The Arkansas Democrat Gazette reports today that the Catholic Church of Arkansas is urging congregants to stop support for the Susan B. Komen Foundation and its efforts in breast cancer prevention and research because the organization works with Planned Parenthood clinics to screen poor women for cancer. And while, according to Sherrye McBride, the executive director of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Arkansas affiliate, "No Arkansas money has ever been spent with Planned Parenthood, no mid-south money has ever been spent with Planned Parenthood and no national money has ever been spent with Planned Parenthood," referring to funds raised by Race for the Cure and "Any statement to the contrary is inaccurate," the Catholic Church of Arkansas appears unmoved and has opted to punish women at risk of cancer rather than support the Susan B. Komen Foundation efforts by screening and caring for women no matter where their gateway is for preventive care, including at Planned Parenthood. Only 3% of the services Planned Parenthood offers nationwide is abortion care while 20% of the services it offers are cancer prevention and screening. It's worth noting that Susan B. Komen donates $1.35 million in grants to Catholic hospitals in the Arkansas. Despite the fact Catholic hospitals deny women critical health care services, such as family planning, and refuse to help rape victims taken to its emergency rooms prevent a pregnancy as a result of the sexual assault, Planned Parenthood has not called for its supporters to withhold donations to the Komen Foundation. Seems clear who has women's interests at heart.

Students at Columbia University, discouraged by the lack of initiative taken by the administration, are hoping to inspire action in addressing escalating birth control costs on campus triggered by changes Bush made in the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005. The Columbia University Democrats is leading the charge and have drafted a resolution to lay out options for the university to consider taking. The Columbia Spectator reports:

A coalition of campus groups has crafted a resolution urging Columbia to alleviate the cost of birth control for students after a federal law took away subsidies last year.

The resolution maintains that in reaction to these cuts Columbia should assume the added costs, which have raised the price of birth control from $10 a month to $60 a month.

The coalition of groups that created the resolution, which includes Students for Choice, Take Back the Night, the American Civil Liberties Union at Columbia, and the four undergraduate student councils, outlined four separate strategies that the University could implement to benefit students: subsidizing birth control costs, creating a dispensary, linking with Barnard’s dispensary, and inviting Planned Parenthood to campus.

While a few universities have taken simple steps the protect their students (Dartmouth, Barnard and Princeton), the vast majority of colleges, like Columbia, have done nothing. College women are those at highest risk of unintended pregnancy and have higher rates of abortion than any other demographic. If we were talking instead about a concentration of avian bird flu outbreaks on college campuses, universities would no doubt rush to subsidize vaccinations. Colleges should help protect students against a real outbreak plaguing college campuses: unwanted pregnancy.

The organizers are cautiously optimistic, but know that if their gentle ways don't work, harsher measures must be taken. As Jonathan Backer, spokesperson for Columbia University Democrats explained, "“If Health Services doesn’t seem to have a resolution, we’ll look into ways we can put activist pressure on the administration. We’re operating under the assumption that it will take a degree of activism.”

There's one degree colleges hope their students don't get.

Next week, heroic Congressmembers will challenge Bush and brethren's abstinence program in Africa. Led by Rep. Howard Berman, the evidence-based bastion will attempt to muscle funding away from proven-to-fail chastity programs in favor of the proven-to-work prevention programs.

Naturally, the "just say no to sex" crowd is launching a full-scale counter-offensive employing their favorite weapon: confusion. Efforts to supply people in the most at-risk for HIV/AIDS regions of the world with condoms rather than sermons is being cast by fundamentalist political groups as "an abortion program". And while that's a bit like claiming donations to cancer research are somehow pro-tobacco, the tactic seems to work every time.

"Abortion" is a conversation stopper, like calling someone a racist. It automatically throws the pro-prevention team on defense and segues the conversation into what for most bystanders sounds like another rerun of the abortion debate. And with that, the eyelids droop. Attention drifts to LiLo, resurrected as naked Marilyn, or to a little plan to shoot a satellite out of space. Even thoughtful people don’t stick around long enough to find out that U.S. funding for abortion services internationally is already banned.

