abortion
lborkowski | October 4, 2017We made it to October without letting Congressional Republicans ravage our healthcare system, so that's a relief. However, the fact that it's October also means funding for the Children's Health Insurance Program and federally qualified health centers has expired ... and Congress has been putting so much energy into trying to gut Medicaid and further restricting women's access to abortions that they neglected to renew funding for these two immensely popular bipartisan programs.
Instead of funding these programs because they're crucial sources of coverage and care for large portions of our…
kkrisberg | July 15, 2017In 2011, Texas legislators slashed the state’s family planning budget by 67 percent. The justification? To reduce abortions by defunding clinics associated with an abortion provider (read: Planned Parenthood). Now, it turns out Texas legislators actually accomplished the opposite: narrowing access to family planning services only led to more unplanned pregnancies and more abortions.
In a study that will soon be published in the Journal of Health Economics, researcher Analisa Packham found that in the years following the 2011 funding cuts, Texas’ teen birth rate went up by 3.4 percent, which…
oracknows | March 7, 2017Massive is the misinformation promulgated by the antivaccine movement, and many are its lies. For example, antivaxers claim that, in some way or other, vaccines cause autism, autoimmune diseases, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), cancer, and a wide variety of other conditions and diseases when there is no credible evidence that they do and lots of evidence that they don’t. One of the favorite tropes used by antivaxers to frighten parents out of vaccinating their children is known as the "toxins" gambit, in which antivaxers cite lists of scary-sounding ingredients in vaccines like…
lborkowski | January 30, 2017President Trump’s callous and short-sighted executive order restricting US entry for refugees and travelers from certain countries is rightfully getting a lot of attention, but it risks overshadowing another destructive thing he did for global health during his first week in office: reinstating and expanding the Mexico City Policy, also known more descriptively as the global gag rule. Trump’s adoption of this policy is even more reprehensible than it was for his Republican predecessors, for two reasons: First, he has broadened its scope so it appears to cripple not only family planning, but…
oracknows | November 29, 2016I’m always hesitant to write about matters that are more political than scientific or medical, although sometimes the sorts of topics that I blog about inevitably require it (e.g., the 21st Century Cures Act, an act that buys into the myth that to bring "cures" to patients faster we have to neuter the FDA and a retooled version of which is still being considered). This is one of those times. Yesterday, I woke up to the news that President-Elect Donald Trump had chosen Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) as his new Secretary of Health and Human Services. The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS),…
kkrisberg | November 1, 2016Celeste Monforton and I are currently in Denver at the American Public Health Association's (APHA) 2016 Annual Meeting and Exposition — the year’s largest gathering of public health professionals. The meeting is packed with hundreds of scientific sessions, leading public health researchers and new findings on just about any public health topic you can imagine. Below are some highlights of the past few days, courtesy the APHA Annual Meeting Blog.
Trees don’t just make neighborhoods pretty. They can also save lives: With flowers in the spring, lush green leaves in the summer and changing colors…
kkrisberg | October 28, 2016While health policy hasn’t been at the forefront of this year’s presidential election, the next person to sit in the White House could have a transformative effect on health care access, affordability and inequity. Of course, with so many variables in play, it’s hard to predict what either candidate could realistically accomplish on the health care front. However, a new report might provide some insightful clues.
Published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, the report complied results from 14 national public opinion polls from various sources and conducted as recently as…
oracknows | July 20, 2016I’ve frequently said that a tendency towards pseudoscience knows no political boundary. For example, antivaccine views, contrary to common belief, are not detectably more prevalent on the left than on the right, as I’ve discussed on more than one occasion. It’s just that for so many years, antivaccine beliefs were associated in the media with crunchy, back-to-nature lefties, and still are to some extent. (I’m talking to you Jill Stein.) However, last year the battle over SB 277, the new California law that eliminates nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates, and the Republican…
lborkowski | July 7, 2016The 5-3 Supreme Court decision in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt last week was a welcome step for women's health, but resulted in the removal of only some of the barriers many US women still face in accessing abortion services. At issue in the case was Texas law HB 2, which required abortion facilities to meet the standards of ambulatory surgical centers and providers to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of a facility. In the opinion of the Court, Justice Breyer explains "neither of these provisions offers medical benefits sufficient to justify the burdens upon…
lborkowski | January 20, 2016A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Maryn’s McKenna at Germination: Zika Virus: A New Threat and a New Kind of Pandemic
Kevin Drum in Mother Jones: My Right to Die: Assisted suicide, my family, and me
Jodi Jacobson at RH Reality Check: Four Facts Nancy Pelosi—and All ‘Pro-Choice’ Democrats—Should Know About Abortion
Sarah Brown in The Chronicle of Higher Education: Many Black Students Don’t Seek Help for Mental-Health Concerns, Survey Finds
David Epstein at ProPublica: The DIY Scientist, the Olympian, and the Mutated Gene
lborkowski | December 14, 2015A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Alana Semuels in The Atlantic: How Poor Single Moms Survive
Nina Martin of ProPublica interviews David Cohen: For Abortion Providers, a Constant Barrage of Personalized Harassment
Terry Fulmer at the Health Affairs Blog: Independence -- It's What Older People Want
Charles D. Ellison at The Root: Wake Up, Black People. The Supreme Court Is Poised to Drop a Bomb on You
Vanessa Heggie in The Guardian: World AIDS Day: How AIDS activists changed medical research (also, it's not a new publication, but World AIDS Day was a good opportunity to re-read this…
oracknows | July 26, 2015Many are the lies and epic is the misinformation spread by the antivaccine movement. For instance, they claim that vaccines cause autism, autoimmune diseases, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), cancer, and a wide variety of other conditions and diseases when there is no credible evidence that they do and lots of evidence that they don't. One particularly pernicious myth, designed to appeal (if you can call it that) to religious fundamentalists, is the claim that vaccines are made using fetal parts. This particular claim reared its ugly head again in the context of a propaganda campaign…
lborkowski | October 20, 2014A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Nancy Shute at NPR's Shots blog: Nurses Want to Know How Safe is Safe Enough with Ebola
Maryn McKenna at Superbug: What Would Keep Ebola from Spreading in the US? Investing in Simple Research Years Ago. (Check out the last paragraph for links to other great recent pieces on the disease.)
