Completely Unnecessary

In  September, the Bush Administration proposed new rules for Health and Human Services. These were an update from the previous rules they tried to push through in July. I wrote about it earlier, so I’m not going to rehash the whole thing.

The upshot is that it would radically change the list of procedures that health care providers are allowed to opt out from due to ‘conscious objections’.

Or rather, it obscures the definitions so as to make them both meaningless and so broad as to include everything from birth control to sterilization to IUDs.

In September, Planned Parenthood - among others - collected protest signatures and the Admin stopped moving forward. As they’re not supposed to make any new rule changes after Nov 1, it seemed as though they had given up on the rule changes.

Not so much!

Officials at the Health and Human Services Department said they intended to issue a final version of the rule within days. Aides and advisers to Mr. Obama said he would try to rescind it, a process that could take three to six months.

To avoid the usual rush of last-minute rules, the White House said in May that new regulations should be proposed by June 1 and issued by Nov. 1. The “provider conscience” rule missed both deadlines.

Under the White House directive, the deadlines can be waived “in extraordinary circumstances.” Administration officials were unable to say immediately why an exception might be justified in this case.

Unable to say ‘immediately’ or just unable to come up with a reason that might legitimately excuse this craven, 11th-hour move?

These 63 days until inauguration are seeming longer and longer.

How I miss the days when transition pranks consisted of Amy Carter leaving a two week old, half-baked cake in a White House oven for the Reagans to find.

Rather than, you know, fucking over women in all 50 states.

Vaguely Related

• Palin on Contraception
• Colorado Initiative Would Grant Personhood to Embryos

Palin’s widely anticipated stuff up on Supreme Court cases aired tonight.

The governor believes Roe v Wade should be left to the states because she’s ‘a Federalist’, but also believes there’s an inherent right to privacy in the Constitution.

I’ll leave that contradiction aside because I don’t care about Palin’s stance on abortion (and her verbal roulette in that clip probably doesn’t explain it that well anyway).

The anticipation had to do with Couric’s follow up. Palin notably couldn’t think of any other Supreme Court cases with which she disagreed - other than nameless ones that should be left to the states.

But as Jezebel commenter, lacey in ak, points out, at least one decision should have occurred to the governor. Perhaps Palin might have remembered that she filed an amicus brief in Exxon v Baker and then released a statement complaining about the decision.

That last part happened in June.

In other news, in the Senate today the bailout was strangely attached to the Paul Wellstone Mental Health Bill. Ezra Klein explains:

Tax bills have to originate in the House of Representatives. But the current thinking is that the Senate should pass a bailout bill to increase pressure on the House. So they needed to find some piece of legislation that had already passed the House but had not yet passed the Senate.

The 25 Nay votes are a strange mishmash of Senators from both sides of the aisle. It’s probably not often that Russ Feingold finds himself voting with Brownback, Sessions and Inhofe. (Also means that Feingold voted against the Wellstone bill, which must have killed him.) Dole made a bid to hang onto her Senate seat with her ‘no’ vote - who knows if it’ll work.

And, finally, the corruption trial of Senator Ted Sevens (R-AK) continues apace. Today, friend and renovator, Bill Allen, testified that while Stevens asked for an invoice, it was clear that Allen should never bill the senator for work done to ‘the chalet’.

Apparently Allen and Stevens were such close friends that they:

used to go to “boot camp” in the desert Southwest - where they would walk around, eating little and drinking only wine, “trying to get some pounds off.” [ADN via Mudflats]

I have no idea.

(Sounds pretty awesome though…)

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• Ted Stevens’ Trial - Already Amazing
• Palin and Couric - Sarah’s No Leo

Just finished watching the latest in the series of Palin/Couric interviews. You’d think at this point that Palin would just coldcock Couric anytime she saw her coming. But no.

Anyway, there was nonsense about gays (it’s a choice!), vague nonsense about feminism (everything’s equal!) and a fairly good explanation of her position on evolution in schools (she believes in creationism, but science is for science class - literally the best answer I’ve ever heard her give).

Things broke down a little bit during Couric’s question about Palin’s stance on emergency contraception (transcript from CBS):

Couric: Some people have credited the morning-after pill for decreasing the number of abortions. How do you feel about the morning-after pill?

Palin: Well, I am all for contraception. And I am all for preventative measures that are legal and save [sic - safe], and should be taken, but Katie, again, I am one to believe that life starts at the moment of conception. And I would like to see …

Couric: And so you don’t believe in the morning-after pill?

Palin: … I would like to see fewer and fewer abortions in this world. And again, I haven’t spoken with anyone who disagrees with my position on that.

Couric: I’m sorry, I just want to ask you again. Do you not support or do you condone or condemn the morning-after pill.