Of course, this was never about abortion. It’s about condoms. In this case condoms to fight AIDS. Stupefying as it seems, the anti-sex crusaders prefer death to condoms. Let’s hope the chastity crusaders don’t pull another fast one. If they do, it'll be over Africans' dead bodies.

Timed sweetly for Valentine's Day, the NYC Department of Health launched its new condom campaign, Get Some NYC Condom, yesterday. If only there were a PR version of the morning after pill to combat the crazies. Today, the Unplanned Family Research Council and chief pro-life blogger Jill Stanek (or her stand-ins while on vacation) have come out in opposition to the benign prevention campaign. The UFRC asked, "C'mon New York, are you really gonna put up with this?" NYC's answer: Hell yah, we protect our own!

One can only imagine the outcry from the anti-contraception crowd if we were to launch one of the equally risky prevention campaigns below.

The Hartford Business Journal ran an opinion piece, Where are the Babies?, by a Laurence Cohen bemoaning that the people of Connecticut are allowed to use contraception legally. Mr. Cohen assigns all of the state's business woes to the fact Connnecticut is not overpopulated by families unable to control reproduction. Cohen believes unplanned families would fuel the economy and force many to take low earning jobs in once thriving factories. he fingers the real culprit: Griswold vs. Connecticut, the US Supreme Court ruling that granted married couples the right to plan their families. Cohen writes,

According to a recent ACNielsen survey, the Hartford-New Haven area is one of the strongest markets in the country for the sale of over-the-counter contraceptives. Aren’t we the lucky ones. With a population growth pattern on the order of North Dakota and other Canadian provinces, Connecticut is at risk of losing another Congressional seat, of seeing the average age of its population rise from the current 85 to 87, and of dumping plans for Hartford’s exciting Front Street development project and replacing it with a geriatric medical center.

Connecticut patted itself on its old, sore, bony back when national studies found that the credit crisis and foreclosure frenzy has had less impact here than in many other places. Of course, the explanation is that while other states have actually been building new homes for a growing population, Connecticut has only been building new warehouses so that CVS and Walgreen have somewhere to store the extra supplies of condoms and contraceptive creams and gels and other yucky stuff.

Is it not enough that you can’t buy a bottle of wine in a grocery store, a bottle of whiskey on Sunday, the bars close early and the Hartford “Welcome Center” closes at 5 p.m.? So why do we need responsible sex?

The impetus for the lack of Connecticut baby production stems from the 1964 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Griswold vs. Connecticut, in which the high court tossed out Connecticut’s economic development strategy of discouraging and criminalizing contraception, to increase baby production.

And thus, the great slide began. Waterbury stopped making brass. Danbury stopped making hats. Hartford stopped making typewriters. And the whole damn state stopped making babies.

Of course, Cohen fails to mention that Connecticut also happens to be, based on average household income, the third richest state in the country--funny how he doesn't link that to the legacy of Griswold v Connecticut. Maybe the local business problems in Hartford have more to do with allowing the likes of Mr. Cohen at the brainstorming table. (Does he really think the birth control pill is responsible for the death of the typewriter? And, if so, that's a bad thing?) We can only hope there'll be more hilarious "in-with-the-old, out-with-the-new" business ideas to look forward to from Cohen and the Hartford Business Journal (there's not enough satire in business writing these days). Here's an idea to bounce around at their next editorial meeting: Bringing Back Child Labor: How to Get Your Kid Interested in Working at a Hat Manufacturing Plant, Making Brass, or Knowing What a Typewriter Was."

The Feminist News Wire is reporting on attempts to ban emergency contraception in Chile. Taking from the script written by extremists in the United States, anti-contraception activists there are attempting to define emergency contraception as abortion and are calling for the highly effective pregnancy prevention method to be banned. The Feminist News Wire reports:

Conservative officials in Chile are threatening the country’s progressive emergency contraception (EC) policies with a lawsuit that would ban EC. Under the policy of President Michelle Bachelet’s administration, all forms of birth control including EC have been free for women over 14 at public clinics since 2006.

