in permanency hearings, it’s still possible to have a caseworker who is not hostile to reproductive health; who might, for example, look approvingly on a biological parent discussing birth control with their teen. But when it comes to foster care agencies with a religious mission, she said, “The chances of getting a caseworker from an agency with a religious mandate who is trained in conversations on reproductive health, or supportive of a biological parenting discussing birth control, may be less likely than if the youth were in state run care.”

Wallis points out that for many of these young people, the best outcome when it comes to accessing contraceptive care, and stability more generally, is to stay within their biological family whenever possible. Aside from religious restrictions, for many foster youth the lack of familiarity they have with foster families presents an especially crucial challenge when it comes to reproductive health care; removing them from their homes and relocating them has the potential to remove any connection they had with a trusted family or community member to whom they could go with these questions. And research backs this up—teens feel unsure or uncomfortable when it comes to talking about contraception, for a number of reasons including uncertainty about who can make those decisions for them.

The more nuanced issues of interpersonal relationships between foster youth and their placements present a unique set of challenges—one that a group of advocates in California is trying to ameliorate by pushing for policies.

In 2016, lawyers from NCYL and the law firm Keker, Van Nest & Peters filed a complaint against Promesa Behavioral Health, which operates group homes for foster youth in California, on behalf of the California Planned Parenthood Education Fund and three former foster youth. Their complaint outlined how Promesa “regularly searched the belongings of foster youth for contraceptives, such as condoms, and confiscated any contraceptives found.” It also stated that Promesa “forced foster youth to waive their right to confidential reproductive health care, required foster youth to sign an agreement that they would not engage in sexual activity, and punished them when they sought or received reproductive health services.” It’s worth noting that while Promesa had religious affiliations at its inception, it was not a religiously affiliated organization at the time of the complaint.

Gudeman said that when NCYL brought these issues to the attention of the state, it was immediately “responsive and collaborative.” As a result, the state of California, working with NYCL, implemented new policies that more explicitly outline the ways in which foster youth are entitled to contraceptive care and other reproductive health services, including a state plan to reduce unintended unwanted pregnancy, an all-county letter that details the sexual health rights of youth, and clear and direct guidelines for social workers and caregivers regarding their obligations under federal and state law. These directives include requirements that case managers provide youth with “age-appropriate, medically accurate information,” “ensure personal biases and/or religious beliefs are not imposed upon foster youth,” and that foster parents “facilitate access and transportation to reproductive and sexual health related services.”

“Their right to services is clear. What has been left unwritten historically, though, is exactly what child welfare agencies and foster parents are obligated to do to ensure youth are connected to the contraceptive and reproductive health services they want. That absence of policy allowed for explicit and implicit restrictions to flourish,” said Gudeman. She noted that the directives translated existing law “into clear and concrete guidelines,” meaning “child welfare agencies and foster caregivers now understand exactly what they must, may, and must not do.”

Beyond religious agencies, religious parents acting as individuals may serve to deliberately obstruct contraceptive care. But others are simply confused about how much they are allowed, or obliged, to do. About them, Gudeman said, “Many caregivers actually appreciate this clarity because it gives them permission to act where they may not have been sure they had permission to act before.” She hopes California becomes a model state with these policies: “Clear and concrete guidelines mean there is no room for grey or disparate application.”

Still, there is work to be done. Barbara Facher, a health-care social worker with the Alliance for Children’s Rights in California, which provides free legal services, advocacy, and support for foster youth, said in her experience, L.A. County, where she is based, has good policies. However, she notes, implementing these policies still requires work—”the devil’s in the details,” as she put it—and says the task at hand now is to partner with local agencies to ensure that these policies are becoming realities.

This is where California’s SB 245 comes into play. The law, which was passed earlier this year, goes beyond the policies arising from the Promesa case. It ensures foster youth receive “age-appropriate pregnancy prevention information” and mandates a curriculum for caseworkers and foster care providers that includes issues related to sexual and reproductive health. By mandating age-appropriate reproductive health information and requiring social workers to document how they are providing access to reproductive health care and pregnancy prevention, the law works to ensure the reproductive rights of foster youth are protected, not only in the abstract. The law also mandates training for judges, group home personnel, and foster family agencies in accordance with a statewide curriculum.

A spokesperson for the Alliance for Children’s Rights says that until SB 245 was implemented, laws existed that outlined foster youth’s rights, but it was unclear who was responsible for what. And although she said the penalties for refusing to obey the law are complex, minors who want contraception and can’t get it could reach out to organizations like the Alliance for support.

It is unclear whether efforts like these will be mirrored on the federal level, but the Alliance for Children’s Rights believes SB 245 is a good example of “the continued effort required in order to clarify the responsibility for connecting a young person in foster care to reproductive health services, including pregnancy prevention,” said the spokesperson. She points out that in order for it to be a success not only in theory but in practice, it needs to make “perfectly clear where the responsibility lies for supporting youth in enacting that right.”

Beyond that, its representatives believe in addressing the need for access to birth control holistically. This means concrete strategies and setting clear guidelines for caseworkers and foster parents about providing information about and access to contraceptives, while taking into consideration the many factors that make foster youth more likely to have unintended pregnancies, as well as other issues, like commercial exploitation, self-harm, relationship violence, and substance abuse. Laurie Rubiner, the president and CEO of the Alliance for Children’s Rights, says that young people who experience trauma, abuse, and neglect enter the foster care system with a unique set of vulnerabilities. She told Rewire that every aspect of their health care, including reproductive health care, needs to be addressed while considering this context. She notes that some foster youth may also look at getting pregnant as their chance to start a family of their own and would need support, and that the foster youth they work with also travel through an average of seven placements, which creates an instability that impedes their ability to foster trusted relationships.

“You can legislate a lot of things,” said Facher. But you can’t legislate trusted behavior. … We know that a lot of these kids are not having the right interventions and the right conversations. One of the reasons we always objected to minor consent or notification laws is not everyone has that relationship with a parent. With [foster youth] you take that and you magnify it tenfold.”

Source: https://rewire.news/article/2017/12/20/foster-teens-accessing-birth-control-uphill-battle/

January 1, 2018

For reproductive rights campaigners 2017 felt like the calm before the storm

Posted by laurasmith20200 under Abortion Information | Tags: Abortion, Abortion Rights, reproductive rights |
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The Trump administration has chipped away at women’s access to contraception and other health services but an all-out assault may just be a question of time

Activists protest against the Trump administration and rally for women’s rights during a march to honor International Woman’s Day on 8 March 2017 in Washington DC. — Activists protest against the Trump administration and rally for women’s rights during a march to honor International Woman’s Day on 8 March 2017 in Washington. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

The year 2017 was supposed to be when reproductive health battles simmering in the states boiled over into national policy.

Not only did Republicans retain control of Congress in last year’s election, Donald Trump stocked his administration with people opposed to not only abortion but everything from sex education to insurance coverage for contraception.

But while the administration did make moves that will limit access to abortion and reproductive care, Trump’s first year in office was not the all-out assault public health advocates feared.

“It’s not as though the federal government has been inactive, but there were a lot of distractions,” said Elizabeth Nash, who tracks reproductive rights policy and legislation for the Guttmacher Institute, a progressive thinktank. “They haven’t gotten their anti-abortion agenda on track yet.”

Perhaps the biggest coup for opponents of abortion rights is one that may not pay dividends for several years. Trump successfully nominated Neil Gorsuch to the US supreme court, where his vote could tip future cases in favor of contraception and abortion restrictions.

“Gorsuch has all the makings of an extreme anti-abortion justice,” David Cohen, a Drexel University law professor and a board member of the Abortion Care Network, told the Guardian upon Gorsuch’s confirmation. In his years as a federal appellate judge, Gorsuch ruled in favor of employers with moral objections to providing employee healthcare plans which covered contraception.

Some of those very same employers notched another victory in October, when Trump’s health department rolled back Obama-era rules requiring most insurance policies to cover a range of contraceptive methods. Under Obama, those rules helped millions of women gain access to contraception with no out-of-pocket costs. Now, companies with religious objections will no longer have to provide that coverage.

But other efforts by the administration or Republicans in Congress faltered. A nationwide ban on abortion after 20 weeks passed the House but has yet to be introduced in the Senate, where even anti-abortion advocates doubt they have the votes.

Congress failed to repeal major portions of the Affordable Care Act, which has expanded maternity and contraceptive medicine to millions of women. And two of the Republican senators who helped doom the repeal efforts, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, were partly motivated by the fact that the repeal would have cut federal funding for Planned Parenthood. The nation’s largest reproductive healthcare provider receives more than $500m a year as reimbursement for treatments it provides to hundreds of thousands of women insured by Medicaid.

