Dallas County holds the distinction of having the only public health agency in the state of Texas that has barred condoms in education and prevention programs. The sad punchline is that it now holds another distinction: the highest HIV rate in Texas. In fact, according to the Dallas Morning News, the number of Dallas County residents living with HIV and AIDS has steadily increased during the past five years. Dallas County Department of Health and Human Services reports that since 2006 African American women alone have experienced a 40 percent increase in HIV rates.

Members Kenneth Mayfield and Mike Cantrell of the Commissioners Court, the governing body for Dallas County, voted for the condom ban 13 years ago. They still serve on the Commissioners Court and have been mum on the subject since we've learned of the effects of the ban. But, hopefully, we'll soon find out if they're of the type to learn from a great mistake. The Commissioners Court is being asked by two other members, Jim Foster and John Wiley Price, to reconsider the condom ban policy in light of the terrible outcomes. Not knowing Mayfield and Cantrell's positions, it's not clear yet whether they'll have the votes to overturn the ban on the five-member court. For the fifth member and potential tie breaker, Maurine Dickey, having the state's highest HIV infection rate and seeing a surge in new infections within the last two years is not evidence enough that basic HIV prevention measures need to be taken. According to the Dallas Morning News, Dickey "wants to study the issue before forming an opinion." In the meantime, someone will need a "Genius at Work" sign for her office door.

I took part in a liveblog discussion today hosted by RH Reality Check. Other participants in included Marilyn Keefe with the National Partnership for Women and Families, William Smith of SIECUS (Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S.), Heather Boonstra of The Guttmacher Institute, and Kay Steiger, RH Reality Check and Campus Progress writer. It was over quickly with a lot of important points made and hopes aired for what we can accomplish with a pro-choice, pro-prevention President and Congress. Topics included whether we can end abstinence-only funding, if we can reverse the HHS regulation allowing healthcare workers to obstruct women's access to birth control, and how to react to the fledgling common ground movement. Check it out.

When it comes to the abortion conflict in the US there's one thing most everyone agrees on: the need for common ground. The public certainly does; both pro-choice and pro-life alike. According to Faith in Public Life Poll, the vast majority (83%) of voters, including white evangelicals (86%) and Catholics (81%), believe elected leaders should work together to find ways to reduce the need for abortion. The election of Barrack Obama brought with it the promise of a new era of post-partisan politics. One of the first areas touched by the spirit of cooperation was abortion politics.

Several pro-life leaders have publicly announced a shift in their focus. Instead of seeking bans and restrictions on abortion, which have proven to have little effect on abortion rates, they are now supporting the proven effective ways to make abortion less necessary. In doing so, they have emerged as unlikely partners to pro-choice efforts, which have successfully lowered unwanted pregnancy and abortion rates worldwide. And while this common ground movement has yet to be formalized, these pro-life leaders have already won the ire of the old guard, anti-abortion establishment.

And possibly that is because the small, ragtag band of common ground hopefuls that has emerged from this election feels different than the unrealized peace-seeking upstarts of the past. For one, this time it's being called for by pro-lifers—most always its been the pro-choice camp extending the olive branch. Also, it has the support of our new President. In fact, the surge in interest in common ground seems inspired by him. When asked about abortion in the third debate, Obama predicted, "we can find some common ground."

The new breed of pro-life activist emerging from this election is motivated by results not rhetoric. Take Douglas Kmiec who has an impeccable pro-life, Catholic, and republican credentials. Kmiec has served as head of the Office of Legal Counsel for Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush and was the former Dean of the law school at The Catholic University of America. He also started "Pro-Life, Pro-Obama," a group based on the belief that the strategies detailed in the pro-choice democratic platform and this pro-choice President's policies will make abortion less necessary. The group's website has a section not found on traditional pro-life groups' websites. It's entitled "Facts on preventing abortion" and explains "Studies Show that Economic Support for Women and Families Reduces Abortion" and "Legal Status of Abortion Does Not Necessarily Impact Abortion Rates."

Catholics United is also a new pro-life group that's calling for a common ground approach to the abortion conflict. James Salt, director of Catholics United explained, "People of faith are tired of leaders who wear the pro-life label without enacting policies that actually prevent abortions. It's time for candidates and elected officials, regardless of party affiliation, to move from rhetoric to results by addressing a comprehensive strategy to address abortion in America." The group's website lists as one of its top priorities "common ground abortion reduction initiatives."

Joel Hunter board member of the National Association of Evangelicals and pastor of one of the nation's largest churches, explained, "We are not compromising our values, but at the same time we are finding a way we can all accomplish our agenda, or at least a piece of our agenda, together. There's got to be a way we can take some of these hot-button issues and cooperate, rather than simply keep fighting and becoming gridlocked in this hostility of the culture wars."

