“I stand for a life free of shame for all little girls.”

“I stand for happy, healthy children–no matter their size.”

“I stand against social stigma and the right to be happy just as you are.”

These are powerful statements, and just a few of the many “STANDards” (above right) assembled by Marilyn Wann and other fat acceptance activists in opposition to a problematic public-health campaign initiated by Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta (above left).

The controversial Children’s Healthcare campaign, called Strong4Life, features posters and billboards depicting depressed-looking fat children with slogans like, “It’s hard to be a little girl, if you’re not.”

These poster children, it turns out, are actually healthy actors and models. They do not have the health problems referenced in some of the ads–a fact which further contradicts the message that all fat children are unhealthy and unhappy. But the ads legitimize the bullying and shaming that fat children regularly face, while reinforcing the perception that change is needed not in the culture but in the individual.

The “STANDards” are just one among many forms of protest aimed at the Strong4Life campaign, but they are of particular interest for feminists. Penned by individuals (at this point mostly women) the messages bring into focus some important patterns in fat shaming.

No one disagrees with the aim of creating healthy kids. Yet many of the “STANDards” point out that an obsession with the number on the scale and a fear that one is taking up too much space are unhealthy. Those who’ve created “STANDards” are fighting back against the messages of shame, blame and ridicule being put forth under the banner of health improvement. Another “STANDard” reads: “I stand against harming fat children. Hate does not equal health.”

Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta Board president Doug Hertz, has heard the criticism and remains firm. He offered an op-ed piece in the Atlanta Journal Constitution on January 12 saying that the campaign gets people talking about a topic that deserves attention. He offered an unreferenced statistic that 80 percent of those who’ve seen the ads agree with the approach and 11 percent don’t.

This high approval rating, if accurate, stands to reason, given that the ads are playing on entrenched cultural values that cast fat people as deserving shame, and that position certain bodies as deviant–in need of correction. These sentiments may be comfortable and familiar, but they have nothing to do with children’s health. As it turns out, fat bodies are not linked with poor health either; a poor diet and sedentary lifestyle are. Anyone, fat or thin, can suffer from lack of healthy food and exercise.

I don’t think this type of fat shaming is what Michelle Obama had in mind when she initiated the Let’s Move! campaign, which celebrated its two-year anniversary yesterday. The four main tenets of that campaign are not focused on fat kids, nor their presumably incompetent caregivers. Instead, Let’s Move’s precepts are:

1) Get parents more informed about nutrition and exercise.

2) Improve the quality of food in schools.

3) Make healthy foods more affordable and accessible for families.

4) Focus more on physical education.

And yet, what some have renamed the “war on childhood obesity” has unwittingly validated some familiar forms of gender discrimination. In the discussion of obesity, we can’t ignore the longstanding precedent that women’s bodies must be controlled, shrunk to near invisibility and reshaped to fit a social standard of beauty that few can healthily maintain. We also can’t ignore the cultural standard for placing blame on children’s caregivers (mostly their mothers) for their poor health and poverty.

Many of the “STANDards” point out that health and body size do not correlate–but discrimination and body size do. In her recent book Fat Shame: Stigma and Fat Body in American Culture (NYU Press, 2011), Amy Erdman Farrell draws on a wide range of sources–including popular literature, political cartoons, advertisements and physician’s manuals–to present the case that our historic denigration of fatness emerged long before it was linked to health concerns. Her work also focuses on feminism’s relationship to fatness, and its intersections with other forms of body stigma. Farrell points out that those who seek to be rid of stigmatized identities–whether related to gender, race, ethnicity or class–will often take up the cause of weight loss and fat hatred in order to validate their own claims to normalcy.

The Stand4EveryBody campaign also addresses these intersections, but from a personal and political rather than scholarly standpoint. Some of the photos accompanying the “STANDards” show fat bodies, some thin, some disabled, some young, some old. They show people of different races and different physical presentations. Check them out! There are instructions for submitting your own “STANDard” as well.

And go here for a more comprehensive snapshot of activities countering the Strong4Life campaign. Fighting fat shame and stigma is a big job, and these efforts have the potential of reaching beyond a single media campaign. And yes, the pun was intended.

Sign here to tell Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta to stop fat shaming in their Strong4Life campaign!

