Family Planning Issues

NFPRHA Launches Ad Campaign Against Bush's Anti-contraception Regulations

The Administration has issued new regulations they claim will protect workers, as a ruse to wage war on mainstream family planning services like counseling and contraception. Existing law carefully balances protections for individual religious liberty and patients' access to family planning services. |MORE

Calif. AG, Family Planning Advocates Say Proposed HHS Rule Would Overturn State Birth Control Law

Aug. 21, 2008

California Attorney General Jerry Brown (D) and some family planning advocates on Wednesday [8/20/08] said that a draft HHS regulation would prohibit the state from enforcing the state law requiring insurance coverage for birth control to women, the San Francisco Chronicle reports (Egelko, San Francisco Chronicle, 8/21). Also on Wednesday, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and MoveOn.org Political Action submitted a petition with more than 325,000 signatures urging HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt to withdraw the draft rule from consideration, ABC News reports (Barrett, ABC News, 8/20). | MORE

An affront to women and families

A last-ditch effort to redefine birth control as abortion isn't a matter of conscience; it's just unconscionable

Michael Leavitt feels misunderstood, or so he hints on his blog. The Bush-appointed secretary of health and human services isn't sure how some people, somehow, got the crazy idea that the government intends to redefine birth control as a form of abortion. READ MORE in The Oregonian's editorial 8/12/08

Redefining abortion:
Federal officials considering a rule allowing health care workers to refuse to provide contraceptives

The Bush administration has consistently opposed providing funding for international birth control programs, but until now has not tried to limit the use of contraceptives inside the United States.

That could change in the president's final months in office. Read more: Houston Chronicle editorial 8/10/08

Birth Control: They're at it again

The Bush administration has heard the outrage over a proposed regulation that would dishonestly define birth control as abortion. Read MORE in SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL 8/10/08

Treating the Pill as Abortion,
Draft Regulation Stirs Debate

Set aside the fraught question of when human life begins. The new debate: When does pregnancy begin?

The Bush Administration has ignited a furor with a proposed definition of pregnancy that has the effect of classifying some of the most widely used methods of contraception as abortion. Read more: Wall Street Journal 7/31/08.

Keroack resigns

Assistant Secretary for Population Affairs Keroack Resigns Because of Unspecified Action Against His Private Medical Practice

Deputy Assistant Secretary for HHS' Office of Population Affairs Eric Keroack on Thursday [March 29] announced that he will resign from the post due to an unspecified action taken against his private medical practice in Massachusetts by state Medicaid officials, the Washington Post reports.
"It's a good day for women's health," said Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. "Keroack was unqualified to run the nation's family planning program. . . . The nation's family planning program should be run by a champion for women's health and safety."

Dr. Keroack was named to the post in November 2006 "amidst a firestorm of negative press over his credentials, or lack thereof," according to NFPRHA (the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association). "Keroack was a controversial choice to oversee the Title X national family planning program, based on a record showing him to be an ardent anti-choice ob-gyn, vocal supporter of abstinence-only education, and even an opponent of contraception."

See editorials below denouncing Bush's original decision to place this opponent of contraception in charge of the federally funded domestic family planning program.

More Uninsured Women of Reproductive Age

Guttmacher Institute reports that in the past five years, the "proportion of women of reproductive age covered by one-third...Yet, this increase -- of nearly two million women -- was matched by an increase in the proportion of reproductive-age women who were uninsured." For full article and state by state statistics, see Guttmacher's report online.
Implications are manifold when you consider the number of women without coverage for health care of any sort: no contraception, no prenatal or delivery services, no STD detection or treatment. In New York State that means three-quarters of a million!

Appeals Court Says: Railroad's Policy To Not Provide Coverage for Contraceptives Is OK

In a controversial decision on March 15, 2007 the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis found that Union Pacific's policy of providing no coverage for contraceptives for female employees or female members of employees' family does not constitute discrimination against women. See further.

• "For 5 million American women, Keroack's appointment is a grave medical mistake," pronounces the Houston Chronicle in a strongly worded editorial November 28 criticizing President Bush's "absurd and irresponsible" choice for director of family planning programs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services a physician who seeks to "dissuade women from choosing birth control or abortion."

• Budget Proposal Figures Show Cuts in Funding for International Family Planning Programs despite increased need.
  -->-->Read Further

• After first denying any political motives, the Food and Drug Administration last week finally gave up all pretenses surrounding the eyebrow-raising move last year wherein it rejected the advice of its own medical panel to make the so-called "morning-after" contraception pill more easily accessible to girls and women. -->-->Read Further