Happy International Women’s Day!
The cuts, which left many low-income women with inconvenient or costly options, grew out of the effort to eliminate state support for Planned Parenthood. Although the cuts also forced clinics that were not affiliated with the agency to close—and none of them, even the ones run by Planned Parenthood, performed abortions—supporters of the cutbacks said they were motivated by the fight against abortion.
[…]
Wayne Christian, a Republican state representative said, “I don’t think anybody is against providing health care for women. What we’re opposed to are abortions.” He added, “Planned Parenthood is the main organization that does abortions. So we kind of blend being anti-abortion with being anti-Planned Parenthood.”
[…]
Nationally, the newest target is Title X, the main federal family planning program. All four Republican presidential candidates support eliminating Title X, which was created in 1970 with Republican support from President Nixon and the elder George Bush, then a congressman.
Like other federal financing, Title X does not pay for abortions. Only some of it covers birth control. Title X also provides money for cervical and breast cancer screening, testing for H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted diseases, adolescent abstinence counseling, infertility counseling and other services.
[…]
Many San Carlos patients struggle to reach Edinburg from their homes in impoverished neighborhoods called colonias. Maria Romero, a housecleaner with four children, who had a lump in her breast discovered at the San Carlos clinic, has no way to get there.
Ms. Parra, 33, the mother of five, managed to borrow a car to get to Edinburg after a pap smear at the San Carlos clinic indicated she might have cervical cancer. Further tests showed she was cancer-free.
Both women worry about getting birth control pills; the clinic may now have to charge them up to $20 for a month’s supply.
“I will have to go without,” Ms. Parra said as she left an English class at a community center and was walking to pick up her two youngest children from a Head Start program. “If I get pregnant again, God forbid.”
[via “Women in Texas Losing Options for Health Care in Abortion Fight,” The New York Times, 3.8.12]
A woman’s place in society and the Catholic Church
Can we still be arguing about a woman’s ability to control her own fertility? Almost 50 years ago in Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court struck down state restrictions on contraception because they violated a right to privacy.
[…]
I supported Planned Parenthood. I believed women should have access to birth control so they could have both a career and a family….I was planning to have a family and a career as a lawyer I believed I should be free to choose the timing of my children’s births so I could do both.
[via “The Unfinished Fight Over Contraception” by Louise G. Trubek, The New York Times, 3.2.12]
Trubek’s right about the way limiting contraception use limits women’s ability to choose the timing of when they have children. To take that argument a step further: Without the right to have contraception universally covered by the Affordable Care Act, the ability to have the job a woman wants, when a woman wants—and in the face of glass ceilings that have still not been broken—is severely limited. In other words, the Catholic Church, and other groups that believe they can get around the act by saying they’re “morally” opposed to it, control, to some degree, women’s ability to be equal in the workplace. Perhaps the Catholic Church wants to impose its conservative idea that women are supposed to be at home having many babies instead of alongside men in the workplace; perhaps it is afraid that women who can control their fertility are a threat to its waning status quo. Whatever it is, it’s controlling women with their own biology, and it’s unconscionable.
Suffering on $350k a year
“I feel stuck. The New York that I wanted to have is still just beyond my reach….I can’t imagine what I’m going to do. I’m crammed into 1200 square feet. I don’t have a dishwasher. We do all our dishes by hand….Imagine four bedrooms. You have the luxury of a guest room, how crazy is that?” -Andrew Schiff, $350000 per year
“People who don’t have money don’t understand the stress….If you’re making $50000 and your salary gets down to $40000 and you have to cut, it’s very severe to you. But it’s no less severe to these other people with these big numbers.” -Alan Dlugash, rich-people financial planner
Daniel Arbeeny now has to buy discounted salmon at Fairway and scan the grocery-store circulars to find the cheapest place to buy Wheat Chex.
“When their means are cut, they’re stuck. Not so much an issue for me and my wife because we’ve always saved.” -Richard Steiner, hedge-fund manager who spends $500 per month on parking, $7500 per year on a golf membership, and $17000 per year on a bichon frise and labradoodle.
[via Bloomberg]
![[via Maddie on Things]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m047d7bvco1qgd3wro1_500.png)
[via Maddie on Things]
(Source: choire)
509Nonfiction v. essays
If a good fact-checker, like Jim Fingal, went through my essay, he’d flag 32 falsehoods,* all inaccuracies of the sort that D’Agata argues for keeping in “What Happens There.” In writing this piece, I never met John D’Agata or Jim Fingal, but massaged quotes from other sources, giving the impression I did. The Things They Carried was actually published in 1990. In 1992 I was 17, not 16, not the age of Levi Presley, and though my girlfriend had dumped me I wasn’t considering suicide at all. That thing with the ice in the trees definitely happened several times while I was in high school, though I can’t remember whether it happened in February of ‘92. I remember what Tim O’Brien wore but I don’t remember what I said to him.
Whether you will be delighted or disgusted by The Lifespan of a Fact depends on what kind of reader you are. Are my misquotes, misrepresentations, and lies OK because, though I’ve never met John D’Agata or Jim Fingal, after reading this enraging, fascinating, singular book, I feel as though I know them? Is this review a clever trick or a cheat, a critique or an appreciation? Is it a work of art or am I a lying sack of shit? Are those the only options?
The book’s unexpected, touching conclusion coincides with the end of D’Agata’s essay and the end of Levi’s life. The section is fiercely powerful, despite the fact that Fingal is picking it apart in real time in the margins. Did Levi Presley deserve better than this? Maybe so. Or maybe these maddening questions are the tribute due a boy who takes his own life without telling anyone why. Proceeds from the book go, according to an afterword, to a scholarship in Levi’s name at the Tae Kwon Do dojo run by Levi’s best friend. I hope that’s true.
On John D’Agata and Jim Fingal’s The Lifespan of a Fact, in which D’Agata simultaneously stuns with lyrical language and enrages with masculine, “dickhead”-heavy, stubborn rhetoric. [via Dan Kois’ Facts Are Stupid]42 Saint Bernards