 Top left: Photo from Stand4Life anti-childhood-obesity campaign; Top right: Photo from Stand4EveryBody anti-fat-shaming campaign.

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To restore its credibility, Komen needs to build more bridges with the feminist movement. An easy place to start? Ribbons.

Each October, we see a parade of ribbons–the pink ribbons of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month and the purple ribbons of National Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

I’ve worked in many domestic violence shelters and prevention programs. Every September, in preparation for the month ahead, staff and volunteers brought out our glue guns and pins, spending hours creating and folding purple ribbons to raise community awareness. This is done between answering the hotline, facilitating support groups and finding other ways to assist the women, children and men who came to us for help.

Yet come October, our communities are awash in a sea of pink, with the occasional splash of purple. Staff and volunteers distribute our purple ribbons as best we could, but our efforts always pale in comparison. Breast cancer awareness groups seemed to have more staff, more volunteers, more funding, more organization–and more societal acceptance of breast cancer as a priority.

All of us supported breast cancer awareness and research. Most of us knew someone with breast cancer–some colleagues of mine were breast cancer survivors themselves. But it was frustrating to see the disparity between the issues; I began jokingly to call Komen the “Pink Juggernaut.”

But I realize now that our two groups have quite a bit in common, besides sharing a month. Both domestic violence and breast cancer predominantly affect women. Both have been historically underfunded. Both suffer from common myths and misconceptions. Most of all, both have a major detrimental effect on women’s health.

Instead of competing every October, why not work together? Instead of choosing either pink or purple ribbons, why not distribute ribbons that are half pink and half purple?

Across the country, cash-strapped shelters are closing their doors and laying off staff. Komen could offer grant money for shelters who use the pink/purple ribbons and for breast cancer awareness groups that do the same.

Komen’s leaders have an opportunity this month to launch the pink-and-purple ribbon: the World Conference for Women’s Shelters in Washington, DC. They can follow up at the International Conference on Sexual Assault, Domestic Violence and Stalking this April in San Diego, and the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence Conference this July in Denver, bringing ribbons and support to each.

As Katha Pollitt wrote in The Nation:

Komen miscalculated by thinking its base cares only about breast cancer: In fact, those women in pink t-shirts and sneakers, raising their thousands upon thousands of dollars a year for breast cancer research, understand quite well that women’s health means more than tumor-free breasts. If Komen understood that but thought–and maybe still thinks–it can deceive those activists … it will dwindle and die.

If Komen wants to prove its commitment to women’s health, the pink-and-purple ribbon could go a long way.

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Although we all know abortion is a politically polarizing issue, Planned Parenthood has generally been well-accepted by those of us who advocate for women’s health because of the array of sexual health and cancer screening services that it provides to women, particularly low-income and uninsured women. Abortion services account for only about 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s patient care each year–although you wouldn’t know that by reading some of the attacks against Planned Parenthood from anti-abortion organizations. In their call for Komen to withdraw their support, they’ve referred to Planned Parenthood as “the nation’s largest abortion mill”. These anti-abortion groups celebrated Komen’s decision.

After many years as a breast-cancer activist, when I heard the news, I was not surprised. It felt like one more in a series of disappointments from the largest and most financially successful breast cancer organization. Komen has long seemed more concerned with their corporate branding than with supporting other breast cancer organizations. And despite the science-driven move by smaller breast cancer organizations to further investigate the causes of breast cancer and warn women against the potential harms of chemicals like BPA, Komen continued to downplay the risks.

Although I wasn’t surprised, I still wondered why Komen made this particular decision. Komen states that they have a new policy that forbids them from providing funds to organizations that are under Congressional investigation. The policy comes just in time to apply to Planned Parenthood, the target of an investigation by Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) into the use of federal funds by the organization–which both Democrats and pro-choice organizations have dismissed as an ideologically-driven witch hunt. While Komen didn’t attribute their decision to political pressure from anti-abortion groups, the organization has been under attack by such groups since launching the Planned Parenthood partnership in 2005. Even more interesting, and not discussed in the AP coverage of the decision, Komen recently hired Karen Handel as their Senior Vice President, who in her unsuccessful 2010 run for governor of Georgia was adamant about her anti-abortion position and opposition to Planned Parenthood.

None of those potential explanations make me feel any better about the decision. The truth is that in discontinuing their funding relationship with Planned Parenthood, Komen is taking a financially small (for their budget) but symbolically significant step away from supporting women’s health.

When I express disillusionment with Komen, others often respond, “At least they are doing something.” But each time Komen takes a step back from supporting women’s health in what seems to be another business decision, I find it harder and harder to support them in any way. While many may think that breast cancer is an apolitical women’s health issue–one that is pretty in pink and easy for all political parties to support–it isn’t. Breast cancer is tied to broader politically controversial issues like universal insurance coverage for preventive health care for women, including mammograms and pap smears. The much higher breast cancer death rates for black and low-income women demand that all breast cancer advocates support affordable and accessible screening for women, so that early detection is possible for everyone. Finally, the growing concern about environmental links to breast cancer suggests that we have to be able to demand government regulation of potentially hazardous chemicals.

Advocates need to work together and support each other, particularly during hard economic and political times. Komen once again has demonstrated that they are not advocates for women’s health, they are advocates for Komen. The good news is that we can switch to  supporting other breast cancer organizations that prioritize women’s health and work in coalitions. I continue to follow Komen for the Cure’s work, and I hope that at some point I will see them make decisions for the right reasons.

Support Planned Parenthood and double your dollars’ impact: The Ms. Foundation has announced that for all donations they receive up to $20,000, they will send a matching amount to Planned Parenthood’s Breast Cancer Screening funds. You can give here.

Photo from Flickr user cliff1066™ under Creative Commons 2.0

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Komen claims to be withholding funds because of new criteria barring it from providing grants to organizations that are under investigation by local, state or federal authorities. In and of itself, that is odd. What is stranger, however, is the 2011 hiring of Karen Handel–who was openly anti-Planned Parenthood–to the position of Senior Vice President of Public Policy for the organization. And, adding to an already questionable management decision, Komen put her in the position to establish their foundation’s policy.

They must have had a reason for hiring her. I can’t imagine what it was, though.

However, the organization has been confronted with anti-abortion pressure before, but not given in. So why cave now? What’s different beyond change in management?

The likely answer: money.

Susan G. Komen is funded, as you probably know, through numerous relationships with consumer brand companies. Come October we are swathed in pink thanks to Komen’s partnerships with Coca Cola (its “Minute Maid Pink Lemonade”), Yoplait (“Save Lids Save Lives”) and dozens of other companies making everything from pink hand tools (who doesn’t love a powder pink power drill?) to Tory Burch puffer jackets. Their sponsors are multinational corporations who have tied in with Komen to show affinity with women—the primary purchasers of their products.

I suspect that not only anti-abortion factions, but also corporate sponsors, pressured Komen. Nothing causes a business to stop in its tracks faster than the fear of a) losing money, and b) bad publicity. It is not that anti-choicers have so much influence on Komen; it’s that they can have so much influence on Komen’s sponsors.

As I write in my forthcoming book, Compassion, Inc.: How Corporate America Blurs the Line Between What We Buy, Who We Are and Those We Help (University of California Press, April), corporate funding of social causes via product purchases has been increasing at a disquieting rate. Called cause marketing, cause-related marketing or sometimes “corporate social responsibility,” these campaigns allow corporations to back social issues from women’s health to education to sustainability.

While these campaigns can do good, there are also considerable downsides to using the consumer marketplace to fund nonprofits. Beyond making people feel that purchasing say, a pink product, can replace a direct donation, the wider concern is the impact on the system of nonprofit funding. For example, if a campaign does not work to drive sales, the corporate sponsor can drop one non-profit for another that might be more beneficial to its bottom line. Conversely, any negative press connected to a corporation can reflect badly on the charity and hurt its donations. Perhaps most disturbing is that corporations support “female friendly” non-controversial causes like education, poverty and homelessness, and health (heart health in the form of red dresses and breast cancer in the form of pink ribbons) while eschewing controversial ones (Planned Parenthood) or ones that can’t be made visually appealing (like Alzheimer’s disease). In this instance, corporations may have become concerned about Komen’s connection to Planned Parenthood. Anti-choicers have grown increasingly savvy in using online petitions and social media to warn corporations away from reproductive-rights causes.

Thankfully, social media works both ways. You, too, can tell corporate sponsors that you will pull your business if they support Komen’s decision. You can go to Credo and sign the petition. You can tweet and retweet support for funding of Planned Parenthood under the hashtags #standwithPP and #occupythecure. I assure you corporate sponsors will get the message.

In the end, this snafu should be filed under “unintended consequences” because Joan Walsh of Salon.com got it right: Komen has fundamentally hurt their brand—the heart and soul of their business. This might not be a brand mistake on the magnitude of New Coke—particularly if they reverse their decision—but it isn’t too far from it given the current activity on Twitter about Komen. If they don’t reverse course, I suspect there will a whole lot fewer Yoplait lids licked next fall.

Support Planned Parenthood and double your dollars’ impact: The Ms. Foundation has announced that for all donations they receive up to $20,000, they will send a matching amount to Planned Parenthood’s Breast Cancer Screening funds. You can give here.

 Photo from Flickr user WeNews under Creative Commons 2.0.

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It’s Trust Women Week! Nearly 40 years ago, abortion was legalized in the United States. To mark the occasion, Lola McClure, a registered nurse, interviewed Dr. Nancy Stanwood, an obstetrician/gynecologist, abortion provider, mother, and board member with the Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health.

Hello Dr. Stanwood, it’s wonderful to meet you today! I knew I would like you instantly when I saw that you were wearing a zebra print shirt under your lab coat; I thought, “Dr. Nancy Stanwood is cool.” I guess that I’ll start there: why is the only 100% true stereotype in medicine that people who work in reproductive health are the coolest super-smart people who have excellent senses of humor and are always clinically current and up to date on evidence?

[Laughs] That’s a great question. I think there are a couple different pieces to that. I think those of us who feel prompted to help women in this way, and feel capable of doing this work and handling the controversy that comes with it, have a certain baseline balance and sense of humor. I think the second thing you asked—being up to date on evidence—I think all people are hopefully out there to be excellent doctors, no matter what we do, but I know with myself that I was raised with the five-P rule: Prior Preparation Prevents Poor Performance.

Whoa.

That’s why I’m in family planning! To plan. Because I think planning is good and healthy.

Being prepared, doing the right thing, and doing it well are what matter. I think a lot of us [abortion providers] sense that extra need to do it twice as well as everybody else. It’s like those women in the ’70s and ’80s: to be able to do everything the boys can do but twice as fast.

There still persists to this day almost 40 years after Roe this perception that any doctor who would do abortions on a regular basis—not the casual, four patients once a year, but those who make it a part of their integrated practice—that they must be quacks or bad doctors. There’s this stigma of the abortionist that—two generations later—still looms large. We feel like we need to prove all that much more that we’re caring, thoughtful, educated physicians who think carefully about what we do for our patients, how we counsel them, how we understand the incredible delicacy of this issue, and how we recognize the privilege it is to help women in this way.

There’s the question of how your work factors into your life, especially with pro-life friends and coworkers. How has the bigger “us versus them” manifested for you personally? How do you navigate what you do versus the fact that you have to, you know, live your life?

Day by day I think: what is the venue? What are the upsides and downsides to talking about my work? Certainly, you know, I have colleagues and acquaintances who know what I do. But in the work sphere I carry the title, I do the work, and I don’t necessarily have to keep outing myself with people. It’s who I am and what I do at work. It’s more in the social sphere … you’re out meeting with some friends and you just want to have cocktails and eat some good food. So you don’t want to—invest the energy in your advocacy work in your downtime. But there are times when it feels like the right, necessary thing to do, especially if conversation is going in the direction of “pro life, pro choice” and people are saying crazy stuff. Wrong stuff! I feel obliged to speak up—but in my downtime, I don’t necessarily seek that conflict.

I read recently something to the tune of, “Roe was so important, but rich women could always go to Puerto Rico or England and get a safe abortion.” I absolutely see this happening again, especially since the first reason people seem to have is often a financial … I’m curious about what you think about that—how even though abortion is “legal,” the distribution of access is so much along class lines.

Just to be a little historical here, it was that burden of morbidity, mortality, disease, and death that fell on the poor who couldn’t get a safe abortion illegally that led to the activism in the medical community to decriminalize abortion. I think theoretically, 39 years later, part of what’s happened is that not only can rich women get an abortion more easily, but they can get birth control more easily as well. So what I’ve seen is the proportion [of women] who are poor having abortions is increased. That disparity exists in access to reproductive healthcare in general, too. The most effective methods of contraception, like IUDS and implants, are unfortunately more expensive, and those can be out of reach.

So then I think recognizing the increasing disparity is very important, and recognizing that when those women are not able to get what they need through safe channels, some of them do unsafe things. Fortunately, it’s still relatively rare in the US, but there are reports of self-induced abortion and of women going to clinicians who aren’t well trained, and it’s harkening back to the pre-Roe era. The fundamental issue, again, is that making abortion less available doesn’t stop it from happening, it just means that more women suffer and die. It’s that simple. And that, unfortunately, is not a part of the public consciousness around abortion anymore, because it’s been safe and legal and accessible for the majority of women for the past 39 years. In that way, we can’t necessarily use that argument anymore, because people don’t necessarily remember “Oh yeah, I remember when Aunt Millie died, it was all hush-hush and 10 years later I found out she had an unsafe abortion. That’s why my cousins grew up with my brother and sister.” That story happened in that era. I don’t think that discussion hits anybody at the visceral level anymore, but it’s still important to make the point.

I think that what might replace that visceral reaction in the age of legal abortion is speaking very plainly about your own experiences…because there’s still so much silence around it as an experience that actually happens to people that if you just talk about it, you’re doing so much good already.

Along those lines, it’s sometimes sadly easy to help my patients become grateful.

Women come in expecting to be judged, treated impolitely, and degraded, and if you show them even the slightest bit of normal human courtesy—not even going to the point of affirming your trust in them, and your belief that they’re doing the best they can—it’s so easy to make them grateful. Because sadly, they expect to be disrespected. They expect to be treated shamefully.

Or they’re being punished. Or like they should act like they’re going to a funeral.

Part of the way I envision it when we talk about “when does it feel safe, or good, or worthwhile to speak out and step out of the silence, or the closet”—the times when I do that, one of the things I envision is that all of my patients are standing behind me. I have this big group of patients standing behind me and they want me to share what I know, because they can’t. And it’s that much more important, for their sake, that I let people know the truth, that aside from what we talked about, we doctors who do abortions are not just “abortionists,” that we’re thoughtful, caring, compassionate people who have chosen this work because we want to, not because we want to do anything or else or that we’re in it for the quick buck. That we have made a conscious, moral, ethical decision that this is important. [...] I think the flipside there is there’s this narrative of women who have abortions that goes along with the welfare-queen narrative of the ’80s. The idea that these are fallen women, women who allowed their sexuality to run rampant. This incredibly negative, demeaning perception that also has a lot of sexism, racism, classism in it—it’s all the isms tied in together. For me to share the stories of my patients and portray them accurately, to let people know that’s not who we’re talking about here—we’re talking about your mother, sister, daughter. People you know who are thoughtful, careful, compassionate, and doing the best that they can with what they have. It’s that idea of: how can we get our society to trust women, and to realize that this is something that women know best, and that needs to remain private, in the sphere of the doctor-patient relationship?

Did you see how in 2011 they enacted 135 provisions that restricted abortion—that graph that goes like that. [draws air squiggly line with finger, then points straight up]

I’ve seen the same graph.

One of the things that seem to be moving is policing practice—the “demand” side instead of the supply side, laws like waiting periods. I’m thinking about the Texas ultrasound law, or something like reading scripts to patients with medically inaccurate lies in them. I’d like to talk about that—it’s very fascinating to me because I can’t imagine working in a clinic in Texas right now.

Restrictions that are placed on medical practice within abortion care—and only in abortion care, singled out and stigmatized within medicine—are because there’s this presumption that we’re not doing it well, that’s part of it, and there’s the harassment factor to scare physicians away or make it harder to do their job.

Specifically to the requirement that a woman would need to see ultrasound images before having an abortion—I think I can sort of understand what the anti-choice side thinks they’re doing. They think that women don’t understand, and that it’s going to change their minds. But in my experience, that’s just not the case. Women know why they feel the need to have an abortion, and seeing an ultrasound image doesn’t change the facts of their lives. They don’t feel ready for a baby, and having an ultrasound doesn’t suddenly make them ready. Again, it comes back to that respect for the responsibility of motherhood and the wish to do it well. It’s misguided to say that being shown an ultrasound will change your whole life. No! It won’t! In many cases this is a very difficult choice, let alone for people who wanted the pregnancy but now have to terminate.

And I think that it’s important to see that even if abortion were no longer safe and legal, women would still do it. Which is why thinking about the anniversary of Roe v. Wade … my entire medical career has been after Roe. I have to think back to the things that my mentors taught me in residency—the old graybeards who were almost all men, but who became ardent feminists when they saw what was happening to women, and who advocated for the decriminalization of abortion. In medicine, if something is an intern’s task, it means it’s kind of, repetitive, not particularly important, kind of menial. And what interns end up doing is sometimes telling of how things are considered to be important in medicine. I had an old graybeard attending in residency who told a story from his residency, pre-Roe, in an inner-city hospital in Detroit. The intern every morning had to mix up the IV pressors for the women who would come in septic after an abortion, and they would use these pressors to avoid dying. The ward where they put them—gallows humor, you have to deal somehow—they called the septic tank. And that’s what he saw as a trainee. He saw women incredibly sick and incredibly maimed, dying, and dead. All because of their determination and recognition of “I am not ready to be a mother. I cannot do this.” Women will take really  frightening risks when they don’t have access to safe care.

Let’s say, thought experiment. Let’s say Roe v. Wade got overturned. There’d be 1.5 million women who had been seeking abortions who can’t have a safe one. Someone will have an unsafe one and will die or be damaged for life; some women will have the child and not be capable of taking care of it. And we know that women who have unplanned pregnancies who go on to deliver have a higher risk of complications in pregnancy, high rate of pre-term birth, a higher rate of the children having behavioral difficulty, poor achievement, cycles of poverty, domestic violence. And the whole idea that somehow adoption can solve it all is just not how the American public thinks. Only 1% of women with an unplanned pregnancy go forward with adoption in the US—very, very small. And I hear it from my patients for all different reasons: they never could do it, the interesting thing they say is that they don’t trust anybody else to raise their child. Will the child be loved? Will the child be well cared for? Again, it gets to the idea that they understand how important motherhood is—I don’t necessarily see out there the American public ready to adopt 1 million babies. So just from a practical point of view, if you do a thought experiment of making it illegal or ridiculously more restricted than it is now, more women will die, more families will suffer, and that’s not good. That is not a moral good.

Read the rest of this interview at The Hairpin.

Mark the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade by taking part in the Trust Women Online March to display your support for women’s reproductive rights.

Photo from 2004 March for Women’s Lives in Washington, D.C. from Flickr user dbking under Creative Commons 2.0

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The conclusion? Having an abortion does not increase the risk of mental health problems. “The best current evidence,” according to the Academy, “suggests that it makes no difference to a woman’s mental health whether she chooses to have an abortion or to continue with the pregnancy.”

A commentary on the study published in the December 17th of the British Medical Journal, The Lancet notes:  “Past studies on the effect of an induced abortion on mental health have been mixed in terms of their quality, findings, and interpretation. Some have shown no harm while others have found associations with mental disorders.”

Last week, the world’s largest, most comprehensive systematic review on mental health outcomes of abortion was published by the UK Academy of Medical Royal Colleges (AMRC). The review claimed to provide a definitive answer: having an abortion does not increase the risk of mental health problems.

According to the Academy’s own statement, the review’s Steering Group and the National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health (NCCMH) at the Royal College of Psychiatrists (NCCMH) “carried out a systematic and comprehensive search of the literature and identified 180 potentially relevant studies published between 1990 and 2011.”

The Steering Group was careful to ensure only the best quality evidence was used, so all studies were subject to multiple quality assessments. In total, 44 papers were included in the review.

On the basis of the best evidence available, the Steering Group concluded that:

• Having an unwanted pregnancy is associated with an increased risk of mental health problems. However, the rates of mental health problems for women with an unwanted pregnancy are the same, whether they have an abortion or give birth.

• The most reliable predictor of post-abortion mental health problems is having a history of mental health problems. In other words, women who have had mental health problems before the abortion are at greater risk of mental health problems after the abortion.

• Some other factors may be associated with increased rates of post-abortion mental health problems, such as a woman having a negative attitude towards abortions in general, being under pressure from her partner to have an abortion, or experiencing other stressful life events.

The Steering Group recommends that future practice and research should focus on supporting all women who have an unwanted pregnancy.

These results, said The Lancet, “should guide care and advice for women with unwanted pregnancies who need mental health support whatever the resolution of their pregnancy.”

Prevention of unwanted pregnancies is also crucial through education and the provision of contraception. But women still face barriers to accessing these services.

Last week, continued The Lancet, “US Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius vetoed the Food and Drug Administration’s recommendation to make the emergency contraceptive pill, Plan B, available without prescription to all women of childbearing age in the USA. Plan B will not be available without prescription to girls 16 years or younger under the ruling.”

The AMRC’s findings show that Sebelius’s decision is an assault on the mental health of women as well as their reproductive rights. It should be reversed.

We could not agree more.

Take action to help reverse this decision—click here to tell President Obama not to let science and medical standards be trumped by politics.

Reprinted from RH Reality Check.

Photo by flickr user Kelly Schott under Creative Commons 2.0

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Plan B’s status has been the subject of fierce debate inside and outside the walls of HHS for nigh on a decade. But that debate seemed to be finally over. Countless doctors, scientists and health professionals have confirmed that Plan B does not pose a health risk. Multiple studies have shown that girls are capable of understanding the package label and using the product safely. In 2009 a federal judge even ordered the FDA to reconsider the age restrictions on the drug, calling it “political and ideological,” not scientific.

Kathleen Sebelius has been a friend to women’s health in the past. In August, she announced that birth control constituted preventive care under the Affordable Care Act, thereby requiring insurance plans to cover it at no cost to women. Why the turnabout? Possibly she’s tired of the relentless pressure she faces every day from religious groups and their friends in Congress. Possibly she’s tired of being called “a threat to the health and well-being of our country,” a thug, a Soviet tyrant, a late-term abortion lover, criminally obstructive, gruesomely anti-Catholic and a liar.

Regardless, in the interest of science, reason and sanity, she should have stepped up–or rather stepped out of the way of the FDA finally doing the right thing on EC.

Secretary Sebelius, we thought better of you. This was the most unkindest cut of all.

Take action to help reverse this decision—click here to tell President Obama not to let science and medical standards be trumped by politics.

Photo from Flickr user US Mission Geneva under Creative Commons 2.0.

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The models fronting H&M’s new holiday lingerie campaign are unreal, literally. Jezebel translated an article from Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet in which H&M press officer Håcan Andersson confirms that their new lingerie-clad bodies are “completely virtual.” For H&M’s website or catalogues, much of the store’s clothing is now shot on mannequins, which are then humanized via photo-editing software — which explains the eerily uniform pose now increasingly commonplace online.

H&M also shot real models for the campaign, but only to superimpose their heads on the standard body form. Aptly, H&M calls them “facial models,” who are apparently aware of their abridged role in the finished catalogue shots. The form, which is also the base used at online styling studio Looklet.com, is then edited some more to sync with differing skin tones, and even for the addition of subtle detail, like a spattering of freckles.

An H&M spokesperson insists that they only settled on a single “default” body because they wanted a standard base on which to display the clothing. But that doesn’t make the effect any less unsettling. Check out the images in the Jezebel write-up. How weird is it that they Photoshopped skin tone in order to approximate racial diversity, but insisted on the same stick-limbed body for each model? Regardless of whether or not these images are supposed to show the “perfect body,” as H&M denies, the company still chose it as the default. Do they think their median customer exercises for four hours a day and subsists on a diet of kale and Perrier?

The face-swapping is what truly brings us into the uncanny valley, though. It’s emblematic of a very strange trope in fashion and advertising, in which women are treated as little more than composites of various body parts that can either be isolated and displayed on their own or (as we see here) reassembled into new and alien Frankenmodels. Mere humans need not apply.

Sign here to urge H&M to use real women to model its clothes:

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At GOP prompting, the Oversight and Government Reform Committee held hearings on the administration’s rejection of a grant application from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) in September. The grant, which the USCCB has received in previous years, gave the bishops the authority to dole out government money to local organizations that assist trafficking victims. It used this control of the purse strings to gag grantees from telling victims about reproductive health services such as birth control and abortions–despite the fact that victims of sex and labor trafficking are mostly women and at high risk of rape at the hands of their traffickers.

This year, the Obama administration put its foot down and specifically required that any grant application include provisions to direct victims to “family planning services and the full range of legally permissible gynecological and obstetric care.” Not surprisingly, the Conference’s application did not include these. Therefore, it was not awarded the grant.

Now, the USCCB and its Republican friends in Congress are crying anti-Catholic bias. Oversight committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) accused the administration of creating “a litmus test that Catholics need not apply” and Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) called the decision “an unconscionable abuse of power.”

Ms. magazine first broke the news that the USCCB distributes government grant money for assisting trafficking victims. The  2007 investigative report “The Invisible Ones” warned that the bishops restricted their grantees from providing a full range of services. We took up the matter again in the spring of 2009 when the ACLU sued the government over these contracts, charging that they violated the First Amendment separation of church and state. This is both an important theoretical point–government grantees are not allowed to impose their religious beliefs on others–and one that affects real women’s lives. Traffickers frequently use sex and reproduction as a means of control. These are services victims desperately need.

Sorry, Smith and Issa, but when a contractor fails to fulfill the requirements of an RFP (that’s grant-speak for Request for Proposal), they’re probably not going to win the contract. That’s how healthy, uncorrupt competition works.

Discrimination, however, is most easily identified as a pattern. And between the U.S. government and the USCCB, the pattern shows anything but anti-Catholic bias. As ABC news reports,

Since 2006, USCCB has received more than $2.5 million annually in grants from HHS. More than $650 million has gone from HHS to Catholic groups—primarily Catholic charities and USCCB—in the last three years.

Photo from Flickr user vladeb under Creative Commons 2.0.

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Mary says this casually, as if it’s commonplace. And in her experience as a midwife in Uganda, it is.

For women in her community, contraception is largely out of reach. Employment is scarce, so families make ends meet by selling crops from their small gardens. They cannot afford the prices of family planning from private clinics.

“The demand for family planning is so high,” Mary explains. “It is really embarrassing for women to have these frequent deliveries when they have other possible ways of preventing them. So access to family planning should be the first priority.”

The situation Mary describes is not unusual; in fact, it is far too common. 215 million women worldwide are not using an effective method of contraception despite the fact that they want to avoid pregnancy. The largest segment of these women live in sub-Saharan Africa and many are at risk of HIV. Women account for 60 percent of people living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, and young women between the ages of 15-24 are up to eight times more likely to be infected than men of the same age.

December 1st marks World AIDS Day and this year’s theme is “Getting to Zero.” Much of this day will be focused on a celebration of new technology and science that can help prevent HIV through daily treatment and male circumcision. And we should celebrate those advances–but we should also not lose sight of women who need both family planning and HIV services.

One of the central strategies for preventing- mother-to-child-transmission of HIV is to prevent unintended pregnancies through increased access to voluntary family planning services. Providing women with access to family planning services as part of HIV prevention, care and treatment can have a tremendous positive impact on health outcomes for women and children. Unfortunately, despite recent progress, meeting the demand for contraceptives at U.S. supported HIV programs remains a challenge.

The U.S. has a longstanding history of leadership in global health and HIV/AIDS. With the creation of President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in 2003, the U.S. provided unprecedented funds to help fight the global AIDS epidemic and put millions of people on treatment. Under the Obama administration, PEPFAR has focused funding towards more evidence-based prevention approaches, and PEPFAR programs are encouraged to provide family planning information and referrals. This is a positive step forward, but let’s face it–progress still falls far short of meeting the needs of women living with HIV, particularly in those countries without adequate family planning funding or programs. Without robust funding and policy support for family planning, the U.S. misses an opportunity to fully utilize all the tools available to eradicate the HIV/AIDS epidemic and promote healthy women and families.

As the U.S. reaffirms its commitment to creating an AIDS-free generation on this World AIDS Day and prepares for the arrival of the XIX International AIDS Conference in Washington, D.C. next summer, meeting the needs of women and girls must remain central to that commitment. That means not only scaling up access to treatment, but scaling up a comprehensive set of HIV prevention and care services–including access to contraception. As we work together towards the goal of an AIDS-free generation, let’s remember that helping women stay healthy and plan their families is a critical part of the solution.

For more information on the importance of contraception this World AIDS Day, or to share your own thoughts, check out the #rememberwomen hashtag on Twitter.

Sign here to urge President Obama to come up with a bold and comprehensive AIDS initiative:

Photo from Flickr user U.S. Embassy New Delhi under Creative Commons 2.0.

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