The stated goals of the conference are to:

1. Explore new ways to think and speak about abortion.
2. Approach issues related to abortion with open hearts and open minds.
3. Define more precisely areas of disagreement and work together on areas of common ground.
4. Get to know those on multiple sides of the issues more personally.

Speakers will include experts in law, bioethics, medicine, theology, and other topics. The full program is available online, and includes panels on topics including morality, prevention of unintended pregnancy, conscience clauses, Constitutionality, and other issues.

Early discounted registration ends September 8.

Cuccinelli’s opinion notes that health centers specializing in reproductive services are characterized as physicians’ offices that are exempt from state hospital licensure requirements. Forcing those facilities to meet hospital standards would bring more demanding requirements for space, equipment and staffing that abortion rights supporters argue would limit access to legal, first-trimester abortions.

Maddow spoke to NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia President Tarina Keene about what this could mean for abortion access in that state. Keene indicated that such regulations could potentially close 17 of the state’s 21 abortion clinics (making our past discussions of the difficulties provider face integrating abortion into their office practices all the more relevant). The organization has issued a statement arguing that:

This move has nothing to do with upholding the law or protecting women’s health, and everything to do with ideology and politics. Attorney General Cuccinelli is trying to accomplish through brute force of executive power what he couldn’t accomplish through the democratic process in his time as a State Senator – restricting women’s access to reproductive healthcare by shutting down abortion providers. These targeted regulations of abortion providers (TRAP) laws have nothing to do with safety and have everything to do with ideology.

Those who support the change will inevitably ask, “Don’t you want women to be as safe as possible when they have abortions?” Of course pro-choice women’s health and reproductive rights advocates want abortion to be safe. But this seemingly innocuous question ignores the fact that those pushing for such changes are working to restrict abortion access, rather than responding to any demonstrated need for improved facilities.

As Keene observes in the interview, “They have hijacked the language, and, unfortunately, what they’ve also done is make people feel like abortion is dangerous and it’s also scary.”

In reality, the data shows that legal abortion in the first trimester is very safe — far safer than continuing a pregnancy.

View the full interview (with transcript) below:

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For context, the piece explains:

Earlier this year, the Senate Armed Services Committee moved toward restoring abortion rights to some 200,000 active duty women in the U.S. military, by voting to reverse current policy prohibiting the performance of abortions in military facilities, even in cases when U.S. servicewomen pay out-of-pocket for the procedure.The amendment to change the policy was sponsored by Sen. Roland Burris (D-IL) and is now attached to the pending Department of Defense (DOD) authorization bill.

The ban on privately funded abortions was apparently put in place in 1988, lifted by former President Clinton in 1993, and reinstated by Congress in 1995. According to the author, the ban particularly affects servicewomen stationed overseas, where legal abortion may not be available in the country’s own facilities. The author makes an argument that the policy against privately funded abortion in Department of Defense facilities not only strips women of their right to an abortion and endangers their health and safety, but that the policy may have negative effects on the military through the loss of women who would otherwise choose abortion.

As the review’s author states for a related press release:

This debate is not about the morality or legality of abortion, but whether women who enlist in the military, and especially those who are living overseas, should be discriminated against as a result…It’s time that we stop treating women in uniform as second-class citizens by denying them timely access to a legal, Constitutionally protected health care service their civilian counterparts can freely obtain.

Readers may also be interested in another piece from the same policy review, The Potential of Health Care Reform to Improve Pregnancy-Related Services and Outcomes.

Medical Students for Choice provides student organizing resources including tips on curriculum reform and tools for student leaders, a list of U.S. and Canadian ob/gyn and family practice residency programs that offer abortion training, recommended reading, and other tools and support. The organization is also on Facebook and Twitter.

Nursing Students for Choice is a relatively new organization that focuses on reproductive health training for nursing students. Their website provides resources for getting involved and for starting campus chapters. The organization also has a new blog as well as Facebook presence.

As part of the week, the groups are asking supporters to contact their Congressional representatives “to ask the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to support comprehensive family planning services that include contraception as a key women’s health service under the Women’s Health Amendment.” As with many online action campaigns, you can put in your zip code to identify your Representative and Senators and send them a letter explaining that “Latinas, immigrants, and women of color will be disproportionately affected if contraception is not made affordable and accessible.”

There is also an online conversation about Latinas and contraception happening all week, with an inaugural blog post, My-So-Called-Sex-Education, up at Nuestra Vida, Nuestra Voz (NLIRH’s blog) on the need for information about and access to contraception. Further discussion will happen on Facebook, via Twitter (#latinaRJwk), and on partnering blogs such as VivirLatino. There are in-person events taking place in a few cities; check out this page for details.

