I don’t fancy myself one of those change a life by leading a college class type of instructors. Those who teach at the primary and secondary school level have more solid claims on that power than those who teach at colleges and universities. Why? Most of the answer lies in the fact that we live in an age where a college degree is obligatory. Thus, we deal more with snowflakes who are clocking in time for the necessary credits, than we do with young intellectuals who believe that knowledge and learning can be transformative.
All those qualifiers noted, there are still moments where I have to repress a smile as a student has a lightbulb moment. These instances of critical self-awareness can come from growth where before there was weakness and intellectual flaccidity; these same moments can also occur when a student realizes that they played themselves, their priors now dispelled, and basic fictions about how the world works beyond their own ego upset.
Because I am a sadist I like the first, but I revel in the latter…forgive me that trait for I was trained by Jesuits.
This quarter I am blessed with a good group of students. Although many are still finding their way, for the most part they are engaged and curious. I am doubly fortunate to have an arch-conservative as my interlocutor. There is no malice, this student simply asks good questions which proceed from a set of ideological priors that he has yet to realize are not universal. Moreover, my conservative charge has yet to realize that not all opinions are created equal, and that Fox News talking point conservatism is utterly dishonest as it is based precisely on a rejection of empirical reality in the pursuit of a narrow political agenda.
In short, said student is good fun because his questions keep me on my toes.
To this point in class, we have had two exchanges which speak to how the mythologies of American political culture are taken as truths by those more conservatively oriented and that reveal how Conservatism is bankrupt as an ideology, in this, our time of the Great Recession.
The first moment came in our discussing the myth of meritocracy, American exceptionalism, and the Great Recession where he recycled the standard story of how America is a great country of opportunity, the best country in the world in fact, as well as the most productive, innovative, and most dynamic economy that has ever been seen on this planet.
I queried, “how does the Great Recession and the fact that America has decreasing rates of intergenerational mobility, a shrinking middle class, and is solidly subpar in education, health, and many other measures, complicate your narrative of American greatness?”
He replied, taking a pause to reconcile rhetoric with facts, “these problems are just part of the business cycle, and no big deal because they are normal.”
My reply, “can we tell those folks who are now structurally unemployed through no fault of their own that they can eat the business cycle when they are hungry? Is there barbeque sauce with that meal?”
My point was a simple one, and one I stress often–the world of theory exists relative to the world of facts…and real people’s experiences. If you overlook this dynamic then you are only getting part of the story.
This was just a lead-in and preamble for our most recent “teachable moment.”
Homelessness is a frightening concept that most folks of any age would rather look away from than acknowledge. To accommodate this mass societal version of the bystander effect, there are cultural scripts with the standard players of “the deserving” and “undeserving poor,” where “those people” are drug addicts or “lazy,” and consequently they “deserve” their position in life.
Who, especially among the young with an ostensibly bright future ahead of them, would want to entertain how the myth of meritocracy may leave them one of the working poor, a paycheck or illness away from the street, panhandling on a corner, couch surfing, or living in a car?
Who would want to acknowledge the scary thought that they could be one of the lost generation?
In class, we discussed these dynamics and how the new poor are the formerly middle class, and how/if this will shake up public policy and political alignments in the United States? Given the old joke that a Republican is a Democrat who got robbed, and that a Democrat is a Republican who lost their job, what will the Great Recession hold for the future of American politics and the two party system?
An important detail for context and flavor: The students in my classes run the gamut from working class, to the poor, to the solidly middle class, and also include a sprinkling of the born on the third base of life trustafarians who believe they hit a triple in life crowd. Consequently, our discussions about class and social mobility are almost always quite compelling.
During our most recent conversation, my conservative friend chimed in that the American middle class is not becoming the new poor and homeless, that one can work and make it if they only applied themselves, and that this talk about the new poor is exaggerated and flies in the face of the American dream. It simply can’t be true. Impossible.
I shared some data on poverty, the record numbers of people on food stamps in America, and provided some context for the specious argument that the American poor have it well off (and the bigger game of Tea Party GOP Ayn Randian libertarianism on behalf of struggling millionaires) as a frame and meme in defense of austerity for the rest of us while the kleptocrats get to keep all of their wealth.