Trump’s inauguration inspired the largest protest ever on US soil, whose themes included the protection of reproductive rights. Next steps after the Women’s March have seen a backlash against states which aggressively limit abortion and reproductive rights.

“We’ve seen real progress happening on abortion and reproductive health access,” Nash said. “Granted, these are states where you’d think, ‘Oh, right, of course.’ But there’s something new happening there. There are some legislators who are listening, responding to the overwhelming number of restrictions we’ve been seeing.”

New York, Oregon, Delaware and Illinois all passed laws to expand insurance coverage for abortion or guarantee the right to abortion in the event it is ever rolled back at the federal level. And as the Trump administration took aim at the Obamacare provision of contraception, several states, including Maine, Massachusetts and Nevada, passed laws to make contraception easier for women to obtain.

Still, Nash is expecting an onslaught of victories for reproductive rights foes.

Many states have passed new laws to ban specific methods of abortion that will be fought in federal court in the coming year.

The Trump administration has already cut more than $213m invested in teenage pregnancy prevention under Obama and is incentivizing programs that focus on abstinence in its place. The health department is weighing a plan to allow individual states to kick Planned Parenthood out of Medicaid; its decision could deal the group a serious blow.

“I fear that’s coming,” said Nash. “They have too many people in place now for that not to be coming … We’re just waiting for these other shoes to drop.”

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/30/for-reproductive-rights-campaigners-2017-felt-like-the-calm-before-the-storm

December 31, 2017

Catholic Hospital Pressured Women to Bury Their Fetuses—Then Pence Made It Law

Posted by laurasmith20200 under Abortion Information | Tags: Abortion, Abortion Rights, reproductive rights |
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While many find comfort in fetal burial programs, imposing these practices on everyone who loses or ends a pregnancy can cause profound shame and distress, a Rewire investigation found.

Public documents and interviews obtained by *Rewire* reveal that St. Joseph Regional Medical Center—a Catholic hospital that made headlines in 2013 for its role in the Purvi Patel case—pressed its fetal burial program on patients, a coercive approach to pregnancy loss to which Mike Pence sought to give the blessing of law.
Terry Blas / Rewire

Tethered to an IV, naked under her hospital gown, Kate Marshall felt trapped as the chaplain approached her bed. It was 2015, and Marshall was awaiting surgery at St. Joseph Regional Medical Center in Indiana after losing a much-wanted pregnancy. She had not asked to speak with a chaplain, but the man had nonetheless entered her room and then pressed her to sign a consent form that would allow the Catholic hospital to bury her 11-week fetus in a cemetery plot.

Marshall, a University of Notre Dame English professor who wanted nothing more than to have a baby, planned to send the fetal remains for testing, hoping to understand what had caused her miscarriage and thus avoid having another. She also did not want her fetus buried in a grave as if it were a full-grown person.

But the chaplain scorned her decision, Marshall told Rewire in an interview.

Gutted by the sudden loss of her pregnancy, and conscious every moment of the dead fetus that was still inside her body, Marshall asked him to leave five times before he finally did, according to a written complaint she filed with regulators the next day.

Then the second chaplain entered her room.

More aggressive than the first, she refused to leave, and accused Marshall of “sending my baby’s remains into a medical slush pile,” Marshall wrote in her complaint.

Kate’s sister watched the chaplains bring Kate to tears.

“They were sending this woman into surgery and she was, I mean she was shaking and crying,” Kelly Marshall told Rewire in an interview. “I felt like I let her down by not blocking them at the door.”

At the time, the hospital’s In God’s Arms program—which invites families who lose pregnancies before 20 weeks to gather for graveside memorial ceremonies—was optional, at least in theory. But if Vice President Mike Pence had his way, patients like Marshall would not have a choice about whether their miscarried fetuses are treated like dead people.

Legislation Pence signed as Indiana governor last year required all fetal remains to be cremated or buried, rather than disposed of as medical waste, as they have been in the United States for much of the last century. Based on religious beliefs about fetal “personhood,” the measure’s sole purpose was, in Pence’s words, to “ensure the dignified final treatment of the unborn.”

In a perverse twist, until recently, the law applied only to miscarriages, although it’s unclear to what extent it was enforced. That’s because the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Indiana successfully halted parts of the law in federal court last year, but did not initially challenge the miscarriage requirements. Then, this fall, U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Walton Pratt blocked both the miscarriage and abortion requirements for pre-viable fetuses, without defining viability. The state has vowed to appeal her decision to strike down those and other provisions of the law.

The law’s melding of religion and public policy has defined the legacy of Pence, who now plays a crucial role in steering such policy at the national level.

While many find comfort in fetal burial programs, imposing these practices on everyone who loses or ends a pregnancy can cause profound shame and distress, a Rewire investigation found. Indeed, even before Pence signed the legislation, St. Joseph had shown just how damaging this approach can be.

Public documents and interviews obtained by Rewire reveal that St. Joseph—a Catholic hospital that made headlines in 2013 for its role in the Purvi Patel case—pressed its fetal burial program on patients, a coercive approach to pregnancy loss to which Pence sought to give the blessing of law.

“Even If Other People Don’t Respect Life, We Feel Like We Need To”

In March, Rewire attended an In God’s Arms ceremony at Southlawn Cemetery in South Bend, Indiana, where we spoke with the program’s coordinator, Linda DeHahn—the second chaplain to enter Marshall’s room. DeHahn expressed horror at how she said fetal remains were treated before the In God’s Arms program began in 2006.

“The babies got handled the same way tissues from surgery get handled: They go to the lab and they go out for incineration, basically,” DeHahn told Rewire, her face registering her distress. “As a Catholic facility and organization we just felt that didn’t reflect who we were. And even if other people don’t respect life, we feel like we need to.”

Kate Marshall felt morally condemned by DeHahn and the other chaplain.

“In that moment there’s all kinds of conclusions you can draw, like somehow it’s your fault that you’ve lost this kid; you weren’t caring enough,” Marshall told Rewire. “I was being made to feel like I was the unfeeling, uncaring party in that transaction—that if this was a life that I valued I would be participating in that program, and that’s just none of their business. And it doesn’t matter, either, but in my particular case it was a life whose possibility I had cherished.”

The day after her surgery, Marshall fired off complaints to regulatory agencies.

“The abuses of these clergy members significantly exacerbated what already was a very stressful and emotionally devastating experience,” Marshall wrote in her complaint. “I am aware that the ‘In God’s Arms’ program can be helpful to many patients, but in this case it was invasive and damaging.”

The In God’s Arms plot in South Bend, Indiana (Amy Littlefield and Marc Faletti / Rewire)

Ultimately, Marshall’s fetal remains did get sent for testing. She went on to deliver her baby, Evelyn, the following year.

The Indiana State Department of Health investigated her complaint at the direction of the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, records show. In interviews with investigators, chaplains confirmed that Marshall repeatedly declined the In God’s Arms program, although the first chaplain noted that he asked for permission to enter her room. DeHahn acknowledged to investigators that she approached Marshall even after being told that she didn’t want to see a chaplain, but denied making the “medical slush pile” comment, saying she told Marshall, “Let me be clear that you want the lab to do what they usually do with tissue.”

In a follow-up interview with Rewire in October, DeHahn confirmed her role in the case and said she has retired from her full-time position at the hospital. She referred questions to spokespeople for St. Joseph—which, shortly after Marshall’s visit, rebranded itself as Mishawaka Medical Center, under the umbrella of St. Joseph Health System.

“In God’s Arms is an optional program that offers comfort to families who experience an early pregnancy loss,” Jessica Shirley, public relations manager for St. Joseph Health System, wrote in an emailed statement. “For parents who choose not to participate in the program, the hospital honors these lives privately.”

St. Joseph has embraced anti-choice ideology in more overt ways. Financial records show the hospital’s foundation has donated about $100,000 annually in recent years to Women’s Care Center, a chain of crisis pregnancy centers—anti-choice fake clinics that often use disinformation to deter people from abortion. Under Pence, Women’s Care Center benefited from millions in public funding intended for poor families.

The hospital is also known for treating Purvi Patel, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for charges including feticide in 2015 after delivering what she said was a stillborn fetus at home; her convictions were later vacated. The St. Joseph doctor who called the police on Patel belonged to an anti-choice medical association. Prosecutors also relied on testimony from hospital employees about Patel’s “flat affect” and lack of apparent distress.

