Abortion – Abortion Clinics, Abortion Pill, Abortion Information

Congressional Democrats have introduced legislation to block the Trump administration from unilaterally undermining a signature Affordable Care Act feature—widely guaranteed contraception without a co-pay.

Under the Protecting Access to Birth Control Act, the administration’s bombshell rules providing religious and moral exemptions for any employer “shall have no force or effect, and shall be treated as though such rules had never taken effect,” according to yet-to-be-filed bill text. An estimated 62.4 million cisgender women and an untold number of transgender and gender nonconforming people rely on the popular birth control benefit as of 2017, at a $1.4 billion savings on birth control pills alone in 2013.

Democrats in the GOP-controlled U.S. Congress can’t stop the Trump administration from axing the birth control benefit and pursuing other discriminatory reproductive health-care policies through their regulatory war; that’ll be up to the courts, where lawsuits challenging the administration are underway. But through legislation, Democrats can publicly oppose such policies and foment public opinion against them. In the first days of the Trump administration, Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY) and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) introduced the Global Health, Empowerment, and Rights (HER) Act to repeal Trump’s expanded global gag rule prohibiting U.S. foreign aid to organizations that provide abortion care abroad using their own funds.

Now, the Protecting Access to Birth Control Act puts members of Congress on the record against unraveling one of the law known as Obamacare’s most popular provisions. A new Politico/Morning Consultpoll found that 46 percent of registered voters strongly support and 20 percent somewhat support requiring health insurers to cover contraceptive care. Such findings are consistent over time. In 2015, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy found that 86 percent of adults across party lines backed policies that ease access to “the full range of birth control methods” for people aged 18 and older; 71 percent backed the same for teens.

The Democratic legislation brings together lead sponsors Reps. Diana DeGette (CO), Louise Slaughter (NY), Judy Chu (CA), and Lois Frankel (FL) in the House of Representatives and Sens. Patty Murray (WA) and Bob Casey (PA) in the Senate. DeGette and Slaughter co-chair the House Pro-Choice Caucus; Murray is a vocal advocate of reproductive rights, while Casey, an anti-abortion Democrat, typically supports contraception.

“President Trump wants to make birth control about ideology, but let’s be clear: For women and their families in the 21st century, birth control is about being healthy and financially secure—and that’s why Democrats are going to keep fighting back against his shameful attacks on women with this bill and any other way we can,” Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, said in a statement.

https://rewire.news/article/2017/10/19/congressional-democrats-tell-trump-nope-shameful-birth-control-interference/

When labor rights activist Gina needed abortion care, she felt she had to hide it from her employer. Blindsided with an unplanned pregnancy despite having an IUD inserted a few months earlier, Gina kept her circumstance a secret.

“I’ve never wanted children,” said Gina, a 35-year-old woman from Lebanon, Missouri whose name has been changed to protect her identity. “That’s why I had an IUD, because it was one of the most effective forms of birth control.”

Gina had recently been approved to take vacation time for a trip abroad and didn’t feel like she could ask for more time off from work. Not only was she dealing with the dilemma of needing to miss work to receive the procedure, but she had to travel several hours to a Planned Parenthood in St. Louis, the only clinic performing abortions in Missouri at the time. She was able to adjust her schedule and take a day off, but she didn’t discuss her situation with anyone at the labor union for which she works.

“Even though I work for a progressive organization that supports reproductive rights, there is still a culture of shame,” Gina said. “It’s a personal decision with very intense personal feelings and I don’t want that to affect my career. Abortion is stigmatized so heavily. It’s difficult to have these open conversations.”

People face many barriers when accessing abortion, including taking time off work, getting to a clinic that offers abortion services, paying for the procedure, and, in some cases, arranging child care. Many like Gina also fear retaliation at work.

“We know women are being discriminated against in the workplace and in housing when it comes to their reproductive health care choices, and they need to be protected,” said Alison Dreith, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Missouri.

The St. Louis City Board in February passed a reproductive health anti-discrimination ordinanceprotecting people in employment and housing. The ordinance offers protection against discrimination for any reproductive health choice including abortion care, fertility treatments, birth control, and pregnancy.

Despite the ordinance, the work of protecting women in St. Louis isn’t over. The St. Louis Archdiocese is challenging this ordinance in court on the basis that the policy is an infringement on religious liberty, despite the law offering exemptions for religious organizations.