A student raised his hand and asked if he could comment. He looked to our arch-conservative friend and explained that his father was a construction worker who owned a nice home. They were not rich, but he and his dad were solidly middle class. This all came undone with the crash of the housing market, an illness, and the utter collapse of the economy in the town where they lived. After the savings was gone, and the retirement fund spent, our honest and sharing student explained that he had to move in with a friend’s family while his father lived in a van.
The latter’s only salvation was the kindness of several strangers, migrant day laborers, who had a small studio apartment which they allowed him to move in to as it became dangerously cold in the fall and winter months.
After this moment of sharing you could hear a pin drop. No response or retort was offered. My conservative friend sat silenced, wheels turning but finding no traction. To his benefit, he was the beneficiary of the great time keeper’s charity as class mercifully ended.
I do not know if that was a tranformative moment for this young arch-conservative. Perhaps, it was sustenance for the other students in the class whose families are also struggling in the Great Recession, as from that moment of sharing they knew they were not alone. I simply smiled because I felt that some good had come from that exchange.
I also smiled as that class further reinforced my allegiance to Black Pragmatism.
At present, one of the great divides in American politics during the Age of Obama is an utter failure by those on the Right, and conservatives at large, to have any sympathy or empathy for those less fortunate, who may be different from them, or somehow the Other. Most conservatives cannot imagine that it could be them who is downsized, unemployed, or in need of the social safety net to keep a roof over their head or food in the childrens’ bellies.
The irony of course is that most of the Right, and the Tea Party GOP especially, benefit greatly from the social contract and want to keep supports such as social security, medicare, and medicaid in place–but only for folks like them, within their narrow tribe of “real Americans” and those suitably “patriotic” and nationalistic. Others can be damned for they are “unproductive,” “liberals,” “lazy,” or practice/benefit from “class warfare” against the rich.
We shall see if the exchange in my class, a moment where a free market trickle down conservative met the face that is the human consequence and collateral damage of robber baron, dysfunctional unfettered capitalism, will change how a young arch-conservative thinks about politics. It probably will not. But we sensible and reasonable folks who believe that education can serve the interests of the Common Good can hope and dream just a little bit.
Can’t we? Or is the die already cast, the roll spent?
Cross-posted from Tikkun Daily.
by Matthew Goodman
Carwill/Flickr
Now in its eleventh day, there has only just begun to be reports and discussion about the occupation of Wall Street in mainstream media. The reasons are related not to the organizational efforts of the occupiers or their lack of conviction or numbers, but to the relationship between our channels of information, our business and corporate sector and our politically empowered. This begs the question of if instead of Wall Street, the occupiers were gathered in Tehran or Sana, would the news of their demands and challenge of the status quo be included in our mainstream news headlines? The answer is yes. Although the American media did not create the protests or uprisings that comprised The Arab Spring, their attention to the social unrest in the Middle East undoubtedly stoked the determination and numbers of those participating in the protests that irrevocably changed the social and political landscape of the region. It is therefore the responsibility of critical and compassionate thinkers to spread the words and actions of the occupiers – most of whom are college age or in their early twenties and thus the future of the American economy and social fabric. READ FULL POST
As a state administrative judge deliberates on the fate of Tucson Unified School District’s Ethnic Studies/Mexican American Studies Program (MAS), Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal compared the nationally acclaimed program to the Hitler Nazi Jugend paramilitary organization at a Pima County Republican luncheon last week.
In an astounding affront to Mexican American veterans and military families, the disturbing comments were issued a week after the 61st anniversary of the Medal of Honor award for Arizona war hero Sylvestre Herrera, whose famous capture of Nazi troops was hailed as one of numerous acts of bravery by Mexican American soldiers during World War II.
While Huppenthal, who aired a controversial radio ad last fall that he would “stop la raza,” is no stranger to inflammatory speech making, this latest episode comes on the heels of Attorney General Tom Horne’s recent charge that the Mexican American Studies program “must be destroyed” and shocking testimony by a Tea Party activist at a Tucson school board meeting with his scenario for “civil war.”
At the same time, Huppenthal recently endorsed the recall campaign of disgraced Senate President Russell Pearce, who has openly associated with neo-Nazi and white supremacist organizations.
The questions beg:: Have the extremist Arizona politicians and their Tea Party supporters gone too far in their witch hunt of the Ethnic Studies Program, and at what point will the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice be summoned for an investigation?
Or, at the very least, does Huppenthal owe Mexican American veterans and MAS supporters an apology?