In Marshall’s case, investigators ultimately found St. Joseph failed to follow its own policy affording patients the right to choose who visits them and to withdraw consent to such visits at any time. But the failure was not enough to threaten the hospital’s Medicare funding, records show. In a plan of correction responding to the findings, the hospital outlined procedures for documenting when patients decline a chaplain’s visit, and said it had revised its fetal remains consent form to allow chaplains to sign off if a patient declines to do so. St. Joseph Health System did not respond to a detailed list of questions from Rewire, including whether chaplains can authorize burial even if a patient opts out of the program.

“The In God’s Arms program is a widely respected and beloved service at St. Joseph’s Health System [sic] and what you described is not consistent with their approach to offering spiritual care,” Eve Pidgeon, a spokesperson for St. Joseph’s parent system, Trinity Health, said in a written statement to Rewire.

Here’s where Mike Pence enters the picture.

In their response to Marshall’s complaint, hospital officials noted they were “mindful of the requirements” of a law Pence signed in 2014 requiring health-care facilities to inform patients of their right to determine the final disposition of miscarried fetuses. Championed by the anti-choice Thomas More Society, the measure was part of an agenda to advance fetal “personhood” that would come to full flower in Indiana in 2016, with the passage of a bill known as HB 1337.

Among the most sweeping anti-choice measures ever passed in the United States, HB 1337 required burial or cremation of all fetal remains, regardless of whether the pregnancy ended in miscarriage or abortion.

In addition to the fetal burial requirement, the law banned abortions sought because of fetal disability, race, or sex, and it required patients to undergo an ultrasound 18 hours before an abortion, among other medically unnecessary restrictions.

It was so extreme that even some anti-choice Indiana lawmakers denounced it.

But the fact that Pence supported such draconian legislation should hardly come as a surprise. During his 12-year stint in Congress, he was an early leader of the Republican crusade to defund Planned Parenthood, a cause for which he threatened to shut down the federal government in 2011. Among the anti-choice bills he backed was one to let Catholic hospitals deny emergency abortions, even if patients would die without them. During his subsequent four years as Indiana governor, he signed every anti-choice bill to cross his desk—numbering at least eight. His best-known overreach was a so-called religious freedom law to sanction discrimination against LGBTQ people, which sparked a national outcry.

When the Indiana ACLU challenged HB 1337 on behalf of Planned Parenthood, it targeted the fetal burial requirements as they applied to abortion, which left the miscarriage requirements intact when a federal judge stopped sections of the law just before it took effect last summer. Then, this fall, the judge blocked the burial provisions for both miscarried and aborted fetuses pre-viability. Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill has vowed to appeal.

The law was part of the anti-choice movement’s growing fixation on fetal remains.

In 2015, the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) released deceptively edited videos to falsely claim Planned Parenthood profits from fetal tissue. In response, the anti-choice behemoth Americans United for Life unveiled an updated model bill requiring “dignified final disposition” of fetal remains. Such measures gained traction in the aftermath of the CMP videos, particularly after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down other avenues of restricting access to abortion care. Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas all passed versions of fetal burial legislation.

But Indiana’s version represented an extreme paradigm shift, Tanya Marsh, a Wake Forest University School of Law professor who studies funeral law, told Rewire.

“What Indiana did was say … ‘We’re going to reclassify all fetal remains after the moment of conception as human remains, and we’re going to put them under the jurisdiction of the funeral industry,’” Marsh said.

Kate Marshall, by then pregnant with Evelyn, watched the bill’s passage with dread; it felt, she said, as if the state was giving its approval to the mistreatment she had experienced at St. Joseph.

Even before it came into force, the law had a chilling effect on pregnant people in Indiana, as the story of Ali Brown in our companion piece shows.

Kate Marshall (Jenn Stanley / Rewire)

“We Felt Like We Were Being Judged”

Programs like In God’s Arms are not unique to Indiana, nor is the tendency of a growing number of Catholic hospitals to impose religion on patients.

Chrissy Helton, for example, told Rewire she went to a Catholic hospital in Edgewood, Kentucky, in 2001, still reeling from the news of her miscarriage and expecting surgery to remove the remains. But the hospital induced labor without giving Helton another option. Helton said she felt pressured to hold the fetus, which staff called a “baby,” and have portraits taken and a blessing administered; she said staff told her that she wouldn’t be able to do these things later, and that she might regret it if she refused. Finally, they removed the fetus from her hospital room and said they would bury it in a cemetery plot, requesting a donation for the purpose.

“I felt very pressured into everything that they threw out there on the table,” Helton told Rewire. “Then, later, realizing what had happened—that if I chose not to hold it, if I chose not [to take] the pictures, it didn’t make me less of a person, it didn’t make me less of a mother later on.”

A spokesperson for St. Elizabeth Healthcare said he could not comment on specific cases, but confirmed the hospital has a fetal burial program.

“We give the mothers the option: They can release their baby to a funeral home of their choice, they can receive the baby for a private burial, and if they refuse, which unfortunately it does happen sometimes … we have a site at St. Mary’s Cemetery here in northern Kentucky … and we do a ceremonial service … one time each year,” spokesperson Guy Karrick told Rewire. “It’s up to them if they want to be a part of it or not; it’s not coerced on anyone.”

Catholic hospitals control one in six acute-care beds nationwide; in Indiana, that number is about one in four. While reaping billions in public funding, these hospitals also generally restrict access to basic services, including abortion, sterilization, contraception, gender-affirming surgery, fertility treatments, and end-of-life care, under directives from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The consequences for patients can be life threatening: The ACLU in 2015 sued St. Joseph’s parent company, Trinity Health, for a “repeated and systematic failure” to provide emergency abortions to people suffering pregnancy complications. Another ACLU lawsuit exposed how a Trinity hospital in Michigan sent a patient in excruciating pain home twice while she was miscarrying. (Both lawsuits were dismissed.) And thanks to the Trump/Pence administration and Supreme Court, these hospitals are poised to have broad new leeway to infringe on the rights of patients and employees.

But even secular hospitals have adopted practices that may unintentionally shame patients who don’t wish to bury or cremate their fetuses. In response to Pence’s 2014 miscarriage law, Indiana University Health, a leading academic medical center, adopted a consent form for pregnancy losses before 20 weeks that informs patients of their “right to choose to have a private cremation or burial service, or have the hospital arrange for common cremation for the baby’s body or miscarriage remains,” with a burial service offered for the ashes every six months.

While some of these offerings are longstanding, laws like the one Pence signed last year could make them compulsory, imposing civil penalties if health-care facilities fail to ensure burial or cremation. If patients choose a disposition option other than what the hospital typically uses, they are legally responsible for the cost. While the Indiana ACLU argued the law places no limitations on patients who choose to take custody of their remains, critics worried it was vague enough to apply to all miscarriages, even those that happened at home. Around the time of the law’s passage, DeHahn, the St. Joseph chaplain, said she received calls from surrounding hospitals who were interested in taking part in the In God’s Arms program.

“A Baby Who Deserved a Mother Better Than You”

After she suffered a miscarriage that required surgery at St. Joseph in 2012, Caroline and her husband carefully considered whether to participate in the In God’s Arms program. Caroline is Protestant and her husband, Matthew, is a devout Catholic. Rewire is withholding their real names at their request.

Sitting behind her desk in the South Bend area during an interview with Rewire, Caroline ticked off on her fingers the number of hours her children spend in religious activities: Catholic school, three to four religious services a week, Sunday school, youth group, church music classes. The couple waited for marriage to have sex; they do not use contraception, because, Caroline said, “We welcome children.”

On the ultrasound, her fetus had looked like a “sac collapsing on itself,” Caroline told Rewire. Neither she nor her husband felt attached to the fetus the way they did to their three children. They didn’t want to dwell on the loss.

But after the couple declined the In God’s Arms program, the St. Joseph chaplain, whose name Caroline does not remember, insisted on going through a packet of information. When they declined again, the chaplain pushed back. Had she mentioned that the program was free? She had.

Then came a series of forms, including one to allow St. Joseph to “properly care for the remains,” as Caroline recalled the chaplain describing it. Her words seemed to carry an implicit rebuke.

“The way it sounded to me as the patient was, since you clearly do not believe that you lost a child, since you do not want to participate in acknowledging this child’s death, you must think of this as medical waste, and only we will be responsible for properly caring for your child,” Caroline said.

Caroline’s husband, Matthew, recalled the chaplain emphasizing that if they opted out of the program, the fetus would be treated as medical debris. Rather than convince him, this approach clashed with the religious traditions he knew.

“If you want to talk to a minister or a priest or counseling, you invite them or you go to them,” Matthew told Rewire. “They don’t just come barging in [like] it’s their responsibility to get involved in your life and tell you what you’re feeling or supposed to be.”