Palin: Personally, and this isn’t McCain-Palin policy …

Couric: No, that’s OK, I’m just asking you.

Palin: But personally, I would not choose to participate in that kind of contraception.

Okay, so what we have here is Palin not understanding how the morning-after pill (and contraception, more generally) works.

Like many forms of birth control, EC can either block ovulation or prevent fertilization - but it can also prevent implantation. If you believe life begins at conception, odds are that most forms of birth control - including EC - aren’t for you.

Not to mention that she’s ‘all for [contraception]‘, but ‘would not choose to participate’ in EC.

For the last time - EC is just a megahit of birth control.

If you’re pro-contraception, it makes no sense to be anti-EC. If you’re anti-EC, it doesn’t really cotton that you’re pro-contraception.

And finally, contraception is, of course, just about the easiest way to lower abortion rates.

Jezebel has the video embedded and more quotes from the interview.

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• Missouri Lawmakers Focus on Plan B
• Bush Admin Going Ahead with HHS Rule Changes

The Bush Administration is proposing changes to the way Health and Human Services deals with definitions, abortion and access.

Specifically, the new rules would require anyone receiving federal funding for health care to allow employees to refuse services to which they object.

The obvious target here is abortion. Or is it?

Senator Clinton and Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, point out in a NYT op-ed last week that the ‘obvious’ target masks the real concern.

Rules allowing medical professionals to opt out of abortions have been in place for 30 years.

The new rule would go further, ensuring that all employees and volunteers for health care entities can refuse to aid in providing any treatment they object to, which could include not only abortion and sterilization but also contraception.

This document is the update from the July version, which defined birth control IUDs as abortificants, but the wording is no so vague as to be the same thing.

Health care professionals are allowed to decide what is meant by ‘abortion’ - and would be allowed to refuse care on the basis of their own definitions.

The rules would also allow federal funding for so-called ‘pregnancy crisis centers’, which are established for the specific purpose of keeping women from having abortions.

(You know how they functioned in Minnesota when I was working up there? At least one ‘clinic’ was showing women fake ultrasounds and telling them they were too pregnant to an abortion.)

Public comment on the new rules are open until 25 September at midnight. Please click this link and add your name to the petition.

Links:
Blocking Care for Women [NYT Opinion]
HHS Attack on Women’s Health Care [Planned Parenthood Action Center]

Vaguely Related

• Colorado Initiative Would Grant Personhood to Embryos
• Bush Admin Memo: Birth Control Equals Abortion

See, here’s what I like about Australia.

Despite the fact that the Labor and Liberal parties usually sit on opposite sides of the fence, both know that it’s time for abortion actually become legal in Victoria.

Abortion procedures have been de facto legal for years - your doctor is likely to accept any reason for a procedure - but having an actual law that guarantees the right of Victorian women is an important step.

No woman should have to justify her decisions to a doctor, the State or anyone.

That’s what’s missing from the that cavalcade of legislation that is currently making it more and more difficult for American women to exercise their right to medical procedures deemed legal by their government.

It’s comforting to see both Premier John Brumby and Opposition Leader Ted Baillieu behind this legislation. It demonstrates the depth of support behind Victorian women and the confidence in their ability to make rational choices.

More importantly, it exemplifies the ability of Victorian officials to get behind commonsense legislation, despite partisan politics.

This legislation has been brewing for years, and full support behind those who will vote for it next week.

Link:
New Law to Give Abortion Right [The Age]

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• Bush Admin Memo: Birth Control Equals Abortion
• Quentin Bryce: Gender-Tagging the New Governor-General

Either leave office or leave us alone, Mr President.

A Bush Administration memo would expand the definition of abortion to include birth control pills and interuterine devices - which would bring them under the auspices of ‘conscience clauses’, allowing medical professionals to deny such items to women requesting them. Via Reuters:

“The Department proposes to define abortion as ‘any of the various procedures — including the prescription and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action — that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation,’” it said.

Since some pills and the IUDs prevent fertalized eggs from implanting, they would fall under this category.

I mean, I know I’m never going to get over the Bush Admin’s great idea of appointing a veterinarian as the head of the FDA’s Office of Women’s Health. But seriously - can you just leave us alone? Less than 200 days. Just go to Crawford. No one cares anymore; we’re not going to complain that you’re not doing your job.

Just go.

Via Jezebel and Reuters

Vaguely Related

• Colorado Initiative Would Grant Personhood to Embryos
• Bush Admin Going Ahead with HHS Rule Changes

There’s no better way to say this than has already been said:

On Tuesday the group Colorado for Equal Rights submitted 131,245 signatures to place an initiative on the November ballot that would define a fertilized embryo as a person. Voters will decide on the measure that would amend the state Constitution to extend a fertilized embryo equal rights and protections. It would define “any human being from the moment of fertilization” as a “person” for purposes of the state’s constitutional provisions “relating to inalienable rights, equality of justice and due process of law.”