The Arizona Independent Daily blog posted Huppenthal’s comments from the GOP gathering last week on the Tucson Citizen site:
“Huppenthal discussed the MAS practice of victimizing, or “racismizing” students. He stated that these same practices were used in the development of the Hitler Jugend. He talked about Nazi’s efforts to demonize one group of people in young people’s minds. He stated that sheer intellectual power will win over the public when they look at the anti-intellectual nature of the MAS program.”
According to the Wikipedia entry, the Hitler Jugend was the second oldest paramilitary organization in Nazi Germany that trained youth in weapons training and assault tactics, and propagated white supremacist and anti-Semitic beliefs.
The comment is particularly disturbing in light of the fact that the Arizona Anti-Defamation League came out against Arizona’s controversial Ethnic Studies ban and declared the Mexican American Studies program “so obviously resuscitated the desire to learn in so many students.”
Earlier this summer, in fact, an independent audit commissioned by Huppenthal found that the Mexican American Studies program did not violation the state ban, and concluded: “No observable evidence exists that instruction within Mexican American Studies Department promotes resentment toward a race or class of people. The auditors observed the opposite, as students are taught to be accepting of multiple ethnicities of people.” The audit noted that courses in the Ethnic Studies Program “graduate in the very least at a rate of 5 percent more than their counterparts in 2005, and at the most, a rate of 11 percent more in 2010,” and “are designed to improve student achievement based on the audit team’s finding of valuable course descriptions aligned with state standards, commendable curricular unit and lesson plan design, engaging instruction practices, and collective inquiry strategies through Approved State Standards.”
Despite the findings of the costly audit, Huppenthal kept his campaign promise and disregarded the report in a bizarre press conference this summer and charged that the MAS program was non-compliant. As part of the appeal process, TUSD and MAS administrators have appeared before a state administrative hearing, which will recommend a decision to the state superintendent. In essence: Once the shoutin’ is over, Huppenthal still has the ultimate power over whether the MAS program should be banned or not.
In 2009, Huppenthal was a featured speaker with the notorious state senate president Pearce at an extremist Tea Party rally, where participants openly called President Obama a “Nazi.” In footage from the film documentary Precious Knowledge, Huppenthal’s tendency for inflammatory rhetoric reached a new high when he declared “parts of our neighborhoods” have been “nuclear-bombed by the effects of illegal immigration.”
Despite Pearce’s open affiliations with white supremacists and his leadership in carrying out draconian cuts in education this year, Huppenthal offered this endorsement for Pearce’s recall effort:
Written by Marlene G. Fried for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
Rep. Henry Hyde
This article is cross-posted from the National Network of Abortion Funds.
The Hyde Amendment turns 35 this month. This provision, prohibiting federal Medicaid coverage of abortion in almost all circumstances, was the beginning of the anti-abortion movement’s post-Roe, all-out effort to ban abortion. It was a gateway bill, opening the door to the flood of restrictions that today constrict a woman’s ability to obtain an abortion, forcing women to “choose” between paying for other basic necessities and having an abortion, and, in too many cases, making abortion impossible. It became the precedent for all other denials of abortion funding, and reinforces our discriminatory, two-tier health care system in which people without financial resources cannot get the care they need.
The persistence of the Hyde Amendment also created a series of disastrous roadblocks to inclusive reproductive health coverage in other legislation. For example, Congress banned abortion coverage in “The Affordable Care Act” in 2010. Compounding this specific policy loss was the profound ideological loss of normalizing the exclusion of abortion from health insurance. During the battle over health care reform, President Obama reassured those who feared that there might be an end run around Hyde by saying, “I’m pro-choice, but I think we also have the tradition in this town, historically, of not financing abortions as part of government-funded health care.”
As we mark this anniversary with our continued activism, I draw several political lessons to inform our advocacy going forward.
Written by Editor-in-Chief Jodi Jacobson for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
Congressman Cliff Stearns. Photo: The Daily Marion
You know how jobs, the deficit, lack of health care, and the country’s economic crisis are top priorities?
Florida Republican Congressman Cliff Stearns apparently does not.
Stearns, Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Investigations, is using taxpayer funding to investigate Planned Parenthood Federation’s “use of federal funding and its compliance with federal restrictions on funding of abortion,” as per a letter he sent to PPFA President Cecile Richards.