After Caroline signed the paperwork allowing the hospital to bury her fetus, she said, the chaplain delivered what felt like a final insult, inquiring, “And how far along were you, may I ask?”

Caroline felt as if her religious beliefs had been placed on trial. Like Kate Marshall, she looked for an outlet, which she found by submitting an anonymous monologue to a local storytelling production.

“You do not recognize a child of God, a baby who deserves burial, a baby who deserves to be mourned just like any other person who has died,” Caroline wrote, describing the chaplain’s unspoken reproach. “A baby who deserved a mother better than you.”

This rigid view of pregnancy loss was echoed by Sister Laureen Painter, a St. Joseph Health System official who helped start the In God’s Arms program. Speaking to Rewire after the ceremony in March, Painter praised what she sees as an increasing reverence for fetal life in society.

“I think that as time has gone on, and as more and more people … understand that [at] that moment of conception, that life begins so quickly … I think that’s taken it more to the realization that you can’t just throw babies away,” she said.

Painter welcomed what she saw as the triumph of these religious beliefs becoming enshrined as the law of the land.

“Faith has dictated the law,” she said.

“The Path Through Grief and Loss Is a Very Personal One”

On the Sunday of the In God’s Arms ceremony, the mourners huddled under a green awning at the back of the cemetery. They sat on metal folding chairs, facing a sleek, black memorial, grasping white carnations to lay on the grave at the appointed time. Some unfurled umbrellas and opted to stand. Over the patter of rain, Chaplain Linda DeHahn welcomed them.

“To lose someone to death, at any age, is a tragedy,” she said. A man, dressed in black, wiped his eyes and kissed his partner on the top of her head.

Jennifer Jones holds prints of the hands and feet of her stillborn son, Levi. (Amy Littlefield / Rewire)

Among those who have found comfort in these rituals is Jennifer Jones. In 2009, Jones carried twin boys until 29 weeks, when one was stillborn, and the other born prematurely by cesarean section. Amid a blur of extremes—grief over her loss and joy at her son’s birth—Jones said a nurse at the secular Memorial Hospital of South Bend suggested she might want to think about a funeral home. As a matter of policy, nurses at the hospital cannot recommend a specific facility; to “remain unbiased,” they allow patients to make their own decisions, a spokesperson told Rewire.

It hadn’t occurred to Jones that she would have to think about her stillborn son Levi’s remains, but once the nurse mentioned it, Jones knew what she wanted.

She had attended an In God’s Arms ceremony with a friend who was treated for an ectopic pregnancy at St. Joseph, and felt comforted by the idea of burying Levi’s remains in that plot with the remains of other people’s lost pregnancies.

“He had always been right next to his brother,” Jones told Rewire in an interview. “I didn’t want him to be alone.”

While the In God’s Arms program is intended for earlier losses, Kerry Palmer, co-owner of Palmer Funeral Homes, assured Jones that he would take care of Levi. Palmer, whose business helped establish the In God’s Arms program, declined to comment at length for this article.

“My only comment is that we at Palmer, we help families through the loss of a baby at no charge,” Palmer told Rewire.

At the ceremony less than two weeks after her delivery, Jones, who is now training to become a counselor, felt bolstered by a sense of commonality with the other women there. It didn’t matter to her that she had been much further along in her pregnancy when she lost Levi.

“If it’s a pregnancy that you have tried for and you’ve given your body up for and you’re changing your lifestyle, you make sacrifices and you are injecting that idea with so much possibility of the future and so much hope,” Jones said. “I think that, to me, is what I could see in these other women’s eyes, was the loss of those hopes.”

Jones had a first-trimester miscarriage just before getting pregnant with her twins. But she hadn’t grown attached to that pregnancy in the same way. If anyone had tried to push her toward the fetal burial program then, she would have been furious, she said.

“I’m glad I had this resource when I needed it but I’m also really, really glad I wasn’t pressured into responding any ‘appropriate’ way for the other occasion,” Jones said. “The path through grief and loss is a very personal one and it needs to be handled that way.”

Source: https://rewire.news/article/2017/11/02/catholic-hospital-pressured-women-bury-fetuses-pence-made-law/

December 30, 2017

Six photos that show the intensity of abortion clinic protests

Posted by laurasmith20200 under Abortion Information | Tags: Abortion, Abortion Rights, reproductive rights |
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Antiabortion protesters outside a clinic in Raleigh, N.C. (Wendi Kent)

For nearly two years, Wendi Kent, an abortion-rights activist and photojournalist based in Madison, Wis., has been documenting antiabortion protesters at some of the most targeted clinics in the country.

Her “Faces of the Fight” project was inspired by a “Wanted”-style poster created by an antiabortion group two years ago, which included the faces of an abortion provider, a clinic escort and a journalist Kent knows. So she decided to focus her lens on the protesters — some of whom pray quietly outside clinics or hand out religious literature, others who shout threats at the patients who walk past.

Kent, 35, says she wanted to show that these kind of confrontations are “really happening” and not just on hot-button days like the Roe v. Wade ruling anniversary. “This happens every day, all over the country,” Kent says. “This harassment doesn’t happen anywhere else, to anyone else. This only happens at abortion clinics, to women.”

She also hopes the protesters themselves might see her images. “I honestly believe that they don’t see themselves the way that everyone else does,” Kent says. “A lot of them follow my work after I meet them, and they’re often really shocked when they see themselves.”

Each image, she says, reveals something important about the nature of these confrontations and the people involved on both sides.

Here are five examples:

(Wendi Kent)

The man standing on the left was the first protester Kent photographed, she said, outside the Family Planning Associates clinic in Chicago. In this photograph, he stands close to a clinic escort — someone who helps safely usher clients in and out of the clinic — in the parking lot outside the building.

“He is holding this piece of paper — it says ‘John 3:16’ on it — he’s holding that in front of her face,” Kent says. “And she is holding the sign that the escorts show the cars that pull up, which says, ‘DON’T STOP — they’re not with us,’ ” warning patients about protesters who might approach them.

Federal law prohibits the protesters from blocking a clinic’s entry or exit, Kent says, “so she is looking down at the ground, at his feet and at the property line, to make sure that he doesn’t cross that line.”

(Wendi Kent)

Outside the Affiliated Medical Services clinic in Milwaukee, Wis., two clinic escorts in red vests walk past a row of praying protesters. Kent says protesters frequently obtain the same color vests that the escorts wear, in order to confuse clients when they arrive — so escorts are often forced to rotate the color of their vests to help distinguish themselves.

In this photo, Kent says, the escorts’ vests are also emblazoned with rainbows. “The escorts told me that the reason they added the rainbows was because they’d had protesters showing up in identical red vests.” At the time this photo was taken, she said, the tactic seemed to have worked; the protesters didn’t want to add rainbows — a common symbol associated with gay pride and gay rights — to their own vests.

(Wendi Kent)

The woman in this photo is a regular protester at the Affiliated Medical Services clinic: “She’s very passive, she’s polite and she’s nice,” Kent says. “There are plenty of protesters who don’t attack women, and I show that. I think it’s important.”

There is nuance within the antiabortion movement, Kent says, and many different kinds of protesters. Those who urge forgiveness for women who have sought abortions tend to be quiet and prayerful in their protest; others are more vocal and hostile, carrying signs with graphic images; and some are aggressive, even physically threatening.

(Wendi Kent)

The man on the left — he introduced himself as Don — drove eight hours from Virginia to protest outside the Metropolitan Medical Associates clinic in New Jersey. He was especially aggressive, Kent says. Here, Don confronts a man who had accompanied his partner to the clinic.

“Don started yelling at him: ‘Hey Dad, hey Dad, don’t go off without your baby . . . I can help you and your wife have this baby, sir.’ ” The man was shaken and angry, Kent recalls. “He was immediately like, ‘[expletive] you, you don’t know me, you don’t know what I’m going through.’ “

After the confrontation outside, Kent learned that the man and his partner had sought an abortion because their baby had developed without a spine and would not survive.

(Wendi Kent)

This photo, taken outside the same clinic in New Jersey, shows Don confronting another visitor to the clinic as he stands outside the established “buffer zone.” The scene demonstrates how these protected spaces don’t do much to prevent aggressive confrontation, Kent says.

“At this clinic, there’s a buffer zone that extends eight feet around the door. But you can see how close he can still get to the patient,” she said. “The buffer zones in every town are different, and the fights for them are different, and those fights are ongoing.”

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/01/22/six-photos-that-show-the-intensity-of-abortion-clinic-protests/?utm_campaign=FB&utm_medium=urlshortener&utm_source=nar.al&utm_term=.6a7c6ed6eb6c

December 29, 2017

At Home and Abroad, Trump Moves To Broaden Abortion Fight

Posted by laurasmith20200 under Abortion Information | Tags: Abortion, Abortion Rights, reproductive rights |
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As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump vowed to restrict access to abortion. As president, he’s started doing just that – and more, pursuing a far-reaching strategy to reshape the federal government’s position on reproductive rights.

Some of Trump’s actions so far are in line with those of his Republican predecessors: he has nominated federal judges who oppose abortion, and reinstated a Reagan-era policy that withholds funding from abortion providers overseas.

But an examination of Trump’s actions on abortion during his first year in office shows the beginning of a broader agenda at home and abroad. His administration has proposed cuts or eliminated funding for major family planning programs, and filled key government posts with officials opposed not just to abortion, but contraception and sex outside of heterosexual marriage. The administration has taken some steps with little warning or attention, like the decision this summer to cut off funding for family planning research grants, citing “changes in program priorities.”

“There’s certainly been other anti-abortion presidencies and administrations, and so that’s not what’s new here,” said Heather Boonstra, director of public policy at the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health and rights group that had some of its federal funding cut this summer. “What’s new is just the expansiveness, and the way that the attacks are coming at so many different directions.”

The Trump administration’s actions come at an especially polarized political moment. As Congress enters a midterm election year and Republicans fight to maintain narrow majorities in both the House and Senate, opposition to abortion has become a key point for the party — and Trump’s support has helped motivate anti-abortion advocates and supporters alike.

“It’s just very encouraging for people to know that we’ve got a president who is standing with us and fighting with us,” said Carol Tobias, president of the National Right to Life Committee, the nation’s oldest and largest anti-abortion organization. She added: “The administration is taking every opportunity they can — through policy, executive orders, resolutions — to promote a respect for human life, and they are doing what they can under the current law to protect unborn babies.”

Tobias and other advocates say that the Trump administration has helped take the fight against abortion to the federal level, after years of battling mainly in state legislatures.

Since the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade determined that women have a right to an abortion, anti-abortion groups have worked to chip away at abortion access. Their strategy, these groups have said, has been to make abortion largely inaccessible state-by-state, while creating legal precedents that might one day help overturn Roe.

The advocates have had considerable success. In the last two decades, more than 900 anti-abortion measures were passed at the state level, according to NARAL Pro-Choice America, an advocacy group that tracks legislation. Today, 43 states prohibit abortions after a specified point in a woman’s pregnancy, 27 states require women to wait a certain amount of time before seeking the procedure, and 18 mandate that women attend counseling before receiving an abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

Meanwhile in the White House, previous presidents who opposed abortion lent their support to the cause with a few major policies. President Ronald Reagan, for example, introduced the Mexico City policy, which bans overseas groups that receive U.S. aid from providing abortions or information about the procedure. Democratic presidents rolled the policy back, and Republican presidents reinstated it.

Trump didn’t just reinstate the Mexico City policy. On his third day as president, he expanded the policy in a memorandum, applying the restrictions beyond U.S. family planning funds to all U.S. global health assistance, which totals $10 billion.

The Trump administration also cut funding for the United Nations Population Fund, which supports reproductive and maternal health programs in more than 150 countries, as other past Republican presidents have done. But then it went a step further, proposing to sever all funding for international family planning for the upcoming fiscal year — the first attempt by a sitting president to completely do away with those programs, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

President Trump’s proposed budget for 2018 zeroes out the family planning funding, which provides women in developing countries with contraceptive services and supplies to avoid unintended pregnancies and unsafe abortions. In 2017, this spending totaled $607.5 million.

While much of the action so far has come from the White House, going forward, advocates on both sides of the issue expect the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to play a large role. The agency has authority over how much states receive in funding for family planning, the Medicaid program, and key government offices, including the Administration of Children and Families.

In September, HHS released a draft strategic plan outlining the department’s goals through 2022. In a change from the Obama administration, that document introduced a different definition of life, stating that its programs would be dedicated to “serving and protecting Americans at every stage of life, beginning at conception.”

Abortion-rights advocates are bracing for what they expect will be significant changes to HHS’s Title X program, which provides grants for family planning and preventive health services, such as pregnancy and contraceptive counseling, testing for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, and cancer screenings.

Last year, Title X-funded health providers spent more than $286 million serving more than four million Americans seeking family planning services. Most were young, low-income women, many of whom relied on these clinics as their sole source of care, according to the program’s 2016 annual report.

Under Trump, the program is overseen by Teresa Manning, once a lobbyist for the National Right to Life Committee, who has said she opposes federal involvement in family planning. In 2003, at a panel on the future of the anti-abortion movement, she said, “Family planning is something that occurs between a husband and a wife and God, and it doesn’t really involve the federal government,” and referred to abortion as a “legalized crime.” Manning has also said that birth control “doesn’t work,” and wrote that making the morning-after pill available over the counter was “immoral, since the pill “can act to destroy the human life already conceived.”

Manning’s office has yet to announce the terms for 2018 Title X grants, which will set the year’s requirements for providers seeking family planning funds.

HHS officials did not return multiple calls and emails seeking a comment for this story.

“If you get a real ideologue who feels extremely strongly about the ills of family planning … they can really disrupt and destroy the program, even if the program did not get a funding cut,” said Duff Gillespie, a professor of population, family and reproductive health at Johns Hopkins University. “And those funds will be reallocated to something else. So, it’s not a funding issue per say. It’s strictly an ideological issue.”

Over the past year, the Trump administration has chosen some lesser-known targets, which have so far received little public attention. Starting this summer, it informed at least two groups researching family planning that they would no longer receive federal funding.

The University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) learned in July that its three-year grant, issued in 2016, would end two years early. That grant had focused on counseling women on the contraceptive methods most aligned with their values and personal preferences, as opposed to the preferences of a specific clinic or provider. In total, the university lost $800,000 in funding. The letter, signed by Manning and obtained by FRONTLINE, cited “changes in program priorities.”

“That was certainly a surprise to us, and quite frankly, devastating to hear that whether women’s needs are being met in a contraceptive counseling encounter is not a priority of the federal government,” said Christine Dehlendorf, a family physician and associate professor at UCSF’s School of Medicine.

The Guttmacher Institute received notice, dated the same day, that its five-year grant to examine the impact of publicly funded family planning had been cut two years early — a loss of $800,000, according to Kinsey Hasstedt, a senior policy manager at the organization. Hasstedt said the institute had applied for and received that funding consistently since 1994, under both Republican and Democratic presidents.

Also this summer, HHS’ Office of Adolescent Health cut funding for its Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, terminating more than 80 five-year grants two years early. Created by Congress in 2010, the initiative aimed to reduce teen pregnancies through “evidence-based programs.”

The teen birth rate has declined steadily since 2008, dropping to its lowest level in nearly 70 years in 2014, according to federal data.

HHS defended the cuts, saying the programs were not as successful as the Obama administration claimed. “The very weak evidence of positive impact of these programs stands in stark contrast to the promised results, jeopardizing the youth who were served, while also proving to be a poor use of more than $800 million in taxpayer dollars,” it said in an emailed statement to CNN in August.

The cuts came after the appointment of Valerie Huber as chief of staff for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Health, which administers the Office of Adolescent Health. Huber spent three years managing Ohio’s abstinence education program, then went on to lead Ascend, a national abstinence education group.

In November, the Office of Adolescent Health, together with the Administration for Children and Families, announced a $10 million project to research teen pregnancy prevention and “sexual risk avoidance” programs, which aim to persuade teens to abstain from sex.

There are also proposed plans to fund a sexual risk avoidance education program that “teaches participants how to voluntarily refrain from non-marital sexual activity” and “teach the benefits associated with self-regulation,” as well as “healthy relationships, goal setting, and resisting sexual coercion … without normalizing teen sexual activity,” according to a document issued by the department in October.

“We’re starting to see a kind of resurgence of this abstinence-only mantra,” said Boostra of the Guttmacher Institute. “And in the end, it ignores those young people who are already sexually active.”

She cited a federal study of nearly 50 years’ worth of data, which found that almost all Americans had sex prior to marriage. “It’s just really out of touch with reality, and therefore doesn’t prepare young people for their sexual lives,” she added.

The administration’s views have materialized in some unexpected places. In September, the director of HHS’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, E. Scott Lloyd, a Trump appointee who opposes abortion, tried to prevent an unaccompanied immigrant teen in federal custody from terminating her pregnancy. The ACLU intervened on behalf of the 17-year-old girl, identified only as “Jane Doe,” and won. The girl ultimately had an abortion.