The “ride” to Atlanta follows up on previous efforts in the state targeting women of color with the goal of restricting abortion. Atlanta was the target earlier this year of an anti-abortion billboard campaign targeting Black women by referring to Black children as an “endangered species.” Also this year, race-focused anti-abortion legislation was defeated in the state; it was opposed by groups of women of color including SisterSong, SPARK, and SisterLove, who were also active in organizing protests of the “pro-life freedom rides.”

Loretta Ross of SisterSong filed this report {PDF] from their protests of the “Ride” at this week’s events, writing that:

…it was surreal seeing all these white folks carrying signs that said “Abortion is the #1 Killer of Black America.” Can you imagine the optics of the scene? Here’s a group of white folks claiming to save Black babies being protested by mostly African American women and men who are shouting “Trust Black Women!”? Once we saw their signs, Paris instantly created a new chant: “Racism is the #1 Killer of Black America, not Black Women!”

In a statement [PDF] prior to the event, the organizations wrote that the “rides” were “no more than a ploy to turn back the clock on Black women’s right to reproductive freedom,” and Ross got to the heart of the offense of the event, including the appropriation of an important civil rights legacy in the service of restricting the rights of women of color:

We are offended by their cynicism, opportunism, and outright distortions of historical facts. Both Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King firmly supported reproductive justice for women. Lies by anti-abortionists, no matter how often repeated, cannot change those historical facts.

As Dazon Dixon Diallo of SisterLove stated:

The actions planned by Priests for Life [the group organizing the rides] are insulting, disrespectful, and completely antithetical to the struggle for women’s human rights. They should be ashamed of themselves, and it is our job as Black women and people of color to shame them!

We would expand that to it being the job of *all* people who are pro-choice advocates for human rights and reproductive justice to resist these campaigns.

For more, see:

• SPARK Reaffirms the Agency and Power of Black Women and our Civil Rights Legacy
• SisterSong has photos from the event on their Facebook profile
• Anti-choice “Freedom Rides” Distort the History and Message of Civil Rights Movement – from the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health

For those interested in an even more thorough exploration of this topic, Lori Freedman’s “Willing and Unable: Doctors’ Constraints in Abortion Care” is a great resource. In fact, the Times piece mentions Freedman, in the context of a study she co-authored.

In the study, researchers interviewed 30 OB/GYNs with abortion training who said they wanted to provide abortions after residency. Once they were in practice, though, most of the OB/GYNs were not providing abortions, and the study examines the professional, personal and social reasons why they weren’t.

“Willing and Unable” provides more detail on these discussions with providers, focusing on the providers who are trained to provide abortion and not opposed to the practice — the willing — but who for various personal and structural reasons are unable to do so.

Freedman discusses the isolation of abortion into freestanding clinics, and the physicians she interviews describe the barriers to integrating abortion into normal medical care in group practices and hospitals, including group practice owners, personal attitudes, fear of stigma, financial and professional vulnerability early in their careers, HMO referral rules, and Catholic hospital networks that have made them unable to provide abortion to patients.

Ninety-seven percent of non-metropolitan U.S. counties lack abortion providers, and dedicated abortion clinics currently provide 93 percent of abortion procedures. Looking at these statistics, Freedman concludes that “threats, overt abortion prohibitions, and a medical culture of practice that distances itself from abortion” results in a “multilevel, institutionalized buck-passing that marginalizes abortion practice.”

She explains that “ultimately, willing and even highly motivated physicians find the current organization of health care all but prohibits abortion practice within mainstream medicine.”

In some cases, providers were more ambivalent and simply did not feel a degree of personal responsibility for providing abortions that would lead them to tackle certain barriers and inconveniences that could be overcome. In other cases, however, the providers would have liked to provide abortion but were prevented from doing so by strict policies and conditions of their employment or other structural barriers.

Freedman examines not only the reasons for but the outcomes of these barriers — such as cases encountered by interviewees who currently work in Catholic hospital networks and have been frustrated by their inability to provide abortions, even to women whose pregnancies were clearly unsuccessful and, in some cases, life-threatening.

Freedman makes the following recommendations for advocates to move beyond increasing access to abortion training (a key focus in previous decades):

• Target physicians later in their careers, as they may experience less financial and professional vulnerability;
• Work to increase the number of advanced practice clinicians (such as nurse practitioners and CNMs) who provide abortion services;
• Call on HMOs and private physician practices to stop outsourcing abortion care to dedicated clinics and reduce the segregation of this service from mainstream medicine.

Overall, I found “Willing and Unable” to be a nuanced and fascinating exploration of the reasons why providers who are trained in and willing to provide abortions may not be doing so, which in turn contributes to the high percentage of U.S. areas with no local abortion provider.

While I have personally been more attuned to the issue of medical student training with regards to the provider portion of the access equation, Freedman’s work was quite informative in pointing out other important ways in which trained and willing physicians are currently prevented from reducing the provider shortage in the United States.

Readers may also be interested in this RHRealityCheck podcast discussion with Freedman, and two articles in the June 2010 issue of the journal Contraception by Freedman and her colleagues.

Note: “Willing and Unable” is published by my larger workplace’s university press, and I know the press’s marketing and new media staff.

The story provides both a historical and personal context for understanding the challenges — and the courageous dedication — of women’s health advocates on the frontlines of reproductive health for the past four decades.

Unfortunately, this ground-breaking journalism appears the same week in which we learned the Obama administration is denying abortion coverage for women whose pre-existing conditions will place them in “high risk pools” that have been established through the recent health care reform legislation.

More on that lack of courage in a moment.

But it’s worth pausing on Emily Bazelon’s story. She first outlines the depressing marginalization of abortion providers in the United States that occurred in the decades after Roe v. Wade. In 1973, hospitals made up 80 percent of abortion facilities. Fifteen years later, 90 percent of abortions were performed in clinics. At the same time, medical schools increasingly refused to make abortion training part of their curriculum. By 1995, “the number of OB-GYN residencies offering abortion training fell to a low of 12 percent.”

Even though it was the hard work of the feminist movement that made abortion widely available through clinics, those clinics were never intended to replace the key role of hospitals. And as we’ve seen all too often, clinics are ground zero for harassing patients and abortion providers.

As Bazelon notes, “This was never the feminist plan.”

This is a story, though, with an encouraging ending. While anti-abortion forces forced this marginalization through very public protests and acts of violence, a quieter, grassroots movement has taken hold that is starting to reverse these trends:

Over the last decade, abortion-rights advocates have quietly worked to reverse the marginalization encouraged by activists like Randall Terry. Abortion-rights proponents are fighting back on precisely the same turf that Terry demarcated: the place of abortion within mainstream medicine. This abortion-rights campaign, led by physicians themselves, is trying to recast doctors, changing them from a weak link of abortion to a strong one.

Its leaders have built residency programs and fellowships at university hospitals, with the hope that, eventually, more and more doctors will use their training to bring abortion into their practices. The bold idea at the heart of this effort is to integrate abortion so that it’s a seamless part of health care for women — embraced rather than shunned.

The article goes on to tell many compelling stories and reveal complex personal negotiations and sacrifices.

The comments section of the article is also an essential read, as it provides some key corrective points and additional context. “sadpatient” points out that the article, despite its “sympathetic” stance, still participates in the demonization of second trimester abortions, even though “many women are driven to terminate a dearly wanted pregnancy due to poor prenatal diagnosis.”

“Jenny K,” a member of Nursing Students for Choice, was “disappointed” that the article didn’t mention the role of nurse practitioners and physician assistants. And “CM,” through a personal anecdote, discusses the continuing difficulties of terminating a pregnancy in hospitals that are unwilling to provide separate, specialized facilities.

But the gains noted in the article are undeniable. Unfortunately, the Obama administration’s decision this week to prohibit abortion coverage in Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Pools (PCIPs) — also known as high-risk pools — is a disheartening setback for all those fighting to make abortion accessible and affordable.

The Hill reports that the decision ”came as the National Right to Life Committee and others argued the pools being set up in Pennsylvania and New Mexico would cover elective abortions — something that wasn’t prohibited by the healthcare reform law or the president’s executive order on abortion.”

Jessica Aron, in her enlightening breakdown of the political machinations behind the decision, explains why denying coverage to women in this group is particularly devastating:

Women entering these plans are, by definition, those who have experienced serious medical conditions — so serious that insurers are unwilling to sell them insurance. In other words, those who get pregnant are already at a heightened risk for needing an abortion for health reasons when compared to the general population.

Aron also explains in detail why, even with the executive order that Obama signed as a compromise with anti-abortion Democrats like Bart Stupak, “nothing in the law requires such action” restricting abortion in PCIPs.

It is understandable that the Administration might now feel the need to honor the “spirit” of the compromise that resulted in the Executive Order.  But the whole point of the compromise was to preserve the status quo, which included both restricted and unrestricted spheres of abortion funding.  Moreover, the terms of the agreement were carefully negotiated.  Abortion opponents who participated in the bargaining did not raise concerns about high risk pools or other specific potential sources of federal funding, and they should be able to live with the deal they made.