He’s doing this even though taxpayer-funded audits have already consistently confirmed that Planned Parenthood follows all the rules. Planned Parenthood is regularly audited by the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Inspector General; state Medicaid programs also regularly audit Planned Parenthood and report publicly on their findings. Given the level scrutiny under which Title X and Title XIX providers already operate and the state-based witch hunts constantly carried out at the behest of far right legislatures, it would seem to be a complete waste of taxpayer funding to conduct this investigation.
Note to Congressman Stearns: Your own state has 10.7 percent unemployment. Think there might be better things to do?
Cross-posted from Tikkun Daily.
by Lita Kurth
What Kind of Person Can’t Afford Community College?
I’m going to begin this blog like a Cassandra, but end it more positively. No one needs another blog entirely dedicated to how awful things are.
So here’s the bad part:
I was talking with some moms recently and one, disparaging an acquaintance who was saving up to attend a two-year college, asked with an incredulous laugh, “What kind of a person can’t afford community college?”
The remark sent a chill through my bones. First, she was so insulated by privilege that she honestly didn’t know how a decent hardworking person could not afford the bottom rung of the educational ladder, and second, that she seemed to consider it a moral failing to be poor. Finally, she represents the people most likely to vote, most likely to lobby a school board, Congressperson, or Council member.
Textbooks
“Books are actually very expensive,” I pointed out, and later I wanted to kick myself for that answer because even without books, tuition at a community college – the very institution set up to serve all – is too expensive for a worrisome segment of the workforce. I recall talking to a waiter who told me that when the price went up to $20 a unit, he couldn’t afford to go anymore. He had two kids and he couldn’t work a second job. However, he was very interested in books for his kids. It was painful to think that someone willing to learn and grow, wanting a better job, wanting to contribute more knowledge to his kids and capable of contributing more skill, and taxes to the economy, should be barred from that opportunity. How un-American! And how troubling to meet a person with a great deal more power in the world who insists that he and people like him don’t exist.
Written by Martha Kempner for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
Last season, I wrote about how well I felt Private Practice handled abortion when one of its main characters agreed to perform the procedure on a patient who found out that she was still pregnant (19 weeks along) after an earlier abortion failed. That show deals with abortion quite often and I give the writers a lot of credit for the way they have portrayed the debate. They touch on different aspects of the issue by weaving a variety of stories into the medical drama; in addition to the woman requesting a second-trimester abortion, they’ve written about couples who disagree on termination, teens and their parents, as well as a young pregnant woman with Down’s Syndrome who didn’t quite understand the situation. The dialogue is often predictable and melodramatic, but the writers let characters express both sides of the issue. In the end, though, it’s clear that they use the show as a platform to illustrate why the right to safe, legal abortions, without judgment is so important.
For premier night, however, it was Private Practice’s sister show Grey’s Anatomy, also created by Shonda Rhimes, that dealt with abortion. When we left our characters last season, Dr. Christina Yang, a hard-edged surgeon in her fifth year of residency, found out she was accidentally pregnant. She and her husband Owen, also a surgeon, argued bitterly because he wanted a child and she did not. When we picked up this season, the two were living apart and not speaking. Though she still intended to have an abortion, she had not done so yet.
What I thought was so bold about this story line was that there were no extenuating circumstances. There was no suggestion that there was anything wrong with the fetus. There was no suggestion of any medical reason she could not or should not carry to term. Moreover, she is well educated, employed, and in a (relatively) stable relationship. She clearly has the resources to raise a child. Her only reason behind this decision was that she does not want to be a mother.
And the writers did good job, in my opinion, making the argument that every baby should be a wanted baby.
I’m really thrilled with the responses to my recent article, Is the Near-Trillion Dollar Student Loan Bubble About to Pop?
A couple of people have written really nice long responses to it that add some significant value. There are a million articles that could be written about the student loan crisis, and I’m gratified to have helped move the conversation forward for other people to spin off of.
I thought I’d link a few of them here for you.
Kay Steiger dug in deeper to the causes for the rising tuition that’s created what I and others refer to as the student loan bubble. She wrote:
Shrinking state investments in higher education. Part of this is that, public universities, which educate a large percentage of students, have seen the amount of public financing shrink. Though states were once dedicated to ensuring a free or low-cost education for its residents, that commitment has largely fallen by the wayside was state budgets tighten. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that since the beginning of the recession, 43 states have cut funding assistance to public universities.