Lloyd retains authority over unaccompanied immigrant minors who are pregnant, and may have intervened in other cases, according to The Washington Post. In emails discovered during the ACLU lawsuit, Lloyd asked for and received detailed updates on the cases of pregnant girls in federal custody, including whether they had asked to have an abortion.

“Obviously there is a pro-life ideology in the Department of Health and Human Services within the administration,” said Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, the nation’s largest youth anti-abortion organization, with more than 1,000 groups on campuses across the country. “They’re working diligently to try to reverse some of the things that happened during the last eight years of the Obama administration.”

The Trump White House has also backed anti-abortion legislation in Congress.

In March, Vice President Mike Pence cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to revoke an Obama-era rule that prohibited states from defunding health care providers because they provide abortions. Trump later signed the measure. And in October, after the House passed a bill banning abortion after 20 weeks, the White House issued a statementsaying it “applauds the House of Representatives for continuing its efforts to secure critical pro-life protections” — and that Trump would sign the bill if it passed.

For abortion opponents, the biggest hurdle now is the Senate. “The administration has picked up the tab in a lot of areas where Congress hasn’t been able to make gains,” said Mallory Quigley, a spokesperson for the Susan B. Anthony List, which supports anti-abortion candidates. Quigley said her group is focused on helping elect anti-abortion candidates in the 2018 midterms so that Trump will have more legislation to sign.

Abortion supporters say the full impact of the changes has yet to be felt — and fear the worst is yet to come. “Up until now, they’ve been dismantling and repealing and trying to reshape,” Boostra said about the administration. “But now, they’re starting to lay out where they want those monies to go and what they would like to do.”

Source: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/at-home-and-abroad-trump-moves-to-broaden-abortion-fight/

December 28, 2017

The White House Thinks Birth Control & Abortion Are The Same — Here’s Why That’s Dangerous

Posted by laurasmith20200 under Abortion Information | Tags: Abortion, Abortion Rights, reproductive rights |
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Kevin Hagen/Getty Images News/Getty Images

In October, the Trump administration rolled back Obama-era rules requiring most employers to provide contraception coverage. As it turns out, this is not the only controversial move it has made in regards to birth control. A recent report by Vox found that the White House is essentially conflating birth control with abortion when communicating with constituents, hinting at how the administration is approaching access to reproductive health care.

As Vox reported, some Americans who sent the Trump administration emails opposing the roll back of the contraception mandate have received responses that discuss abortion instead. The responses lay out why the administration believes that health care organizations should not receive federal funding if they perform abortion services, and some of them don’t even mention contraception.

For example, Vox cited that case of Charissa, an alias for a woman who sent an email to the Trump administration with a direct request regarding birth control costs. Charissa told Vox that her email read: “I demand you keep birth control copay free … Why? Because it’s absolutely critical to women’s health, equality and empowerment.”

In response, she received a lengthy email about the administration’s thoughts on abortion. “Thank you for taking the time to express your views regarding abortion,” the message said. “The right to life is fundamental and universal. As your President, I am dedicated to protecting the lives of every American, including the unborn. As I have made clear, organizations like Planned Parenthood should not receive Federal funding if they perform abortions … ”

The administration’s response to Charissa (and others who wrote similar emails and received similar responses) unfortunately aligns with its history of providing skewed information about contraception.

For example, according to Teen Vogue, leading officials at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have a reputation for promoting “junk science” regarding contraception safety and contraception’s disproven linkages to abortion.

Indeed, current HHS special assistant Matthew Bowman once wrote a scathing condemnation of the employer contraception mandate in a comment on a Christian legal theory blog in 2012. Bowman indicated that employers who provide insurance coverage for contraception “kill embryos and bow to the altar of fruitless intercourse.” Vox also reported that, in 2011, Bowman wrote an article in Town Hall claiming that the contraception mandate included coverage for “several drugs or devices that cause the demise of an already conceived but not yet implanted human embryo, such as certain intrauterine devices (IUDs).” Bowman also referred to the mandate as the “the HHS abortifacient [abortion-causing] mandate.”

Bowman’s logic is misguided, as Vox reported that daily birth control methods, emergency contraception, and IUDs all primarily work by inhibiting fertilization and/or ovulation — not by stopping implantation of a fertilized egg. An exception to this could be when a woman has a copper IUD inserted after intercourse, which may prevent implantation, but it is exceedingly rare. And, as the outlet reported, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists is clear about the fact that contraception is not linked to abortion, saying, “FDA-approved contraceptive methods are not abortifacients.”

White House health care policy adviser Katy Talento also once erroneously claimed in an article she wrote in 2015 for The Federalist that using contraception make it less likely that women will be able to conceive a child. As Talento wrote, “the longer you stay on the pill, the more likely you are to ruin your uterus for baby-hosting.” This information is not accurate; there is not evidence that using contraception diminishes a woman’s chances of getting pregnant once she stops using it. Indeed, some studies have actually shown that women who use the pill for five or more years are actually more likely to get pregnant within six months to a year than women who did not take the pill.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration is perpetuating inaccurate rhetoric about contraception and abortion, including when communicating with constituents. This dangerous rhetoric could hint at a possible desire to even further limit women’s access to contraception, which would then restrict women’s reproductive freedom and lead to more unwanted pregnancies.

Source: https://www.bustle.com/p/the-white-house-thinks-birth-control-abortion-are-the-same-heres-why-thats-dangerous-7672831

December 27, 2017

Media Must Challenge Anti-Choice Falsehoods About Planned Parenthood

Posted by laurasmith20200 under Abortion Information | Tags: Abortion, Abortion Rights, reproductive rights |
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“Media should be making clear to readers that there’s a cost to policymaking that’s based on misinformation—and it’s often the well-being of those who are often already marginalized,” Media Matters’ Reproductive Rights Program Director Sharon Kann told Rewire.

Should the federal government strip reproductive health-care clinics from its funding programs, it will be devastating for millions of people who rely on such providers, not always just for reproductive care.
Laura Segall/AFP/Getty Images

The anti-choice myth that community health centers could easily fill in for Planned Parenthood if the reproductive health-care provider loses federal funding has become pervasive among conservatives hoping to justify defunding the organization. It’s a claim that has been repeated by anti-choice organizations and politicians alike—and when it goes unchecked, it stands to perpetuate a falsehood that could have harmful consequences. Should the federal government strip reproductive health-care clinics from its funding programs, it will be devastating for millions of people who rely on such providers, not always just for reproductive care.

The claim appeared again last week in an advertisement in Politico’s widely read Huddle tipsheet, which offers a “play-by-play preview of the day’s congressional news.” Among the tipsheet’s sponsored headlines were multiple ads from the anti-choice Susan B. Anthony List featuring misinformation and cherry-picked data about Planned Parenthood.

The text ads contained a link directing readers to a landing page on the group’s website repeating the aforementioned misinformation about reproductive health care. But the ad glosses over the truth.

“Congress will soon consider re-directing taxpayer funding away from Planned Parenthood and to community health centers, which outnumber Planned Parenthood 20:1 nationwide,” claimed the first entry. “These centers provide comprehensive health care for women but do not perform abortions or harvest fetal body parts. Polling shows the majority of Americans support this effort.”

As the Washington Post explained when fact-checking an almost identical claim by House Speaker Paul Ryan during a CNN town hall event in January, the statistic in question originates from the anti-choice Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research offshoot of the Susan B. Anthony List. The group claims that “there are 20 community health clinics for every Planned Parenthood.”

But as the Post’s Michelle Ye Hee Lee wrote, while the numbers themselves may be close to accurate, Ryan’s claim “is based on assumptions that are too uncertain, and lack context”:

Ryan is referring to federally qualified health centers and rural health clinics, which are both outpatient primary care health providers for underserved populations. He is correct that these centers, combined, are vastly bigger in network than Planned Parenthood and “provide these kinds of services” that Planned Parenthood does (i.e., cancer screening, STD/STI screening and treatment, contraceptive services, pregnancy tests and prenatal services).

But a key caveat is that rural health clinics — which account for about a third of the network that Ryan is referring to — are not required to provide family planning services and do not have to serve low-income patients. And federally qualified health centers provide a broader range of services and fewer contraceptive services than Planned Parenthood does. The Congressional Budget Office has warned there would be an immediate disruption of services if Congress pulls Medicaid money from Planned Parenthood and instead increases funding to federally qualified health centers.

As Rewire reported at the time of Ryan’s comments, while community health centers are a vital part of the United States’ health-care system, experts say they could not fill the gap in coverage that would occur should Republicans defund Planned Parenthood. Like Ryan, the ad from Susan B. Anthony List did not mention that the federal dollars received by the reproductive health provider—and any other provider that offers abortion care—are already blocked from paying for abortion care thanks to the Hyde Amendment.