Municipalities nationwide have been slow to act in protecting people from this type of discrimination. Along with St. Louis, only Boston, Washington, D.C., and Delaware have ordinances on the books to protect people from discrimination based on their reproductive health choices. The Democratic-held California General Assembly recently passed a similar ordinance, but it was vetoed by Gov. Jerry Brown (D) on Sunday.

Gina is protected at her job by a collective bargaining agreement requiring her employer to give her time off for illness or medical procedures, but she thought she may experience repercussions other than termination if she were open about her abortion.

“There are other ways bosses can make your life difficult other than just being fired,” she said, citing examples such as receiving a bad assignment or being moved to a different department.

Not only can stigma cause workers to fear workplace repercussions, but missing work to receive reproductive health procedures can also affect employment.

One 22-year-old mother of four living in Blue Springs, Missouri lost her job after taking three days off work to receive and recover from an abortion. Amanda, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, was working full time as a night closing manager for Dollar Tree when she unexpectedly became pregnant. With four children under the age of five, she knew she couldn’t support a fifth.

She gave her employer two weeks’ notice that she would need time off, made sure her shifts were covered and provided a doctor’s note that mentioned she needed the time off without giving details about the medical procedure. When she showed up for her next shift, she was greeted with the news that she had been fired because she had missed too much work. Despite working at Dollar Tree for six months as an hourly worker, she had not earned enough time to be absent for three days.

“I was infuriated,” Amanda said. “Sometimes women have to take off work for unexpected medical reasons and employers need to be considerate of that.”

Out of work for about five months and reeling financially, Amanda returned to a serving job she had years ago, where she makes $3.75 an hour. Amanda’s situation was not surprising to Dreith of NARAL. “A majority of workers in this country don’t have paid sick leave or paid leave in general,” Dreith said. “It’s the low-wage workers who suffer the most when they have to take time off work. They can get fired even though they should be protected.”

Access to paid sick leave varies widely among employers, said Alex Granovsky, an employment lawyer in New York City who focuses on discrimination cases. Only 13 percent of private industry workers are able to access paid leave through work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. One of the only protections available to many workers is the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which protects a person’s job without pay for up to 12 weeks. Even then the benefits are limited, as FMLA applies to companies with 50 or more employees, and an employee must be working for the same employer for at least a year to qualify.

“Some states have sick leave protections, but in general there aren’t many protections for employees missing work,” Granovsky said.

It can be hard to distinguish discrimination based on reproductive health choices from employers enforcing a sick leave policy. Granovsky said inconsistent treatment can expose a bigger issue.  “If one employee misses two days due to an illness or medical procedure and it isn’t a big deal, but then someone else misses the same amount of work for a D&C [abortion procedure], and then loses her job, that might be something worth looking into,” he said.

There are some federal protections for pregnant workers, such as the Pregnancy Nondiscrimination Actand the Americans with Disabilities Act, which require employers to make accommodations for pregnant workers. No such protections exist for people seeking abortion care, leaving many struggling to balance their personal reproductive health choices with their jobs.

“These are the positions we find ourselves in as women,” Gina said. “We might advocate for access to reproductive health care, but when we need it we find ourselves alone.”

https://rewire.news/article/2017/10/16/many-keeping-job-means-hiding-abortion/

Nurses and other attendees had just settled in for the lecture, “The Latest Research on PTSD and Abortion,“ when the instructor raised the specter of death.

“There are some women who almost die on the table,” Dr. Martha Shuping, a licensed psychiatrist from North Carolina, told the class. “I know one woman whose daughter did die on the table.”

Shuping taught the course this April at the annual conference of Heartbeat International, a multi-million-dollar anti-choice organization based in Columbus, Ohio. Heartbeat International is known for its worldwide network of 2,200 anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers, or fake clinics. Less well known is the organization’s role as a nursing educator.

“How many of you are here for nursing [continuing education units]?” said Shuping, asking for a show of hands in the room at a Chicago-area Hyatt Regency hotel. “Okay, quite a few.”

Heartbeat International in 2012 won the approval of the California Board of Registered Nursing, the state’s chief nursing oversight body, to teach continuing education (CE) courses. Because other states accept CE units from California-approved providers, Heartbeat International can educate nurses from around the country.

Shuping read a passage in which a woman described her distress after her abortion procedure: “I started having nightmares in which I saw myself in a baby parts cemetery and holding a dead baby in my arms and crying for the ones I lost.’”