The worst of it is that the Administration could have at the very least set up something akin to the Hyde Amendment and the PPACA by giving states the option of using state or private money to cover abortion care costs.  Instead, the Administration cited the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan specifically as the controlling precedent for the PCIPs.

The reaction from women’s health advocates has been swift. Judith L. Lichtman, senior advisor of the National Partnership for Women and Families, released this statement:

For the next few years, temporary insurance plans for those with pre-existing conditions will be the best and only way that millions of Americans — including many women of child-bearing age — can get health insurance coverage. It is unnecessary and punitive for the Obama Administration to adopt rules that prevent women from using their own private resources to purchase coverage for abortion services in these plans.

Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, stated:

The very women who need to purchase private health insurance in the new high-risk pools are likely to be more vulnerable to medically complicated pregnancies. It is truly harmful to these women that the administration may impose limits on how they use their own private dollars, limiting their health care options at a time when they need them most. This decision has no basis in the law and flies in the face of the intent of the high-risk pools that were meant to meet the medical needs of some of the most vulnerable women in this country.

Raising Women’s Voices and the National Women’s Health Network are providing avenues for action and key talking points to use when contacting the White House (202-456-1111) and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (877-696-6775).

On a personal note, it pleases me no end that this truth-telling episode appeared on “Friday Night Lights.” The show is based on Buzz Bissinger’s book of that same name, a sociology of the very West Texas town (Odessa, Texas) where I lived for 20 years and the high school (Permian) from which my three children graduated.

Not only do I know Dillon/Odessa and its hardscrabble culture all too well; it was where I moved as a 15-year-old pregnant teen with my new husband. We hailed from an even smaller West Texas town, where our football team was truly the only game around (my high school classmates still play the 8-millimeter film of our state championship game at every reunion, if that gives you a clue). At least Odessa has supermarkets and movie theaters!

Odessa was also where my growing understanding of the complexity of childbearing decisions came full circle — and why, though I loved my children more than anything, I came to realize I would have been a much better parent if I’d waited 10 or 20 years to have them.

My 30-year career with Planned Parenthood began when I became executive director of the fledgling affiliate there in 1974 — an affiliate now headed by a woman who was in my older daughter’s Permian High graduating class.

Sadly, I know from stories I still get from young women that the same time-warped pattern repeats itself: Teen girl wants to please football player boyfriend and gets pregnant. The good news is that these stories now — regardless of what the girl decided to do about the pregnancy — are much more likely to end in a statement of appreciation for having had choices in the first place.

This particular episode of FNL is a testament to the fact that regardless of the reactionary, shaming culture and a media with a rightward tilt, real life women will find a way to save their own lives — even in unlikely places like the fictional Dillon and the very real Odessa.

I’ve sent NBC a note of appreciation and urge all of you to do same. We’re good at reacting when we don’t like something, but less so when there’s a show worthy of applause. Here’s where you can go to send a comment: http://www.nbc.com/contact/general/

The series is executive produced by Peter Berg (the film “Friday Night Lights,” “Hancock”), who also wrote and directed the pilot. Joining Berg as executive producers are Jason Katims (“Roswell”), Brian Grazer (“Frost/Nixon,” “The Da Vinci Code”), David Nevins (“Arrested Development”), Sarah Aubrey (“The Kingdom”) and Jeffrey Reiner (“Caprica”). “Friday Night Lights” is a production of Universal Media Studios, Imagine Entertainment and Film 44, in case you want to target a specific individual.

“Friday Night Lights,” one of my long-time favorite series, has paid attention to women’s health since its inception, from its diverse portrayal of teenager’s sexual lives to its confrontation of sexual violence. And, yes, it even book-dropped “Our Bodies, Ourselves” at the end of its first season.

But it truly out-did itself (and almost every other work in the history of television — or film) with an episode that aired last week on NBC that traced one character’s decision to have an abortion.

Fifteen-year-old Becky (Madison Burge), pregnant after one sexual encounter with a high school football player, turns to Tami Taylor (Connie Britton), a high school principal (but not at Becky’s school) and trained guidance counselor, to help her sort through her feelings of whether she can manage a baby at her age:

Becky: I have an appointment for my abortion tomorrow. Why do I feel so weird?

Tami: Because it’s a hard decision. Have you thought about what you want?