Conservatives argue that President Bachelet’s policy violates the Chilean ban on abortion based on the misconception that EC is a form of abortion, according to Women’s eNews. However, despite the heavily Catholic influence on Chile, Women’s eNEws reports that 49 percent of Chileans believe that women should have the right to access EC.

For all those Americans who claim that the anti-contraception movement doesn't exist and, if it did, would never try to ban contraception: Watch and Learn. The Chilean activists behind this recent attempt learned all their techniques from our homegrown extremists.

Planned Parenthood is sounding the alarm over Bush's proposed 2009 budget--exposing the wholesale attack on family planning for the nation's neediest contained within. Planned Parenthood reports:

The president’s 2009 budget proposes cutting Medicaid funding for family planning by $570 million in FY 2009, and by $3.3 billion over five years. This would have a devastating effect on the millions of low-income women who rely on Medicaid for contraception and other preventive family planning services. The president's drastic proposal would do nothing more than increase the number of unintended pregnancies and the rate of sexually transmitted infections, including HIV/AIDS.

In addition, the president’s 2009 budget proposes to flat-fund America’s family planning program, despite the fact that Title X is drastically underfunded. Seventeen million women need publicly funded family planning services. Funding for the Title X family planning should be increased by $100 million in FY 09 to begin to fill this gap and meet the needs of the millions of women who need access to family planning services.

Despite exhaustive evidence revealing that prevention is working, Bush appears obligated to reward his Christian fundamentalist base (the only supporters he has left) by cutting contraceptive services and flat-funding Title X. There is no other explanation for slashing funding for services that have delivered so many successes, especially to those genuinely concerned with making abortion less necessary. According to the Guttmacher Institute in their report entitled "Title X: Three Decades of Accomplishment;"

Each year, Title X-supported clinics enable one million women to avoid unintended pregnancy, and women served at Title X-supported clinics have prevented almost 20 million pregnancies over the last two decades. Nine million of these pregnancies would have ended in abortion. The program has played a particularly important role in reducing pregnancies to teenagers. By helping to prevent 5.5 million adolescent pregnancies, Title X funded clinics have helped young women avoid more than two million births and a similar number of abortions over the last two decades. Without Title X, the number of teenage pregnancies would have been 20% higher than it was for this period.

In the dwindling days of his disastrous presidency, Bush is repaying the favors of those who enabled him to wreak havoc worldwide. Fittingly, his target are those least able to defend themselves. That's the classic technique of cowards and bullies.

The Broadsheet column on Salon.com today has a terrific piece about anti-contraception fanaticism and the real-life implications of handing over the levers of power to ideologues set on imposing religious values through government policy. The article focuses on Manila, Phillippines, where Mayor Jose Atienza has banned contraceptive services from public health clinics (not unlike the strategy employed recently in Missouri). The policy has injured many poor women in the city, prompting 20 of them to organize a lawsuit. Broadsheet writes,

Although affluent women in Manila have continued to be able to get contraception from private clinics, the executive order has had a particularly devastating impact on the 70 percent of women from Manila who live below the poverty line. While ostensibly issued to "uphold natural family planning," the main effect of the law has been to prohibit healthcare workers from promoting or distributing contraceptives. Public clinics suddenly being unable to pass out the free contraception received from programs like USAID has had a devastating effect on many women's lives.

How devastating? Consider the testimony of the plaintiffs, quoted in a Reuters story today and elaborated on in the lawsuit press release. They describe either experiencing or witnessing: choosing between contraception and food for their children, multiple pregnancies after being told it would be dangerous for them to have more children, unwanted pregnancies forcing families into extreme poverty, abstinence leading to troubled marriages and divorces, backroom abortions, maternal deaths from multiple pregnancies, abortion deaths ... you name it.

There's a small window into the devastation that results from "pro-life" successes. Wonder when Human Life International will honor Mayor Atienza.