‘I Want to Be With My Babies’

California nurses must take 30 hours of CE courses every two years to maintain licensure; nearly 3,000 California-approved CE providers offer this training. Heartbeat International markets its CE-provider status at conferences and online.

Rewire purchased an audio recording of Shuping’s course via the Heartbeat International conference website.

In it, Shuping introduced herself as a medical doctor, adding, “I’ve been helping people recover from abortions since 1985.” Shuping, who is known for making unsubstantiated claims about abortion’s links to mental illness, co-authored a flawed study suggesting abortion caused anxiety, mood, and substance-abuse disorders.

While Shuping spent much of the 70-minute lecture describing research on trauma related to pregnancy loss and abortion, she devoted about 20 percent of the time to anti-abortion anecdotes:

Here’s British artist Emma Beck, [she] committed suicide after an abortion in 2007. And she wrote, “I told everyone I didn’t want to do it. Even at the hospital. Now it is too late. I want to be with my babies.” So that was in a newspaper article. Again, sometimes people would like to say it’s not the abortion. It’s something else. And it’s not always something else. It might be the abortion, and there it is.

Shuping told attendees how Sheila Harper, founder of the abortion recovery ministry Save One, weighed whether to end her life after an abortion.

She went home from work early one day for the purpose of killing herself because of distress related to abortion. She got out her roommate’s gun. She was sitting with a gun in her hand kind of thinking how she was going to do this and kind of get psyched to pull the trigger. And the roommate came home early, providentially, and so she decided not to kill herself because that would be a mess for the roommate to find, and it kind of just made her stop. So again going back, that’s self-destructiveness, obviously.

Shuping then read excerpts from the book Forbidden Grief, written by Theresa Burke, who co-runs the “post abortion healing” ministry known as Rachel’s Vineyard.

That Shuping’s class didn’t hew to science is no surprise.

In January 2016, Rewire reported that Heartbeat International taught the course “Abortion Pill Reversal and Your Clinic” to nurses for CE credit. So-called abortion pill reversal is an experimental treatment advanced by the the anti-choice movement without rigorous peer-reviewed research to back it up. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in 2015 condemned abortion pill “reversal,” saying it is “not supported by the body of scientific evidence.” A month after Rewire‘s reporting on the abortion “reversal” class, state Sen. Jerry Hill (D-San Mateo) introduced legislation to require CE courses to be based on science and the nursing board to routinely audit CE providers—something it said it hadn’t done due to a shortage of resources and staff. Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signed the bill last fall.

The nursing board began an audit of Heartbeat International on January 29, 2016.

The board seemed galvanized to crack down on Heartbeat International’s unscientific curriculum. But what emerged over more than 18 months was akin to regulatory Whack-A-Mole.

‘Insufficient Scientific Evidence’

Rewire obtained a copy of the audit last month through a public records request. The trove of documents revealed Heartbeat International offered not one course—as previously reported—but three courses related to abortion pill “reversal.”

Included in the documents were descriptions of courses titled “Women’s Mental Health and Abortion” and “Breast Cancer Risks of Induced Abortion and Hormonal Contraception.” When Rewire showed the curriculum for the two courses, which included research citations, to Dr. Daniel Grossman, a leading reproductive health researcher and director of the University of California, San Francisco, research group Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, he said Heartbeat International “cherry-picked the references and ignored the most recent and rigorous data on these topics.” 

The weight of evidence has long disputed a link between abortion care and breast cancer or mental illness. In 2003, more than 100 experts convened by the National Cancer Institute rejected claims that abortion causes breast cancer, while an extensive review in 2008 of the “best scientific evidence” by the Task Force on Mental Health and Abortion of the American Psychological Association found abortion was not a threat to women’s mental health.

For much of 2016, Susan Engle, a registered nurse and auditor, probed the extent to which Heartbeat International’s courses were based on science, according to documents reviewed by Rewire.

In a letter dated October 11, 2016, Engle asked Susan Dammann, a registered nurse with Heartbeat International, to provide scientific evidence to back up its courses. Two months later, on December 27, Engle again wrote to Dammann, ordering Heartbeat International to suspend the three “abortion reversal” courses for “insufficient scientific evidence.”

Then, on January 17, 2017, Engle cracked down on the abortion pill “reversal” courses, writing: