Roundup: Clinton Stands Tall for International Reproductive Rights, FDA OKs OTC EC Access for 17-Year-Olds

Clinton gives a vigorous defense of reproductive rights worldwide; FDA official says agency will approve over-the-counter access for Plan B for 17-year-olds; health care costs hit even the fortunate, like Kate Michelman; Senate Finance Committee approves Sebelius nomination.

Two pieces of great news from Wednesday, both already noted on the Real Time blog:

Secretary
of State Hillary Rodham Clinton gave a vigorous defense of the US’s
role in ensuring reproductive rights and access to reproductive health
care worldwide in testifying before the House Foreign Relations
Committee. 

And an FDA official told the AP
that the agency will, following a court order, make Plan B available
over the counter to women aged 17 and older (the judge also ruled that
the FDA must reconsider having an age limit on over-the-counter access
at all).  Unfortunately, the AP story twice credits the religious
conservative take on emergency contraception: that it "it’s the
equivalent of an abortion pill because it can prevent a fertilized egg
from attaching to the uterus" and that "social conservatives say that
since it can prevent the implantation of
a fertilized egg, Plan B is the equivalent of an abortion pill."  Yet
no evidence has ever suggested that Plan B works by preventing
implantation.  Conservatives haven’t accepted the science, and continue
to insist that there is no firm evidence that EC doesn’t work that way.

Health Care Cost Crisis Hits Even Kate Michelman
Kate
Michelman’s courageous telling of her family’s struggle to afford
health care for her critically ill husband and her daughter, paralyzed
by a horse-riding accident, first appeared in The Nation and has been picked up by NPR, Jezebel, and Ezra Klein
Little wonder: a woman of power, accomplishment, and connection to
be facing bankruptcy because of health care costs drives home just how
precarious we all are without health care reform. Ezra points out that
even the rich need to join insurance pools to be protected from
insurmountable health care costs:

There are those who believe insurance a perversion of the market. It
may be true, they sadly admit, that low-income Americans need subsidies
and help. But there’s no reason such distortions need to reach into
higher income brackets. But this misunderstands the nature of health
care costs. They are not on the scale of individual incomes. Even the
rich find themselves rapidly impoverished by the staccato procession of
treatments and medicines and daily care required in the aftermath of a
health calamity. It is only aggregate incomes that can afford insurance
protecting unlucky individuals against the full costs of catastrophe.
Health care isn’t about purchasing. It’s about pooling.


Senate Finance Committee Approves Sebelius Nomination
The Senate Finance Committee voted 15-8 to approve Gov. Kathleen Sebelius’s nomination to HHS Secretary, the Kansas City Star reports
The Star adds, "Even if she faces a similar near-party line split when
her name goes
before the full Senate sometime this week, her confirmation — barring
an unforeseen last-minute roadblock — appears to be a lock."  Her
failure to disclose the full extent of Kansas abortion provider Dr.
George Tiller’s contributions to her political campaigns appear to have
cost her somewhat: "Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the ranking
Republican on the Finance
Committee, opposed her because she failed to disclose certain political
contributions."  Apparently undaunted, conservative leaders including
Tony Perkins, Grover Norquist, James Dobson and others sent a letter to
Senators of both parties urging them to vote against Sebelius’s
nomination, Huffington Post reports.

Did You Know? "A Child Is Born" Cover Was Staged
Visiting
close family friends recently, I saw on their bookshelf "A Child Is Born," a book my parents, and all my parents’ friends, had in their
houses while I was growing up — they were all pretty crunchy, but they liked science.  (The book was basically my version of sex ed.)  Seeing it
again, my immediate reaction was "anti-choice propaganda!"  But I
hadn’t known that the iconic cover (the thumb-sucking fetus) was in
fact staged, and was an aborted, not a live, fetus — as were most of photographer Lennart Nilsson’s subjects — as a Cambridge University exhibit on the history of imagery of the fetus reveals. Jezebel offers
a terrific write-up of an exhibit. 

Other News to Note

April 21: LifeSite News: Openly Pro-Choice Priest Asks Catholics To Stop Funding LifeSiteNews

April 21: Central Texas Votes: Texas Senate Committee Approves “Choose Life” Plate

April 22: Kansas City Star: Report says China facing looming aging crisis

April 22: WSAW: More Marathon County Women Are Choosing To Postpone Starting A Family Because of The Economy

April 22: Commercial Appeal: Tennessee lawmakers will push bill to limit state funds for Planned Parenthood

April 22: PR Newswire: Americans United for Life Releases Pro-Life Legal Guide, Hosts Capitol Hill Briefing

April 22: Sarah Palin Blog: The Abortion Debate – Sarah Palin Makes It Personal

April 20: Examiner.com: Brad Pitt – Doesn’t believe in birth control?

April 21: CPC Watcher: Op-Ed: Fake clinics mislead pregnant women

April 22: Chicago Tribune: Sex ed: Abstinence-only programs under review: As Congress considers reducing support, Illinois schools rethink sex ed policies

April 22: Arizona Daily Star: Brewer mistaken to OK abstinence-only funds

April 22: Business Wire: Project Prevention Announces Payment for Birth Control to the 3,000th Addicted Woman

April 22: Empowerher: Save the Earth with Birth Control

April 22: Kansas City Star: Judge upholds wording for Missouri abortion initiative

April 22: UPI: Man blocks anti-abortion truck

April 21: Dallas Morning News: Definition of human cloning debated in House

April 22: TownHall: Ind. weighs rules for abortion doctors

April 22: Kansas City Star: Abortion arguments need to be reframed

April 22: FOX News: California Man ‘Adopts’ Wife’s Two Aborted Children