Tag: contraception

It’s Now or Never for Westchester’s Women!

We Need You to Speak Out for Women’s Safety and Privacy!

The Clinic Access Bill is scheduled for a Public Hearing at 7 p.m., Monday, April 30, 2012
Westchester County Office Building
148 Martine Ave, 8th floor
White Plains, NY
Put This on Your Calendar & Show Up, Please!

They Need to Hear from YOU!

The Following Legislators will not promise to support it!!
(Either they voted against furthering the bill to bring it to the floor or failed to vote for it at.)

Call ALL of Them!

Demand that They Stand Up for Women!

We deserve safe access to reproductive health centers!

David Gelfarb            995-2834                                                                                 gelfarb@westchesterlegislators.com

Jim Maisano              995-2826    maisano@westchesterlegislators.com                                                                                                                                                                      Bernice Spreckman  995-2815    spreckman@westchesterlegislators.com                                                                                                                                                                       Sheila Marcotte         995-2817   marcotte@westchesterlegislators.com                                                                                                                                                                           John Testa                 995-2828   testa@westchesterlegislators.com                                                                                                                                                                              Gordon Burrows      995-2830                                                                                                                                                                                       burrows@westchesterlegislators.com

Michael Smith            995-2847                                                                                                                                                                                              smith@westchesterlegislators.com

They need to hear from you.  Last December no one turned out except for a room full of anti-choice extremists, and the bill was never brought up for a vote. We fought hard to bring it back. Now you need to fight.
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More than a decade ago, Senator Andrea Stewart Counsins and Assemblyman Tom Abinanti, then County Legislators, fought to ensure that women had safe access to women’s reproductive health centers. Unfortunately, they were not successful.  It has taken us more ten years to get to this point. We had a shot at it again last December and came up short. Now, after months of discussion, review, and dissection, the Clinic Access Bill—that would ensure women safe access to reproductive health centers—was voted out of Committee and sent to the Westchester County Board of Legislators for a vote.

This bill protects First Amendment Rights and takes a big step toward protecting Westchester’s women.

Come out and show your support for this bill tonight!

We must excerise our right to speak up and be heard.
Please come and speak out.

For the record: 1. The Bill was carefully reviewed to make sure that it was 100% in compliance with First Amendment rights – for all parties involved; and, 2. There is no other law–not state or federal–that presently protects Westchester’s women’s safety as they enter and exit reproductive health centers.

Tell Them: We Elected Them to Protect Women!

Nicholas D. Kristoff, you got it right! “Beyond Pelvic Politics”

Beyond Pelvic Politics

By Nicholas D. Kristof, The New York Times, 2/11/2012

I MAY not be as theologically sophisticated as American bishops, but I had thought that Jesus talked more about helping the poor than about banning contraceptives.

The debates about pelvic politics over the last week sometimes had a patronizing tone, as if birth control amounted to a chivalrous handout to women of dubious morals. On the contrary, few areas have more impact on more people than birth control — and few are more central to efforts to chip away at poverty.

My well-heeled readers will be furrowing their brows at this point. Birth control is cheap, you’re thinking, and far less expensive than a baby (or an abortion). But for many Americans living on the edge, it’s a borderline luxury.

A 2009 study looked at sexually active American women of modest means, ages 18 to 34, whose economic circumstances had deteriorated. Three-quarters said that they could not afford a baby then. Yet 30 percent had put off a gynecological or family-planning visit to save money. More horrifying, of those using the pill, one-quarter said that they economized by not taking it every day. (My data is from the Guttmacher Institute, a nonpartisan research organization on issues of sexual health.)

One-third of women in another survey said they would switch birth control methods if not for the cost. Nearly half of those women were relying on condoms, and others on nothing more than withdrawal.

The cost of birth control is one reason poor women are more than three times as likely to end up pregnant unintentionally as middle-class women.

In short, birth control is not a frill that can be lightly dropped to avoid offending bishops. Coverage for contraception should be a pillar of our public health policy — and, it seems to me, of any faith-based effort to be our brother’s keeper, or our sister’s.

