States

Last week, NARAL Pro-Choice Texas Foundation released their third annual report: Taxpayer Funded Crisis Pregnancy Centers in Texas: A Hidden Threat to Women's Health.  This 2008 report "provides an overview of what a crisis pregnancy center (CPC) is and what it isn't, why public funding for its services is controversial and detrimental to the health of Texas women, and why Texans should be seriously concerned about the lack of accountability and regulation in the use of millions of dollars of taxpayer money." According to the report:

During the 2005 Texas legislative session, anti-choice Texas lawmakers forced an unprecedented rider onto the state budget. This rider cut a total of $5 million from family planning funding over the biennium (FYs 2006-2007) and shifted the money from preventive health screening and contraceptive services into unlicensed and unregulated crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs). Now, over two years later, the program this rider created has proved itself to be a controversial, failed experiment with a multi-million dollar cost to Texas taxpayers.

Read the full report here and check out these articles for more information.

Tarina Keene is executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia.

On Wednesday, anti-choice Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling cast the decisive vote in the Virginia Senate to defund state family-planning clinics that provide low-income women with access to basic health care, such as contraception and screenings for breast and cervical cancer.

Bolling’s vote — which broke a 20-20 tie in the Senate — was outrageous enough, but this politician takes hypocrisy to a whole new level.

Check out his web site and you will find (I am not kidding here) Bolling promoting public-service announcements in which he encourages women in Virginia to get screenings for cervical cancer:

Busy women in today’s modern world must make the connection between HPV, Pap testing and avoidance of a nearly preventable cancer. Urge the women in your life to get a Pap test. Pass on the information to friends.

Mr. Bolling, you just voted for a bill that will deny cervical-cancer screenings to thousands of women in Virginia.

You can bet that we are going to tell everyone we know about this hypocrisy. At a time when so many Virginians cannot afford health care, you cut funding for the very services you encouraged women to get – services that are available at Planned Parenthood and other family-planning clinics.

We have your number—literally. 804-786-2078. Our public-service announcement begins with a call to your office to express our displeasure with your vote against women’s health.

While a Pennsylvania bill requiring hospitals to provide emergency contraception has stalled in the House of Reps, it's good to see that Wisconsin is at least moving forward with a similar bill:

The Assembly, which worked into the early morning hours Wednesday on a variety of measures, passed a revised version of that bill on a 56-41 vote just before midnight.

Both houses must adopt identical legislation before it can go to Gov. Jim Doyle for his signature. Republicans who control the Assembly objected to a final reading of the bill Tuesday night, meaning the full body won't be able to vote to send it to the Senate until January.

The bill has already gone through a number of challenges, including efforts to get parental notification and allow hospitals to pull the old "conscience clause" and let them refuse EC on "moral or religious" grounds, but it was a no-go. Rep. Ann Hraychuck, D - Balsam Lake hit the nail on the head: "This is not about what my moral beliefs are. This is not about what your moral beliefs are. This is about victim's rights."

Indeed.

This is just bizarre.

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday to allow a proposed 2008 ballot initiative to proceed that would extend certain rights to fertilized eggs. Huh? NARAL Pro-Choice Colorado Executive Director Kathryn Wittneben said it well:

“Proponents of this initiative have publicly stated that the goal is to make all abortion illegal -- but nothing in the language of the initiative or its title even mentions abortion. If that’s not misleading, I don’t know what is.”

It really is ridiculous. Check out more info on the decision here.

As gleeful as I was about yesterday's news that New York has rejected federal funds that would have gone towards abstinence-only education programs, having access to the resources you're educated about would probably help too.

Despite New York City's campaign launched in 2005 to incease access to emergency contraception and family planning services, it looks like teens may have slipped past the radar. A study of teen health clinics operated by the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation found that less than half of them provided emergency contraception and prescriptions for birth control. Yikes.

The corporation claims that the report was inaccurate and misleading, but would look into training staff at their clinics who might be asked about the availability of EC.

Not even a month after Missouri governor Matt Blunt signed legislation that limits abortion providers' ability to teach sex education classes, a measure will go into effect next month that will require that any medical clinic performing more than five first-trimester abortions a month, or any abortions later in pregnancy, to be licensed as an “ambulatory surgical center.”

This means a number of regulations imposed on clinics that would result in up to $2 million in renovations. (In other words, forcing some out of practice.)

That'll help; make abortion even less accessible than it already is. Ugh.

While many would think New York state is dandy when it comes to reproductive rights, think again.

A New York Times letter to the editor by Galen Sherwin and Corinne Carey, the director and an attorney with the New York Civil Liberties Union Reproductive Rights Project, reminds us that New York receives more abstinence-only funds than any other state, with the exception of Florida and Texas.

Let's hope New York joins the other states that have rejected the funding this year and increase real sex education in New York.

Since anti-choice district attorney Phil Kline previously invaded the personal information of ninety patients of Planned Parenthood while he was Attorney General of Kansas, the tables surely have turned. And fast.

Not only is Planned Parenthood filing a lawsuit in order to force him to return the personal records of patients, but Kline's successor, present Attorney General Paul Morrison, has decided to join the party and aid Planned Parenthood in their efforts to get these records back.

Let's Morrison's support will make this happen.

This is just infuriating.

Sen. John Adams has introduced a bill in Ohio that would require a woman seeking an abortion to bring a - I kid you not - permission slip from the would-be father:

Under Adams’ proposal, a woman seeking an abortion must provide the name of the unborn fetus’ father, who then must give written consent for the procedure. Not knowing the father is no excuse and women who try and lie or doctors who perform abortions without permission of the father could be charged with “abortion fraud," a fifth-degree felony punishable by up to a year in jail and $2,500 in fines.

"Abortion fraud"??? This is one of the most ludicrous, paternalistic and heinous bills I've heard about in a while. It's almost more ridiculous than an actual ban, which Adams is actually also co-sponsoring.

“You put this bill in the real world and it is unworkable,” said Kellie Copeland, executive director of NARAL Pro-choice Ohio. “We believe the decision should be a woman’s.”

Um, yeah.

This is just so screwed.

Just one day after the beginnings of the anti-choice protests taking place in and around Birmingham, Gloria Gray, the director of the West Alabama Women's Center, was arrested for disorderly conduct.

There hasn't been much coverage of exactly what happened, except that when the director came outside to talk to one of the protestors for trespassing onto clinic property, the police directed her to go inside and then arrested her when she refused to, you know, get off her own property. She posted bail shortly thereafter.

I'm speechless.