Among other reasons she highlights, one stands out:
Some schools are actually ripping people off. While the vast majority of colleges really are there with the mission of educating their students and helping them reach a better financial future, there are some schools out there that seem to actively be ripping people off. Some of these schools, according to government investigations, seemed to be calculating tuition prices to maximize the amount of federal subsidies, recruiting students by way of questionable tactics, and providing poor-quality training for jobs they purport to prepare students for. (Let me be clear on this—not all for-profit schools are setting out to rip people off. I’m talking about some of the particularly bad actors.) This gets into much of the debate over for-profit colleges, the Department of Education’s attempt to regulate them. Lately the for-profit colleges themselves have released a code of conduct to demonstrate that they can be a self-regulating body. Whether this combination of administration regulation and self-policing works remains to be seen.
Where I differ with her is over solutions. She suggests that we want to encourage students not to take student debt lightly, just as we don’t want to encourage mortgage holders to walk away from their homes. The problem right now is that students are saddled with debt that they’re stuck with for life. They can’t walk away from the asset they purchased when its value drops like a person who bought a house can–they can’t even declare bankruptcy if the current economy has led their purchase to be worth less than they thought–in this case, if they’re unable to find work that allows them to pay down their debt.
Mike Konczal also responded to my piece, and compared the never-ending nature of student debt to colonial indentured servitude:
How well does colonial indenture match up with student loans? Pretty well I’d argue. That’s the provocative thesis of this great Jeffrey Williams piece in Dissent, Student Debt and the Spirit of Indenture. I brought this thesis up to a conservatively-minded economic historian I know and he delighted in it – as he pointed out, in colonial times people died so quickly and they could disappear easily. As such indenture needed to function in a “total institution”-like space with coercive punishment very present to get maximum returns to creditors. With today’s longevity, as well as our surveillance and monitoring technologies, indenture can function in the background as a cut deducted from your checking account every month for a few decades.
Steiger suggests that maybe the key to the question about student loans lies in the situation of the person I called Max Parker in the article, who told his story of having to leave school midway through and being unable to return because of the size of his debt.
While I agree that Parker’s case is heartbreaking, I don’t think that’s the most important problem. I’ve often quoted the wonderful BBC journalist and author Paul Mason on the “graduates with no future,” the students around the world who finished school at a time of economic crisis, who did everything they were supposed to do and still have no opportunity. In the UK, where Mason is based, the current graduates don’t have US-style student loans, yet they still have no future. And here, the rate of default is rising for grads–and even those who, like Colleen Williams, mentioned in my piece, manage to make their monthly payments, are stuck pumping lots of money into servicing their debt rather than into the economy, creating yet another drag on the whole.
Konczal takes yet another tack in pointing out that the current system of student loans is unsustainable, looking at those who do go on to economic success (whether they are happy, fulfilled, or productive is another argument entirely, one should note) after graduation. He quotes a paper by Jesse Rothstein, Constrained After College: Student Loans and Early Career Occupational Choices, which says that “an extra $10,000 in student debt reduces the likelihood that an individual will take a job in nonprofits, government, or education by about 5 to 6 percentage points.”
He continues:
For our purposes, even those for whom this arrangement works find themselves pushed out of government, education or non-profit work by their debt loads. Debt puts contraints on what people are capable of doing, and one way out of that constraint is to work in the fields that pay the most. For those who want to see our best working in schools, government, nonprofits, taking chances starting entrepreneurial work or simply not working to replicate already existing power structures, this is a terrible arrangement.
We can see this in action as the financial sector has grown all out of proportion with the rest of the country (and broken the economy, leaving so many of these grads stranded, along the way). A recent study points out that the financial industry has “cannibalized” (no, really, that’s a quote) the best and the brightest not just from business schools. No, it’s taking “new master’s- and doctoral-level graduates of science, engineering, math and physics, and pays them starting wages that are five times or more what they would have earned had they remained in their own fields.”
(The same can be seen in the medical field, as fewer doctors are going into primary care because it pays less than specialty fields do.)
Were Max Parker to graduate with his double degree in econ and physics, the likelihood that he’d end up just the kind of person being headhunted by financial firms–and feeling obligated to go there, just as he’s now feeling obligated to go into the military, because of the size of his debt.