Atul Gawande at Slate: No Risky Chances: The conversation that matters most
Catherine Rampell in the Washington Post: Is sex only for rich people?
Laurie Abraham in Elle: Abortion: Not easy, not sorry
Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic: To Raise, Love, and Lose a Black…
gregladen | July 20, 2013This was one of the many great panels at FtBConscience, this panel hosted by Miri of Brute Reason and organized by Biodork.
A panel of reproductive rights activists come together to discuss access to abortion in current events , clinic escorting and some common religious and non-religious arguments against abortion. Our panel consists of clinic escorts - including one panelist who volunteered before FACE laws went into effect (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances), health care professionals, an author and several bloggers who write about reproductive rights. Our panelists hail from…
lborkowski | January 22, 2013Forty years ago, the US Supreme Court decided in Roe v. Wade that states could not ban first-trimester abortions. Wonkblog's Sarah Kliff takes a look at what's been happening since; her charts document the decline in the number of US abortion providers from the mid-1970s to early 2000s (holding steady since then); an increase in state abortion restrictions, with 92 enacted in 2011 alone; and an increase in the proportion of abortion patients who are low-income and minority. Perhaps most surprising to those of us already aware of these trends is the result of a recent survey: only 44% of…
gregladen | November 12, 2012This is the year of the woman in the US Congress and elsewhere, despite the best efforts of some to make sure that the opposite happened.
This is the year in which the Right Wing carried out the most anti-woman campaign ever since suffrage, or at least, so it would appear, along with a continued attack on non-hetero persons. A defining moment in this campaign occurred in February, when the Republican controlled House carried out a nearly comical hearing on women’s reproductive rights.
Three Democrats walked out of a House Oversight and Government Reform hearing on religious liberty and the…
denialism | August 22, 2012Everyone has heard about Akin's comments about "legitimate rape" and the push now coming from the GOP to get him out of the race. But is this really fair or ideal? The problem with removing Akin from the race over this is that his gaffe was not just one exposing his scientific ignorance, but because it was a Kinsley gaffe. That is, it's a gaffe because it unintentionally revealed the truth.
I'm not saying that his medieval medical hypothesis has any scientific validity, he is after all just parroting pro-life misinformation spread to attack scientific data about the frequency of pregnancy…
denialism | March 21, 2012In the continual spread of assaults on women's reproductive freedom in the wake of the 2010 tea party movement, another state, Idaho, is legislating women receive unnecessary and invasive medical procedures prior to obtaining abortion.
This is part of an unprecedented effort at the state level to restrict reproductive rights, and in 2011 a record number of these measures have passed.
And it won't stop here, as we've seen in Georgia, they are trying to pass a law to force women to carry all 20 week gestations to term, even if the fetus is dead. And if you think that's creepy, Georgia isn't…
denialism | March 13, 2012In a debate on the floor of the Georgia State house over a bill to force women to bring all pregnancies after 20 weeks to term, even in cases of dead or non-viable fetus, this Georgia representative reaches a new low. State Rep Terry England seems to be suggesting pigs and cows do it, why can't humans?
Rep. Terry England compares women to cows, pigs and chickens. from Bryan Long on Vimeo.
Aside from this genius on-the-farm reasoning of Mr England, the failures of reasoning and misrepresentations of scientific knowledge engaged in to pursue this legislation are many.
The legislation is…
denialism | February 28, 2012Pennsylvania is poised to enact a ultrasound bill even more stringent than Virginia's failed bill.
Even as the transvaginal ultrasound bill in Virginia was causing national outrage, Pennsylvania conservatives were quietly pushing a even more restrictive abortion bill. The legislation is designed with so many difficult and differing restrictions that long-time abortion policy analyst Elizabeth Nash at the Guttmacher Institute told Raw Story, "I've never seen anything like it."
In addition to mandating the much-maligned transvaginal ultrasound requirements since rejected by the state of…