Mother Jones notes that such an amendment might ‘trigger governmental investigations into miscarriages, restrict in-vitro fertilization by couples trying to conceive, and could limit birth-control methods.’

Aside from its glaring, rage-inducing absurdity and almost certain unconstitutionality, this initiative raises some amazing questions.

One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers, for instance, asks if she can move to CO and receive Social Security benefits sooner.

Could a woman be charged with manslaughter or reckless homicide for a miscarriage? Or, better yet, what if the family carries Accidental Death insurance? Given how many zygotes self-terminate, you could make a pretty penny just claiming based on statistics.

And what do we do if the fetus kills the mother, in childbirth or otherwise? Is it incumbent upon the state to try the infant for manslaughter? Can the father sue his newborn or fetus for loss of consortium, wages, etc?

And perhaps the most obvious question - how on Earth can anyone know when the moment of fertilization is? Outside of a science lab, it’s pretty darn unprovable. And even if a test was developed, I’m pretty sure it would involve the government asking a woman to put her feet in the stirrups. So let’s hope Colorado for Equal Rights has something to nix the Fourteenth, as well.

As recent years have shown, however, this initiative is perhaps just crazy enough to pass.

I mean, a veterinarian was selected by the Bush Administration to head up the Office of Women’s Health in 2005. (Alderson was quickly removed after a number of groups justifiably lost their minds.) Minnesota’s Right to Know laws required doctors to provide state-scripted information on abortion that defied medical science. Missouri lawmakers are trying to get Plan B regulated as an abortifacient.

Anyway ladies, I suggest looking into Accidental Death insurance, just in case. If we move to Colorado, natural self-termination might be the new sugardaddie.

H/T: Andrew Sullivan via Mother Jones

Vaguely Related

• It’s Purity Ball Season!
• Bush Admin Memo: Birth Control Equals Abortion

Missouri isn’t the best state in which to find yourself unhappily pregnant. But if some lawmakers get their way, many more women will find themselves in such dire straits.

The Kansas City Star reports:

Legislation presented to a House panel last week would classify emergency contraception as an abortion-inducing medication, contrary to the definition used by the Food and Drug Administration.

Leftie sites are sputtering with justified rage since, as many of them have pointed out for the millionth time, emergency contraception is not an abortifacient. It essentially works as a mega dose of birth control - either preventing ovulation, fertilization or a fertilized egg from implanting on the uterine wall.

The bill, should it pass, would also allow pharmacists to abstain (ha) from dispensing Plan B without fear of lawsuits or government regulation.

It seems like this bill won’t pass. Danger averted? Not really.

Here’s the problem: this is the more subtle ‘whittling away’ tactic that anti-choicers have been working on for some years. Knowing that they can’t get abortion outlawed, they’ll settle for 24-hour waiting periods and parental notification. For now. Once people are used to those ideas, they’ll push for more. [It's like what we're doing with civil unions, but terrible.]

But that’s abortion, right? Surely they wouldn’t come after your Ortho-Tri. Well, I wouldn’t be so sure. Getting rid of contraceptives is definitely on the agenda for some of these groups, and they’ll use the same tactics.

All they have to do is get Plan B classified as an abortion-inducing drug in one state. Once that happens, things will start to fall pretty quickly. Plan B is essentially what I said: a mega dose of the pill, minus the estrogen. If Plan B becomes classified as abortion-inducing, any pill containing levonorgestrel (the synthetic progesterone found in many pills, both monophasal and triphasal) will be easy prey.

It’s not a far step from allowing a pharmacist to deny you Plan B because it causes abortion to denying you the pill for the exact same reason.

And they know it.

This is a “First they came…” situation, and if it fails in Missouri, it will be tried elsewhere.

Feministing has info on how you can contact the Missouri Health Care Policy committee chair. He’s a doctor, so hopefully he won’t need a marvelous amount of convincing, but a few emails never hurt.

Links:
Missouri Bill Would Reclassify Morning-After Pill, Protect Pharmacies [Kansas City Star] - Love that headline by the way, poor pharmacies…
Analysis of HB1625 [NARAL]

Vaguely Related

• Palin on Contraception
• Dennis Byrne and the Pill

Monday is Ideological Conservative Commentary Day over at the Chicago Tribune. The columns by Chicago-based Dennis Byrne and nationally syndicated Charles Krauthammer usually leave me wringing my hands.

One of the nice things about reading the Trib online is that they’re pretty buried on the site, so I can miss them with zero effort. Sadly, when presented with the print edition, I am not so lucky. Headlines like, ‘Why Isn’t This Study on the Pill Heeded?‘ draw both my eye and ire.