In other words, Konczal notes, even when the system works, it’s actually working to create more inequality by sucking up those who are considered worthy into high-paying jobs and leaving the rest with their incomes cannibalized for decades. It’s creating a brain drain on just the kinds of things we want our well-educated young people doing, working for social good, innovating, going into public service–as Tarah Toney pointed out in my piece, she wanted to go into teaching after working her way through school, but there were no jobs and her debt pushed her instead to take a job at a real estate office.
Konczal and Steiger both note that keeping tuition low, especially at public universities, is a necessary solution to the problem. But that would only solve the problem for some of the grads of the future. Right now, the economy desperately needs spending and, as Rep. Hansen Clarke noted (and I quoted in my piece) households are burdened with debt that in most cases they took on in good faith, and the majority of the new jobs that have been created since the beginning of the recession have been low-wage, hardly enough to keep someone going, let alone allow them to pay hundreds of dollars a month on a student loan that seems, more than ever, like a waste of money.
“Many Christians are only now awakening to the seriousness of the threat to our society posed by the homosexual movement. But, unfortunately for us all, it is only the sounding of the victory trumpets by “gay” activists that has stirred Christians from their slumber. The watchman’s walls have been broken and breached, the village is in flames, and triumphal “gay” culture warriors are leading a long string of young prisoners by their necks into the woods. Most disturbingly, many of the captives, including some of the children of these still sleepy-eyed Christian parents, seem happy to go.”
The above ramblings is paranoid homophobic bigotry of the highest order. And it would be hilarious except when one realizes who it is coming from.
Scott Lively, head of the SPLC-declared hate group Abiding Truth Ministries and author of the discredited piece of garbage, The Pink Swatiska (a book claiming that gays were responsible for Hitler’s Nazi Party), wrote the piece which appeared last week in World Net Daily.
And it is pretty much the same vein of trash which Lively has made a living in declaring – i.e. claiming that gays are secretly plotting to take over America, “indoctrinate children,” and cause all sorts of mayhem.
It’s the same trash one would hear from folks like Matt Barber and Peter LaBarbera, except for one thing. As odious as LaBarbera and Barber are, neither person has the death of an innocent on their heads.
For edification of those with a bad memory, let me remind you that Lively was one of the American homophobes who went to the African country of Uganda and spread all of those lies about gays molesting children. The hysteria he and his ilk caused led to that awful “kill the gays” bill which some folks in that country have been trying to pass for over a year now.
And the hysteria Lively caused also led to vicious persecution of Ugandan gays and lesbians, the most stark example being the brutal murder of Ugandan gay activist David Kato.
Lively has been pushing that nonsense for a long time now. He advocated “criminalizing homosexuality”as far back as 2007. In a piece entitled Letter to the Russian People, Lively had this to say:
My philosophy is to leave homosexuals alone if they keep their lifestyle private, and not to force them into therapy if they don’t want it. However, homosexuality is destructive to individuals and to society and it should never publicly promoted. The easiest way to discourage gay pride parades and other homosexual advocacy is to make such activity illegal in the interest of public health and morality.
It’s something that the lgbtq community must take into account. Sometimes the most outrageous ramblings by homophobes are seen as funny until we remember that some gullible people take them seriously.
Related posts:
Scott Lively’s homophobia in living and repulsive color
Did Scott Lively’s homophobic ‘nuclear bomb’ cause a death in Uganda?
Homophobe tries to play Joan of Arc when he really should try out for Lady MacBeth
Written by Jessica Mack for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
Today is World Contraception Day. It’s actually a day just like any other, because it’s a day when so many women worldwide remain without access to birth control or other reproductive health services, and in which reproductive choice for all women remains an elusive goal.
Launched in 2007 by a coalition of global reproductive health partners, the mission of World Contraception Day is a world where every pregnancy is wanted. Hm. This is good, but I might suggest the following rewrite: a world where unwanted pregnancy hardly ever happens, because women have unfettered access to contraceptives.
I would then add this important follow-up, that when unwanted pregnancy does happen, which it inevitably will, women should have the choice and access to do something about it. Guess I shouldn’t be in the tag-line business, but this is definitely the world I want to live in.
As advocates, our emphasis shouldn’t be on making pregnancies wanted, but on making unwanted pregnancies nil. The latter places the burden on government, health systems, policymakers, and even parents, teachers, and insurance companies to ensure that individuals have the access to the tools they need. What they do with that information, that access, and those supplies is their choice.