Putting aside the clear reference to the discredited and deceptively edited videos released by the Center for Medical Progress, the ad also cherry-picks polling data to falsely claim the public supports pulling taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood.

Susan B. Anthony List’s landing page cites a single December 2015 poll from the Robert Morris University Polling Institute as evidence, but even the press release linked by the organization says, “Previous polling on the issue of funding Planned Parenthood has shown majority support for government funding of Planned Parenthood.” The poll’s authors attribute the difference to their narrowly worded question that specifically asked:

Congressional Republicans favor shifting Planned Parenthood federal funds to community clinics that perform the same services, but do not perform abortions. Would you say you support or oppose this plan?

The vast majority of other polling—including a poll recently reported on by Politico and another conducted last year by the news site itself—has indeed found that the public does not support cutting the organization off from federal funding.

Politico‘s advertising department did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Rewire about whether the outlet required their advertisements to be factual, or if these particular anti-choice ads were vetted. However, the false claim that community health centers could fill Planned Parenthood’s shoes has also appeared in several news stories from the outlet.

An August 2015 piece from Politico did note that Planned Parenthood says community clinics couldn’t absorb all of their patients should it be defunded, but presented the fact alongside a quote from a member of the GOP who disagreed and provided similarly misleading claims about the centers outnumbering Planned Parenthood clinics. A November 2016 article from the outlet reported that “Republicans say they will redirect the funding that would have gone to Planned Parenthood to community health centers,” but failed to address the implications of such a move.

In other pieces, variations of the claim were mentioned without addressing whether it was true.

Despite being roundly debunked, the assertion that community health centers could fill in for the absence of Planned Parenthood has nonetheless continued to go unchallenged in the media far beyond Politico. The falsehood is especially rampant with conservative media figures on networks like Fox News, but it has also gone unchecked in some mainstream media outlets.

For example, in the aforementioned town hall with Speaker Ryan, CNN’s Jake Tapper pushed back on the Republican’s blatantly false suggestion that taxpayer funding went to abortion care but didn’t follow up when Ryan asserted that community health centers could replace Planned Parenthood.

Speaking generally about misinformation on these topics in the media, Sharon Kann, reproductive rights program director at the media watchdog Media Matters for America, told Rewire last Tuesday by email that “allowing false statements about reproductive health to spread unchecked is incredibly dangerous, and often contributes to support for anti-choice legislation with wide-reaching, negative effects.”

When it comes to the myth that community health centers could fill in for Planned Parenthood, Kann noted that “media [outlets] have a responsibility to address the underlying argument when presenting quotes from politicians about health care access.”

“The idea that community health centers can seamlessly replace Planned Parenthood isn’t a new piece of misinformation, but it’s one that’s had staying power in part because media outlets tend to either accept the premise as true, or uncritically repeat the claim without context,” she said. “The reality—and we’ve seen this play out in multiple states that have attempted to replace Planned Parenthood—is that not all community health clinics are equipped to provide reproductive health care, or even a full set of preventative care services.”

Allowing the claims to go unchecked isn’t the only way the media allows for the perpetuation of this falsehood. “In many cases, despite the score of experts and studies refuting the 20:1 claim, media will try to report what seems like ‘both sides’—an approach that often means claims that originated with anti-choice groups and outlets are given equal weight as comments from health care experts or actual providers,” said Kann.

A feature published by CQ Magazine last week fell into this trap, allowing Ryan’s falsehoods on community health centers to go largely unchecked and instead offering a false equivalency between the anti-choice conservative and the reproductive health experts who are supported by the evidence.

“Ryan argues that the money Planned Parenthood receives … could be better put to use by community health care clinics,” the article said. Only later did it note that “Planned Parenthood and its advocates have raised concerns about whether community health centers will be able to absorb the Medicaid patients who now go to Planned Parenthood.”

That research and experts support the inability of community health centers to fill this gap goes entirely unmentioned.

According to Kann, media can better address falsehoods by asking “specific questions about precisely which providers will replace Planned Parenthood and who will be able to access their services.”

“Not all community health centers are equipped to provide reproductive health care,” Kann noted. “Media [outlets] ought to be investigating this and calling out attempts to mislead the public by conflating the total number of community health centers with the much smaller subset that actually provide the same services as Planned Parenthood.”

“More broadly, good media coverage of reproductive health and rights should uplift the voices and experiences of those who are impacted by these policy decisions,” she added. “The narratives and experiences of people who have had abortions or who no longer can access basic care when Planned Parenthood clinics close are an essential perspective that is often left out of reporting …. Media should be making clear to readers that there’s a cost to policymaking that’s based on misinformation—and it’s often the well-being of those who are often already marginalized.”

Source: https://rewire.news/article/2017/02/21/media-challenge-anti-choice-falsehoods-planned-parenthood/

December 26, 2017

Ohio Politician Who Lobbied for ‘Heartbeat Bill’ Has ‘Never Thought About’ Why a Woman Would Want an Abortion

Posted by laurasmith20200 under Abortion Information | Tags: Abortion, Abortion Rights, reproductive rights |
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On Tuesday, Ohio lawmakers approved a bill that would ban abortion at six weeks, or when a fetus’s heartbeat became audible. The so-called “heartbeat bill” is one of the strictest in the nation and has the potential to prevent women from getting abortions before they even know they’re pregnant, and it makes no exception for cases of rape or incest.

Republican Representative Jim Buchy was a strong proponent for the bill, which he said would “encourage personal responsibility.” “What we have here is really the need to give people the incentive to be more responsible so we reduce unwanted pregnancies, and by the way, the vast majority of abortions are performed on women who were not raped,” he told Ohio Public Radio.

Buchy is a longtime proponent of restricting women’s access to abortion — in 2012, he told Al Jazeera that his ultimate goal is to ban abortion completely in the State of Ohio. Then, the reporter asked him an interesting question: “What do you think makes a woman want to have an abortion?”

He pauses. Then he says, “Well, there’s probably a lot of reas— I’m not a woman.” He laughs. “I’m thinking now if I’m a woman why would I want to get … Some of it has to do with economics. A lot of it has to do with economics. I don’t know. It’s a question I’ve never even thought about.”

Source: https://www.thecut.com/2016/12/ohio-lawmaker-never-thought-about-why-women-get-abortions.html

December 26, 2017

Here’s How You Can Become an Abortion-Clinic Escort

Posted by laurasmith20200 under Abortion Information | Tags: Abortion, Abortion Rights, reproductive rights |
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Planned Parenthood escorts in St. Paul, Minnesota. Photo: Courtesy of Flickr/biodork

Following the results of Tuesday’s presidential election, reproductive rights are threatened now more than ever. Donald Trump wants to appoint an anti-choice judge to the Supreme Court who would overturn Roe v. Wade and his running mate Mike Pence has waged war on a woman’s right to choose as governor of Indiana.

If you’re pro-choice and looking for a tangible way to fight back, one of the things you can do is volunteer to be an abortion-clinic escort, and help women feel safer as they might walk past anti-choice protesters on their way into the building. Planned Parenthood wrote on Tumblr that you can visit their volunteer page, where they list currently available volunteer opportunities, or call your local health centerdirectly to see what its specific needs are. You can also join the organization’s broader Clinic Defender program, where they will ask you “to bring national attention to local fights, empowering local organizers and activists to make a real impact.” Either way, you’ll be helping women get the care they need.

Source: https://www.thecut.com/2016/11/how-to-become-an-abortion-clinic-escort.html

December 25, 2017

You’re Not Out of the Woods Yet: Advocates Share Tips for Hard Conversations

Posted by laurasmith20200 under Abortion Information | Tags: Abortion, Abortion Rights, reproductive rights |
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Because ’tis the season. And who better to help than reproductive rights and justice thinkers who regularly fight alternative facts?

While respectful political debates between friends and family members were often hard before the Trump administration, the ever-increasing prevalence of alternative facts and politicized misinformation can make genuinely productive discussions nearly impossible.
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Thanksgiving is over, but the holiday season is notorious for uncomfortable conversations about politics, sexuality, and reproductive rights. While respectful political debates between friends and family members were often hard to come by before the Trump administration took office, the ever-increasing prevalence of alternative facts and politicized misinformation can make genuinely productive discussions nearly impossible. For many of us, these are uncharted waters.

But advocates for reproductive rights and justice have been battling fake news for decades and are key experts in navigating troubled waters.

Rewire spoke to nearly a dozen health-care practitioners, reproductive justice activists, and sexuality educators about their strategies for encouraging open dialogue about potentially polarizing topics. Their knowledge and experience can help laypeople initiate or take part in fruitful conversations about sexuality, contraception, and abortion—or talk over controversial issues beyond reproductive health.