To understand the centrality of birth control, consider that every dollar that the United States government spends on family planning reduces Medicaid expenditures by $3.74, according to Guttmacher. Likewise, the National Business Group on Health estimated that it costs employers at least an extra 15 percent if they don’t cover contraception in their health plans.

And of course birth control isn’t just a women’s issue: men can use contraceptives too, and unwanted pregnancies affect not only mothers but also fathers.

This is the backdrop for the uproar over President Obama’s requirement that Catholic universities and hospitals include birth control in their health insurance plans. On Friday, the White House backed off a bit — forging a compromise so that unwilling religious employers would not pay for contraception, while women would still get the coverage — but many administration critics weren’t mollified.

Look, there’s a genuine conflict here. Many religious believers were sincerely offended that Catholic institutions would have to provide coverage for health interventions that the church hierarchy opposed. That counts in my book: it’s best to avoid forcing people to do things that breach their ethical standards.

Then again, it’s not clear how many people actually are offended. A national survey found that 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women use birth control at some point in their lives. Moreover, a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute reported that even among Catholics, 52 percent back the Obama policy: they believe that religiously affiliated universities and hospitals should be obliged to include birth control coverage in insurance plans.

So, does America’s national health policy really need to make a far-reaching exception for Catholic institutions when a majority of Catholics oppose that exception?

I wondered what other religiously affiliated organizations do in this situation. Christian Science traditionally opposed medical care. Does The Christian Science Monitor deny health insurance to employees?

“We offer a standard health insurance package,” John Yemma, the editor, told me.

That makes sense. After all, do we really want to make accommodations across the range of faith? What if organizations affiliated with Jehovah’s Witnesses insisted on health insurance that did not cover blood transfusions? What if ultraconservative Muslim or Jewish organizations objected to health care except at sex-segregated clinics?

The basic principle of American life is that we try to respect religious beliefs, and accommodate them where we can. But we ban polygamy, for example, even for the pious. Your freedom to believe does not always give you a freedom to act.

In this case, we should make a good-faith effort to avoid offending Catholic bishops who passionately oppose birth control. I’m glad that Obama sought a compromise. But let’s remember that there are also other interests at stake. If we have to choose between bishops’ sensibilities and women’s health, our national priority must be the female half of our population.

President Obama, Contraception & the First Amendment

“Under intense pressure from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, President Obama today said that the White House would not back down from its guarantee that insurance companies must cover contraception without co-pays.  Instead, the President announced that it would adjust the policy so that women who work for religiously-affiliated employers like Catholic hospitals can receive contraceptive coverage at no additional cost directly from their insurance companies, rather than from their employers.

Women asked the President to stand with us, and he did.  This policy protects women’s access to critical preventive health services without adding new charges.

While the policy already included an exemption for churches and houses of worship, Catholic hospitals and other religiously affiliated employers have lobbied for more.  The Bishops have made clear that they will oppose any policy that gives women insurance coverage for contraception, but Sister Carol Keehan, President of the Catholic Health Association, has been quoted in news reports saying that she supports the policy described today by the President.  Keehan is also a supporter of the overarching health reform law, the Affordable Care Act, and her support was critical to Congressional passage of the law in 2010, despite the bishops’ objections.” (Thank you,  Raising Women’s Voices)

The Right-Wing Opposition Has Already Launched an Attack
Already the anti-contraception fanatics are hard at work trying to overturn the entire contraceptive coverage policy. Anti-choice extremist Senator Roy Blunt (R-MO) is tying all contraceptive coverage to a transportation bill, which the Senate could vote on at any time. Blunt’s approach is to say the very least, blunt…and extreme.

Blunt wants Congress to totally eliminate President Obama’s guarantee of access to affordable birth control. Instead, Blunt wants any employer or any health plan to be able to refuse coverage of birth control.
Call your Senators and tell them to oppose the Blunt Amendment!