But there are some who seem invested in the gridlock and are unwilling to join in on common ground efforts to reduce the need for abortion. For example, none of the traditional pro-life groups have endorsed any common ground proposals. In fact, several old guard leaders have pledged opposition to common ground attempts and have even taken to seething openly over the calls for unity. Doug Johnson, of National Right to Life, called Obama's common ground approach an "Abortion Reduction Scam." Last month, Joseph Schiedler, president of the Pro-Life Action League, wrote an op-ed in USA Today arguing against common ground and told the Washington Post, "It's a sellout, as far as we are concerned. You don't have to have a lot of social programs to cut down on abortions."

Common ground is simply common sense. People who are genuinely pro-life want real results; something the current pro-life establishment and the Republican party have consistently failed to provide. The facts show that the countries with the lowest abortion rates are those with the strongest pro-choice policies. Prevention, not prosecution, and support for poor women who want, and need help, to continue their pregnancies are what works. Pro-choice advocates are eager to share this success. We long to join with those who seek progress on what has been, up until now, the most intractable issue. We can only hope the "pro-life" establishment doesn't stand in our way.

President-elect Obama must consider every solution to resuscitate the economy. In the meantime, people are losing their jobs and with it, their health insurance. For many, with that goes basic preventive health care. For women the most basic prevention is of pregnancy. We spend 27 years of our lives trying to prevent pregnancy--much of that time we rely on employer-based health care for our family planning method.

Family planning is critical to economic stability, especially in unstable times. There are many solutions Obama and Congress can consider to give people this most basic control over their lives in unsound times, many of these solutions are cost neutral.

For example, Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.) came up with a solution that Obama can set in motion immediately upon taking office. In a recent letter to President-elect Barack Obama, Crowley urged him to restore birth control discounts for college and university health clinics and private clinics. These groups were removed from discount drug programs by President Bush in his 2006 Federal Deficit Reduction Act. (Bush claimed it was "a mistake." The removal of these centers from the discounting program generated no cost savings, but it did conveniently satisfy his anti-contraception base. Not surprisingly it was "a mistake" he was never interested in correcting.)

College-age women have the highest rate of unintended pregnancy and abortion and should be considered the most at risk population and in need of aggressive pregnancy prevention measures. Last year, Obama sponsored a bill (S 2347) to fix the drug pricing problem that would have restored the incentives for pharmaceutical companies to provide the discounts, and Crowley sponsored a companion House bill (HR 4054). A proposal identical to the Crowley and Obama bills was included in the Senate version of the 2009 war supplemental spending bill; however the provision was removed by members in the House concerned that it would trigger a presidential veto. Obama can indicate his support for the measure now and get this problem solved immediately upon taking office, just in time for the Spring semester.

There are other simple cost-neutral steps to ensure women access to family planning. Once the HHS regulations that allow any healthcare worker to deny women birth control are approved, which is expected any day, the Obama administration can immediately set about the process of undoing the regulation and protecting women's access to birth control. Similarly, the wasteful spending (over 1.5 billion dollars to date) on abstinence-until marriage programs must stop immediately and be routed to programs proven to delay sexual initiation, and lower std and teen pregnancy rates.

The money we've been throwing away on abstinence-only programs could also be used to invest in the serially underfunded Title X program. The number of people relying on Title X has swelled due to the faltering economy and job losses. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation report, "From 1980 to 2007, appropriations for Title X, the only federal program focused solely on family planning services, had declined by 61% when inflation is taken into account." As a result of the lack of funding for family planning for the poor, we witnessed a spike in the number of poor women getting pregnant unintentionally; at considerably higher rates now than in the mid-1990s. Poor women are giving birth to many more unplanned children and having more abortions. In fact, women living in poverty are almost four times more likely to become pregnant unintentionally than women of greater means. Clearly, access to birth control is a economic issue with those least able to support a child most at risk of facing an unwanted pregnancy. A critical component to ensuring economic stability is to grant the most at risk among us the ability to control one of the most important economic factors in our lives: the ability to plan the family we want and support the family we have.

One woman is a victim of daily defamation from the right: Susan B. Anthony. The name and image of the iconic suffragist have been used to promote the anti-woman, anti-choice campaigns of a group that calls itself the "Susan B. Anthony List." Clearly, they hope that co-opting the name of the famous woman's rights leader will camouflage their anti-woman agenda. It should then come as no surprise that the same group is now maligning and defaming (though not yet co-opting) the name of another woman's rights leader, Hillary Clinton.

The "Susan B. Anthony List" claims Clinton, as Obama's Secretary of State, will "promote abortion" around the world. According to their November 30 press release, "Clinton will join Obama in promoting taxpayer funding of international abortions through a revocation of the Mexico City Policy and restoring funding to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). The UNFPA has been implicated in supporting China's coercive one-child family planning policy that involves forced abortions and sterilizations."

