Bristol Palin By the Numbers

It's been a while since I've posted here. Got to get back to it.

I do not look down on Bristol Palin. She had the disadvantage of a poor sex education probably caused by her mother's ideology but she has the advantage that her mother has a good, if after the last weekend dead-end, career. She also has magnificent access to services (who wants to piss off a Governor known for abusing authority to get people fired) and, unfortunately, she's being presented as the model of virtuous teenaged womanhood for bearing her child to term.

She is not a role model we can afford to have splashed on screens everywhere, not for ideological reasons but for sheer facts. This from Janet Currie via Freakonomics:

• Bristol Palin is not alone. She is one of 750,000 American girls ranging in age from 15 to 19 who will likely become pregnant this year. It would be unfortunate if media reports about high-profile people like Ms. Palin help legitimize teen pregnancy.
• Given the decision to carry her pregnancy to term, Ms. Palin’s available resources and support will give her the best possible chance of a good outcome. But on average, teen pregnancies are more likely to result in premature births and low-birth-weight babies. This is not a good start in life. Babies with a low birth weight are more likely to have A.D.H.D. and are less likely to graduate from high school.
• Teen moms are less likely than other women to attend or complete college, and their marriages are more likely to end in divorce; about 50 percent of women who married younger than age 18 are divorced after 10 years, compared to 20 percent of women who married at age 25 or older. In turn, single mothers have the highest poverty rates of any demographic group, and 60 percent of the U.S.-born children in mother-only families are poor.
• Statistics are not destiny, and one can only hope Ms. Palin has a healthy baby, a long and happy marriage, and a sense of fulfillment as a homemaker, a career woman, or both. But the fact remains that for most women, a teen pregnancy considerably diminishes the odds of any happy ending.
• High teen pregnancy rates remain a serious problem in the U.S. Although they have declined since they peaked in 1990, rates are still twice as high as in Canada or England, and eight times as high as in the Netherlands or in Japan.
• These international differences are due to low contraceptive use in the U.S.; most of the recent decline in teen pregnancy in the U.S. is due to more consistent use of birth control, although teens are also waiting longer to have sex than in the past. In 1995, almost 20 percent of girls had sex by age 17, compared to 15 percent in 2002. Let us hope that attempts to normalize situations like Ms. Palin’s do not help to reverse this trend.

Some observations, not to Ms. Palin's liking:

• Abstinence-only education does not work. Her own daughter is a case in point.
• Contraception is the only known way to limit or prevent abortions; however, if conception begins at birth, contraception is abortion and is to be outlawed.
• Since they don't want contraception and they don't want abortion and they want to preach abstinence-only despite its failure, I can only conclude the Right is anti-sex, although Ms. Palin appears to have enjoyed (or tolerated) it at least five times.
• Statistically, teen mothers have it bad throughout life. They're less educated, the babies are more likely to be underweight at birth, they're more likely to have economic problems through life.
• Statistically there are always exceptions: Palin with her support network and successful mother will most likely be one. Lance Armstrong was one. There are people without high school educations making over $100,000 per year. They are rare.
• Single mothers have the highest poverty rate of any demographic group.

I'm not advocating abortion. I'm advocating prevention, the use of our God-given intelligence and a few fortuitous chemical reactions in the body to prevent unwanted pregnancies. I advocate sex education in schools, fact-based and frank, to give women like Bristol Palin the tools they need when abstinence fails. I'm advocating the morning-after pill, readily available and pulling the licenses of pharmacists who refuse to sell contraceptives. I'm advocating a fact-based approach to reducing abortions in this country.

Unfortunately it's not faith-based, as Bristol Palin's education must have been. She and her baby will most likely do well. 750,000 other teen mothers and their children have a much lesser chance of doing so. And given the Right's refusal to provide aid to those mothers and children, indeed their tendency to ignore them until they're old enough to enlist, I dub the Right the party of Right to Birth.