An Interesting Piece of Information from The New York Times
Catholic Institutions Reluctantly Comply With N.Y. Law on Contraceptives Coverage
By Joseph Berger Published: February 10, 2012

Although Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York has been leading the national fight against requiring Roman Catholic hospitals, universities and charities to cover birth control in their health insurance plans for employees and students, some Catholic institutions in his own diocese and others throughout New York State have for 10 years been complying with state law mandating precisely that coverage.

The state began requiring contraception coverage in 2002, and Catholic institutions, after losing a court battle over the issue, have followed the law. Historically Catholic institutions like Fordham University, which is run by a lay board of trustees in the tradition of the Jesuit religious order, provide contraception coverage for employees and students.

Fordham, which has 15,000 undergraduate and graduate students, seeks to comply with Catholic teaching by barring its student health center from prescribing or dispensing birth control pills unless they are used for such conditions as severe acne or endometriosis, according to Bob Howe, Fordham’s director of communications. Students who seek birth control pills to prevent pregnancies must obtain prescriptions from a private doctor or a service like Planned Parenthood, and the college’s insurance carrier will then cover the pills under its standard reimbursement schedule.

“We currently follow New York State law,” Mr. Howe said. “For employees and students, we provide insurance coverage that includes contraception. That’s the law.”

New York is one of the 28 states that require insurance companies to cover contraception. According to the White House, Colorado, Georgia and Wisconsin have no exemptions from that requirement, while California, New York and North Carolina have limited religious exemptions, identical to the limited exemptions the Obama Administration proposed to put in place nationally.

Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of New York, referred questions about the archdiocese’s practices to Dennis Poust, a spokesman for the New York State Catholic Conference, who did not immediately return a call. But Mr. Poust was quoted in The Buffalo News as saying of the state’s requirement: “In many cases, there was no other choice but to comply under protest. None of it is voluntary. It is all under duress.”

There are no longer any Catholic hospitals in New York City; St. Vincent’s in Greenwich Village closed in 2010, and Mary Immaculate Hospital in Jamaica, Queens, closed in 2009. A spokesman for Catholic Health Services of Long Island, which administers six hospitals, including St. Francis in Roslyn and Good Samaritan in West Islip,  said, “It is the policy of Catholic Health Services not to comment on political issues.”

Representatives of several other Catholic institutions in the region seemed leery about discussing how their insurance plans operated.

“The college’s institutional policies and practices are consistent with Catholic teaching,” said  Lenore Carpinelli, director of college relations for the College of New Rochelle, which was founded in Westchester County in 1904 by the Ursuline Sisters as the first college in the state for Catholic women. “We will be reviewing and evaluating the new regulations respectful of our commitment to our Ursuline Catholic mission and identity.”

Hats Off to a Legend, Suzi Oppenheimer!

“Suzi Oppenheimer”
A Name Synonymous with Women’s Rights
New York State Senator Suzi Oppenheimer has announced that she will be retiring at the end of 2012.We—the women of this state—will miss her greatly!Suzi has been at the forefront fighting for the women of Westchester and New York State for almost three decades.Suzi has battled tirelessly against Senate anti-choice bills, making all women’s needs her concern. Her floor speeches in favor of Medicaid funding are legendary. She has fought annually for family planning and teen pregnancy prevention programs.

Choice Matters has been proud to endorse Senator Suzi Oppenheimer in every election since her initial run for the New York State Senate. In 1982, she came close, making Choice a focal point of her campaign; in 1984 she closed the deal with the voters.

In 1984, when she ran against anti-choice Perone, Suzi made her position on government’s proper role in abortion clear, saying, “Government has no more right to decide whether a woman may have an abortion than it has the right to tell us where we can’t live, whom we can’t marry, or what religion we can’t practice.”  She stressed the need not only to protect our freedom of choice, but to protect the safety of abortion as well. “Abortion has been with us for thousands of years, and no law will stop it now. Since the Supreme Court has already affirmed the right of a woman to choose abortion, it is now our duty not just to protect that right, but to protect the health and safety of all women who do decide they must have an abortion.”

Suzi, we hold our glasses high in a toast to you.

You have set the bar very high, and we thank you for that too!