Defamation is a tool of the anti-choice establishment. Its campaign against UNFPA was one of its most sinister. It was, in effect, a campaign against the most desperate women, babies and families of the world. Anti-contraception groups, like the "Susan B. Anthony List," with the help of the all-too-willing President Bush managed to freeze $161 million of U.S. funds to UNFPA. This "pro-life" victory resulted in millions of infant deaths, over a hundred thousand mothers dying during childbirth, as well as millions more unintended pregnancies and abortions worldwide. With an Obama presidency, sadly for "pro-life" groups, this trend will end. But the pro-lie movement against UNFPA will continue.

Hillary has been a big supporter of UNFPA, and for good reason. The UN is, despite press reports to the contrary, primarily a relief agency. It provides assistance to those living in the most dangerous and unstable places on earth. The role of UNFPA, one of its agencies, is to provide lifesaving interventions in the reproductive field: delivering babies, creating healthy births, ensuring that women are well enough to become mothers again, and giving families the methods to space children. (These, by the way, are goals that Susan B. Anthony certainly would have endorsed.)

UNFPA does not provide abortion. In fact, the organization states explicitly, "UNFPA...does not provide support for abortion services." Instead, UNFPA is the supplier of 41 percent of the world's total needed contraceptive (or prevention) services. It does this all on a meager budget, $500 million, provided by nations that believe in its mission. UNFPA is by many standards a model of what the UN does well. It has a tremendous impact on the people in greatest need, and it does so on a shoestring. As economist Jeffrey Sachs, author of The End of Poverty and, according to Time magazine, one of the world's one hundred most influential people, explained, "UNFPA's work is absolutely vital."

Sadly, the organization's good work providing people in poor countries the ability to plan a pregnancy put it on a collision course with the U.S. anti-family planning movement. While domestically, our anti-sex fundamentalists tend to act covertly to roll back access to birth control, they act brazenly abroad. In Kosovo they characterized UNFPA's efforts to provide emergency contraception to female refugees who had been raped and wanted to prevent pregnancy as "ethnic cleansing " and "genocide." They followed UNFPA workers into Iraq to suggest the emergency obstetric care clinics it was constructing and staffing was instead the headquarters for an "abortion jihad."

This heckling of humanitarian relief efforts is coordinated by a group based in Front Royal, Virginia, the Population Research Institute (PRI). When Bush took office, PRI saw its opportunity. The staff of six was imaginative. In 2002, they amplified their slander campaign against UNFPA claiming it was working with the Chinese government to enforce its coercive one-child policy.

The truth was the very opposite. UNFPA was working with the Chinese government to prove that voluntary family planning would lead to better outcomes for Chinese citizens as well as the Chinese government. In fact, UNFPA was having lots of success persuading the Chinese to relax their coercive and brutal one-child policy, the goal of their work there. It had even documented a dramatic decline in abortion rates in the Chinese counties it focused, from 24 percent to 10 percent. (To put this in context, the current abortion ratio in the U.S. is 24 percent.) Just when UNFPA was succeeding in proving to the Chinese the one-child policy was not only inhumane but also ineffective, PRI swooped in with its claims of complicity. Bush, eager to lock lips with his fanatical base, ignored the advice of his own state department, as well as many allied nations, and opted to go with the swirly eyed lunacy of the six staffers of PRI. At their request, Bush quickly froze all U.S. funds to UNFPA, which represented 12 percent of its budget.

Since the accusations were made, over 145 diplomats have looked into the spurious claims made by PRI. Not one investigator has been able to validate PRI's accusations against UNFPA.

Nonetheless, UNFPA has not received U.S. funding since 2002, amounting to a loss of $161 million dollars. Many countries have appealed to the U.S. to restore funding to UNFPA, including UN ambassadors from more than 50 countries who explained that "The least developed countries, 34 of which are in Africa, receive the bulk of UNFPA funding and will be most affected." Thanks to our "pro-life" movement, the US holds the ignoble distinction of being the only country to ever withhold funds to UNFPA for political reasons.

The effects of U.S. policy are tangible. Johns Hopkins researchers have estimated the magnitude. According to the researchers, the loss of funding to UNFPA has resulted in 1.9 million infant deaths, 135,000 maternal deaths, 60 million unintended pregnancies, 25 million abortions.

Anita Rahman, president of Americans for UNFPA, an organization formed to educate the American public about the impact this U.S. religious fundamentalist plot has had on women, babies and families worldwide, once said, "We dream of the day when the United States government will once again contribute financially to UNFPA and be part of the international community's work to promote the health and dignity of women everywhere." With Obama and Clinton guiding foreign policy, that dream will come true. But that doesn't mean the "pro-life" movement isn't busy plotting the next nightmare.