And here's a link to what the average teen mother can expect from life. And that's why we can't have Bristol Palin paraded before the country as a paragon of virtue and an example for teens.

Links to the original Freakonomics blog post here, including links to Janet Currie's papers.

Cross-posted from A Colorado Progressive.

TAGS: Bristol Palin, Teen Pregnancy

Bearing the Fruit of Fascist Theocracy

To protect citizen's health care rights, Washington state regulators ruled that pharmacists may not refuse to dispense any medication based on personal convictions. In Washington state, a pharmacy owner and two pharmacists sued the Washington State Department of Health because the ruling infringed on their right to deny any medication based on their personal beliefs.

In this case, the pharmacists have issues with "Plan B", the "morning after" birth control pill.

Plan B works by using high doses of common birth control medication to prevent implantation of a fertilized egg. Opponents regard it as a form of abortion. It is not the same as RU-486, the so called "abortion pill", and has no effect if a woman is already pregnant.

To my seemingly never ending irritation, these rogue pharmacists equate birth control with abortion, to which they seek to prevent access. I have already shared my views on abortion. Preventing access to legal birth control should be, in my view, illegal.

Last week a federal judge suspended the rule, to the delight of the rebel pharmacists who claimed it had violated their religious freedoms to obstruct women's ability to purchase critical medications in a safe and legal manner.

A preliminary injunction granted by U.S. District Judge Ronald B. Leighton prevents the state from disciplining pharmacists who refuse to dispense the medication, known as Plan B, as long as they immediately refer patients to nearby sources.

By allowing pharmacists to delay medication, the injunction enables pharmacists to render the medication ineffective:

The injunction creates a system in which pharmacists can refuse to fill a request for Plan B if they refer customers to a nearby source. But that could effectively deny the drugs completely to residents in rural areas, said Jet Tilley, spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of the Inland Northwest. Advocates argue that women must have access to the medication as soon as possible for it to be effective.

Does this mean that rural women who are denied "Plan B" medication based on a pharmacist's personal conviction, are sent to look for legal medication elsewhere, try but are unable to obtain their legal medication in time for it to be effective, can sue the rogue pharmacist and pharmacy for 18 years of child support? I want to know the answer to that.

Fortunately, State Senator, Karen Keiser, D-Kent, is working to propose legislation that will prohibit pharmacists from denying access to legal medications.

As much as these events anger me, they fit right in with the "rampant sexism" that is institutionally supported by the Bush administration. Under Bush:

W. David Hager chairman of the FDA's Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee does not prescribe contraceptives for single women, does not do abortions, will not prescribe RU-486 and will not insert IUDs. Hager believes that headaches, PMS and eating disorders can be cured by reading Scripture.

Predictably, Bush's FDA has been up to some real monkey business thwarting the makers of Plan-B in their quest for over-the-counter approval:

David Muir's report on the "morning-after" pill, or Plan B, on ABC's World News Tonight, included a conservative group's claim that allowing sales of the pill without a prescription would be unsafe, but provided no scientific evidence to support the claim, while omitting the fact that Food and Drug Administration (FDA) staff scientists and outside advisory panels have recommended that the FDA approve allowing over-the-counter sales.

And articles that confuse the whole issue don't help either:

And because Plan B can now be sold over the counter to most women and men 18 or older, he said, most people can get it without a pharmacist.

Excuse me but...the drug has been approved for sale, without a prescription, behind the counter, by pharmacists, to women who can prove they are at least 18 years of age--approval that this injunction allows pharmacists to ignore.

Welcome to Bush's Fascist Theocracy; we're soaking in it.

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Thanks to my friend, Green Libertarian, who passed this news story along to me. I won't even mention what Ellie passed along. With friends like these, the rage never ends... peace.