Here are some of their time-tested tricks and tips, which can be deployed during almost any difficult discussion.

Set the Tone

If you suspect that a specific issue is likely to spark conflict, be clear about how you want to approach it. Create comfortable parameters at the outset of your talk by deciding which topics are off-limits, or by crafting an informal community agreement before embarking on an especially challenging conversation.

According to Boston-based sex educator and therapist Aida Manduley, normalizing not knowing something is a crucial step toward establishing a nonthreatening environment and fostering mutual understanding. They suggested correcting misconceptions with simple phrases such as “A lot of people actually don’t know this, but…” or “I just learned this recently.” It’s a technique Manduley frequently employs while leading training workshops on transgender health care for medical providers.

“People don’t like to feel dumb. People don’t like to feel like they are at a loss, especially if they’re in a position of power,” Manduley explained. “If someone already has a lot of cultural cache or social standing, it can be hard to listen.”

Be Prepared to Meet People Where They Are

Chanel Jaali Marshall—a Washington, D.C.-based HIV and AIDs activist and founder of the Jaali Company adult sexuality education group—believes that being open-minded and prepared to meet people on their level can start off a tough conversation on the right foot.

“You have to consider people’s culture, you have to consider religious factors, you have to consider all these things,” she said. “Just be aware that everyone is not the same.”

Julie Metzger, a registered nurse who lectures on puberty and human sexuality to preteens and their families with her Seattle-based company Great Conversations, emphasized the importance of tailoring your remarks to your audience. And that includes taking age and knowledge into account. An 18-year-old won’t process information the same way as a 40-year-old.

“When you honor the developmental states of the audience, you gain their trust by keeping it safe,” she said. “That is a powerful and important thing to do.”

New Orleans-based sexuality educator and founder of the Women of Color Sexual Health Network (WOCSHN) Bianca Laureano avoids unnecessary miscommunication by assessing her students’ level of media literacy. She often invites people to explain how they seek out information and attempt to confirm the veracity of their facts.

“A lot of people don’t know what it means to go to the Library of Congress website and get a citation,” she said. Asking people to back up their beliefs and vouch for their sources raises awareness that all websites or facts aren’t the same or to be trusted equally.

Acknowledge Emotion

“You can’t talk to people about feelings with facts,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, the president and chief executive of Whole Woman’s Health, which was the lead plaintiff in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the landmark 2016 U.S. Supreme Court case that struck down two provisions in a Texas law regulating abortion providers.

“I’ve found that people are sometimes more open to hearing the actual data and the facts if the conflict and the feelings part is acknowledged in the process,” Hagstrom Miller explained, adding that she’s usually able to stop emotions from hijacking a talk by briefly mentioning the potential for strong feelings to hinder constructive conversations.

Address Stigma Upfront

St. Louis-based sex educator, reproductive rights advocate, and sex shop manager Cicely Paine cautions ambitious communicators to remember that the specter of social stigma frequently haunts discussions of taboo subjects like human sexuality and pleasure.

She said that reframing issues related to sex and sexuality around health care and self-care can often dispel shame and allow for more productive conversations. Her favored tactic with nervous customers at her adult gift shop involves “just being super intentional about it.”

“They know that they want something that’s in there, but there’s so much internalized stuff, that they don’t even know what to say or how to say it,” she said.

Paine makes sure to let customers know that she’s open to hearing what they’re thinking and feeling, and often explicitly tells them that they’re going to get through this together.

Find Common Ground

In her former work as a sexuality education specialist at Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri, Paine learned to look for overlapping values and goals while speaking with parents of teenagers.

“Their values around teen sexuality [are often] ‘I don’t want my kid to have sex,’” Paine explained, adding that she was frequently able to reframe conversations with hesitant parents by searching for common ground and identifying shared aims.

As she often put it to uneasy parents, “We want your kid to be safe and healthy, so what ways can we both work around that idea, even though we might have different values and perspectives in how we see what health and safety looks like for young people?”

Share Quality Information

Hagstrom Miller of Whole Woman’s Health said access to accurate, nonpartisan information goes a long way toward building bridges.

“I think people have learned to be very skeptical of both the anti-abortion movement and the pro-choice movement because they always feel like someone’s trying to lobby them,” Hagstrom Miller said.

She’s found that even a simple, straightforward timeline of recent restrictions to abortion access has the capacity to astonish audiences.

Know That Identity and Bias Affect Listening

Remembering that society often undervalues the knowledge and experiences of marginalized communities and women is also key, Hagstrom Miller explained, adding that abortion opponents often exploit this unfortunate reality to inhibit reproductive choice.

“I think that we have just such a fundamental disrespect and skepticism of women’s knowledge and authority and abilities in our country. It’s just ingrained in us as humans, even those of us who are feminists, I think sometimes, if we really examine our behavior,” she said.

Use Humor

Comedian and co-founder of Lady Parts Justice League Lizz Winstead believes humor can open up conversations and break down barriers by pushing the envelope in terms of what constitutes acceptable topics of conversation. That’s the philosophy that guides her comedy group, which has drawn attention to fake abortion clinics and helped destigmatize emergency contraception through their sharply funny YouTube videos.

Winstead said she’s also learned to use comedy to move audiences to action instead of simply stoking their anger. She designed a recent Lady Parts Justice League live comedy tour to direct volunteers to organizations that need their help.

“Oftentimes, the humor can get people in the tent, get them excited, get them educated, and then the actual conversation needs to happen with them about what are we going to do now,” Winstead said.

Push Back

Listen carefully to opposing points of view, but don’t be a doormat, the experts warned. Ask your loved ones to explain their thinking and speak up if facts or statistics seem suspicious. Point out logical inconsistencies, and don’t let misleading comments slide.

Connecticut-based sexologist, educator, and Widener University doctoral candidate Cindy Lee Alves suggested pushing back against lazy stereotypes and unfounded generalizations about marginalized populations by centering the oppressed, while pushing socially privileged people to speak from their own observations.

“I try to get people to be able to voice what they want to voice, but have it come from a place of their experience,” she said.

Be Mindful of Body Language

Dr. Barbara Levy, who serves as the vice president of health policy for the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, recommended using your body language and eye contact to communicate an atmosphere of openness and equality.

“In order to read my patient, I’ve got to be looking at her. I have to be looking at her face and interpreting her body language,” Dr. Levy said. The same goes for friends and family members.

Dr. Sandra Carson, ACOG’s vice president of education, witnessed the importance of body language firsthand as a professor at Brown University, where she started an improvisational acting class for medical students. A local theater group taught future doctors nonverbal communication through pantomiming exercises.

“The lesson that we took home from that was when you’re communicating with patients, you want to open up when topics come up that are open and close your body language when it’s a very serious topic to stress the importance, and the patient will mimic those actions if she’s understanding you,” Dr. Carson said.

Take a Break

WOCSHN’s Laureano noted that if she’s speaking to someone who’s becoming visibly upset, she frequently pauses the conversation. She’ll ask if they’re open to taking a breath together to reset the moment and keep the conversation going.

“I also think about safety, not just for myself, but for everyone else in the space,” Laureano said.

Create a Habit of Inclusivity

Don’t throw sex workers or marginalized communities under the bus by relying on arguments that run contrary to your values, the experts cautioned. Comedian Winstead warns against using stigmatizing language or ideas to make short-term gains with people who disagree with your politics, citing the pervasive tendency to demonize abortion, even among pro-choice advocates.

“We’ve allowed so many tropes to come from the right, and we’ve allowed their language to be the language and a lot of that is really shaming,” she said.

Alves, the Connecticut-based sexologist, recommended taking a proactive approach by creating a habit of inclusivity with your words, even if you don’t think it’ll matter to anyone in the room. Alves says that’s why she insists on asking all of her students to share their pronouns.

“I want to honor how you want to be addressed, and I’m not going to assume your gender based on what I’m looking at,” Alves said. Even when she’s talking to people who aren’t aware of using gender-inclusive language, she does so anyway and uses the opportunity to “bring up the fact that [being unaware] is a privilege.”

Never Stop Learning

Resist the temptation to rest on your laurels. Keep learning and challenging yourself to communicate more effectively, said Great Conversations’ Metzger. She’s currently updating her course’s approach to discussing gender identity after decades of groundbreaking educational work with preteens and their families.

“We learn all the time from the people who come, so we’ve been really challenged and excited,” Metzger said. “It’s about honing your language” and seeing every conversation as an opportunity to grow.

https://rewire.news/article/2017/11/29/woods-tips-difficult-conversations/

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