Byrne’s argument is that a study published ‘more than a year ago’ by Dr Chris Kahlenborn linking contraceptive pills and breast cancer is getting short shrift in the media:

… I couldn’t find a single reference to it in the archives of the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times or this paper. The Associated Press appears not to have covered it. I couldn’t find a single mainstream media article about it in a Google search.

Byrne notes that Kahlenborn is ‘frustrated’ that he’s not getting ‘important information out to women’ that, according to his study, they’re much more likely to get breast cancer if they use the pill before pregnancy.

What Byrne doesn’t mention until the second to last paragraph is that Kahlenborn is - wait for it - anti-choice. Byrne questions, however, those who feel that ideology might have clouded Kahlenborn’s judgment:

…but what has that to do with his research? As for me, I am not opposed to contraception, oral or otherwise. I am not plotting to get the pill banned. I am not writing this column for hidden religious reasons. I am not saying that the Kahlenborn study is the last word; I’m not a scientist, so I can’t vouch for its methodology or conclusions. Just like the abortion/breast cancer study, I’m writing about it because people have a right to know about the existence of health information, even if it is contradictory to the given wisdom.

Byrne isn’t a scientist, so what could he know about methods? Yet he’s quick to argue at the beginning of his column that Kahlenborn’s study ‘employed an often-used medical research technique called “meta-analysis”‘. He seems to know enough about scientific methods to grant legitimacy to Kahlenborn’s techniques.

So let’s say you don’t read to the end of the article or, say, conduct a brief Google/Google Scholar search. You might never know that Kahlenborn’s work is cited extensively in the anti-contraceptive/anti-abortion literature promulgated by One More Soul, ‘a non-profit organization dedicated to spreading the truth about the blessings of children and the harms of contraception‘. (I’m going to go ahead and leave their copied links in there because they’re great.) Briefly, they’re against contraception for a number of reasons:

The first reason is that the use of contraception leads to abortion.

Also - and I know some of you think I make this stuff up, it’s in the Barrier Methods section - condoms have tiny holes that let the AIDS through.

Without that brief Google search, a Bryne reader might also not know that Kahlenborn’s ‘books’ (the first ‘book’ is a pamphlet), How the Pill and Other Contraceptives Work (1999) and Breast Cancer, Its Link to Abortion and the Birth Control Pill (2000) were both published by One More Soul.*

Kahlenborn might have moved up in the ranks - at least to getting a study published by Mayo - but clearly, clearly there is an ideology at work here. Perhaps those bad reporters at the NYT, et al did what I did - a five minute Google search - and decided that, Mayo or no, this wasn’t news.

Now, I’m no scientist, but I think that a legitimate scientist probably wouldn’t have his work published by an organization that cites a 1992 letter to the editor as proof that condoms have holes. As a scientist, looking to publish my work some seven years later, I would take this as empirical evidence that I should publish elsewhere. Unless, of course, I agreed with their ideas or couldn’t find anyone else to take my work.

Neither of these options makes me grant much legitimacy to Kahlenborn’s work then or now, especially in the face of numerous studies that demonstrate the opposite.

Mr Byrne, I know from your article that you did a Google search on Kahlenborn. Thanks for giving us all the facts - your commitment to the people’s ‘right to know’ is what makes you such a great columnist.

Update: As a legitimate scientist, I probably wouldn’t still be working with the crackpot ‘condoms have holes’ people after my study was released by Mayo. Here’s Kahlenborn’s pamphlet ‘ Newly revised and updated in September 2007′. It’s $0.35, but that drops to $0.21 if you buy 1000 or more.

*- should you wish to purchase Breast Cancer, Its Link to Abortion and the Birth Control Pill (and why wouldn’t you), I suggest buying it from One More Soul’s site for $5.95. The Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer - its other distributor - is selling it for $11.95! Oh, the savings!

Vaguely Related

• Palin on Contraception
• Missouri Lawmakers Focus on Plan B

Heh, House Republicans tried to turn the tables on the ol’ Democrats today. House Dem, presidential candidate and elfin scamp*, Dennis Kucinich, introduced a measure to impeach Cheney, and the Democrats were barely able to avoid discussing it.

What did the White House have to say about the possible impeachment of someone who isn’t part of the executive branch?

The White House, in a statement, said Democrats were shirking responsibilities on issues such as childrens’ [sic] health insurance “and yet they find time to waste an afternoon on an impeachment vote against the vice president. … This is why Americans shake their head in wonder about the priorities of this Congress.”

Someday, the people are going to come for you, my friends.

* - in uncute scamp-like behavior - did you know that until a week after announcing his 2004 presidential bid Dennis Kucinich was anti-choice? This includes voting to ban late term abortions without health of the mother stipulations and supporting the global gag rule. Far left indeed.

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