Becky: We don’t have any money. I’m in the 10th grade. It was my first time. I threw it away, and I don’t want to throw my life away. It’s just really obvious that my mom wants me to have this abortion because I was her mistake and she has just struggled and hurt and everyday she wanted better. And I knew better. I was just thinking forget about what she wants, what do I want? Maybe I could take care of this baby. And maybe I would be good at it and I could love it and be there for it. Then I think about how awful it would be if I had a baby and I spent the rest of my life resenting him or her. Do you think I’m going to hell if I had an abortion?

Tami: No honey, I don’t.

Becky: What would you tell your daughter?

Tami: I would tell her to think about her life, think about what’s important to her and what she wants and I would tell her she’s in a real tough spot and then I would support whatever decision she made.

Becky: I can’t take care of a baby … I can’t.

Writing in The New York Times, Ginia Bellafante discusses the significance of the episode:

With those words Becky decides to have an abortion. This took place on Friday’s episode of “Friday Night Lights” and was remarkable — abortions have been rare on serial television since the early ’70s. But the effect was particularly resonant this week. On Monday Bristol Palin, America’s most famous teenage mother, briefly appeared as herself on the ABC Family soap opera “The Secret Life of the American Teenager,” bringing greater attention to a popular series that for three seasons has performed didactic and soulless cheerleading for anti-abortion sentiments.

Bellafante goes on to describe numerous instances in which television has “leaned to the right on the subject of unwanted pregnancy,” including a  shocking (even for a soap opera) turn of events on “All My Children”:

In the most bizarre instance of revisionism on the issue, four years ago “All My Children” reversed Erica Kane’s 1973 abortion, a milestone in television history when it occurred 11 months after the passage of Roe v. Wade. A character named Josh Madden learned that although Erica had initially conceived him, he had been kidnapped as an embryo and transferred to the womb of another woman by the obviously deranged doctor who had raised him. Fans were outraged, on one level because the story line was ludicrous, even by the measure of daytime television, and on another because the twist had gone a long way toward eradicating the show’s progressive politics, and, in some sense, an entire era.

What makes the portrayal on “Friday Night Lights” even more surprising is we see the hardships of obtaining an abortion — from coming up with the money for the procedure to the time and money lost when faced with a mandatory waiting period.

And unlike an abortion episode from the short-lived WB series “Jack & Bobby” (see Jenn Pozner’s summary), FNL doesn’t dwell on issues of divided teens/parents. Becky’s mother, Cheryl (played brilliantly by Alicia Witt), supports the decision, though she’s emotionally unavailable to her daughter. The boy’s parents, though, want Becky to have the baby, noting that Mary and Joseph toughed it out — to which their son, Luke, retorts: “Becky and me are not Mary and Joseph.”

Having seen this season of FNL during its earlier broadcast on DirecTV, I don’t want to offer any spoilers, but know there will be fall-out from Becky’s decision. Meanwhile, another character is pregnant and lacks health insurance. Her storyline is also compelling and is yet one more reason you should be watching this intelligent show.

In other TV news, Los Angeles Times TV critic Mary McNamara also sees something virtually unprecedented in the recent portrayals of fat people on television who, at least three new shows have discovered, “are human after all, with a panoply of dreams, desires, foibles and stories that often have nothing to do with their weight”:

Lifetime’s “Drop Dead Diva” broke the ice last year. Lit up by newcomer Brooke Elliott, the show wrangled its iffy conceit — an afterlife mix-up leaves a thin girl trapped in a fat girl’s body — into a surprisingly edgy comedy. This summer, ABC Family debuted “Huge,” a vehicle for “Hairspray” star Nikki Blonsky, which was no doubt the cause for much rejoicing among plus-sized thespians. Set at a fat camp, “Huge” is essentially a teen drama — with the requisite rebel, pretty girl, shy boy, tough jock, etc. — but one that also explores the complexities of childhood obesity with a clear eye and dark humor.

And this fall, pound-power comes to the networks. In CBS’ romantic comedy “Mike and Molly,” Melissa McCarthy and Billy Gardell play a fourth-grade teacher and a Boston cop, respectively, who meet at an Overeaters Anonymous meeting. All three of these shows take on the emotional, social and physical difficulties of being overweight, but none of them get bogged down in the slippery excess of parody or pathos that so often accompanies current tales from the top of the scale.

McNamara also makes an important clarification: “When I said television has discovered that fat people are human, I mean it’s discovered that fat women and children are human. Men have always been allowed to be fat on TV.”

She gives props to the one great exception — “Roseanne” — in which Roseanne Barr herself was remarkable for rarely remarking on any of these issues at all.