TAGS: Plan B, Abortion, Health Care, Birth Control, Access, Reproductive Rights, Women's Rights, Karen Keiser, Medication, Pharmacist Rights

My Father

I've had a complicated relationship with my father. He's not dead, but we're not speaking. I was his favorite, his first. We used to stay up late together talking about things like geology and weather and nature and energy and resources, but sometimes about interpersonal things. I'd give him a backrub and massage his feet, and he would tell me about the world. He was especially worried about energy and overpopulation. He was an engineer and a marine. Rather a stoic guy, but around me he became very soft and silly, just to please me. I wore my hair long because he liked it that way; my mom was stuck dealing with my knots. I have always had wild bedroom hair, but that's a story for a different day. Today is about my father.

My father and mother didn't seem to have much in common. I could never figure out why they got married. How they met? He needed a date for a dance, and his friends sent him in to a hotel to ask the first woman he saw. My mom was at the counter. He had Mayflower status; she was the daughter of immigrants. He had aristocracy; she had labor. He had Southern Baptism, to fear; she had Catholicism, to ignore. He had everything to conserve; she had nothing particularly to lose. Of course they divorced.

As a young girl, I was taught very liberal, progressive values. Things like all people have value, everyone is of equal importance, people are generally good, we reap what we sow, intention is almost everything, government exists to serve the people.

When I grew up and hit college, my father confessed to me that he had always refrained from speaking freely with me to appease my mother, but now that I was an adult, he felt free to speak his mind. The things he shared with me revealed racism and sexism that I could not fathom. He used to quote Rush and cite his sources all the time. He loved Rush. I think he could see the nausea wash over my face when he spoke of race. He talked more about gender, perhaps because it was more personal for me, perhaps because in my own bias, I was less sure. His favorite meme: "American society fell apart when women started wearing pants." Then there was the bit about women working outside of the home was destroying America. Birth control was essential for population control; abortion was simply wrong. It made it too easy to be a trollop. And who wants that? We debated abortion all the time, paddling in his fishing boat, driving around in his white Ford truck, which even back then I knew screamed out "Republican."

It was complicated. I loved him so much. For all the times he held me down and tickled me, for the silly voice he used to make me laugh, for the way he teased me, for sharing his love of nature with me, for the way he used to say, "I love you, baby." And yet, as I matured I came to learn that the Venn diagram of our values held rather a thin slice in common. One day, as we were driving in the Ford, out looking for nature, in round number 47 on abortion, he said, "You know, baby, I'm not a woman. Maybe if I were a woman, I'd feel differently. So I guess I can't really know for sure." I think in that moment, I knew more that he loved me than at any other. I knew how hard it was for him to give me this. I knew how uncomfortable he was giving away control. And I felt his love and respect for me as a person, every bit as valuable and important as he, himself. I loved him so much for that.

And today, on the anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Roe v Wade decision, which protected the rights of individual to make personal decisions based on their own beliefs, I remember my father.

He hated government interference and intrusion. Ranted all the time. Funny how much he agreed back then with the thinking of First Freedom First now:

Individuals may look to their own faith or other ethical considerations as they make these choices, but the government must never mandate that all Americans must follow the tenets of one religious viewpoint.

Funny how the more things change, the more they stay the same.

So for me, it comes down to something really simple. The way to honor and respect and love a woman is to trust her to make decisions about herself, her body, and her life. This is what is meant by everyone is of equal importance. "As long as men control women's sexuality and reproduction, women will never be equal."

So there it is. My response to the question, "Why are you pro-choice?"

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You know it. I know it. You want the postscript. You want it bad. Fine.

One night on the telephone, as we discussed Clinton's Democratic congress and my father launched attack number 8,042 on Hillary and her law career, I asked my father if he had ever read her legal writings. You see, I had. And I was able to explain why I thought she was brilliant. And correct. I was emboldened. I pushed it. I told him that if I ever had a daughter, I might choose to name her "Hillary" (lie). Further emboldened by his gasp, I pressed on. I told him that if I ever had a second, I might choose to name her "Eleanor" (another lie).

That is the last time we spoke. I guess that's where he drew the line.