You most likely haven’t thought of earning a badge since your girl scout or boy scout days.

Unless of course, you use foursquare-a service where you earn points and badges by sharing your location with friends.

This week MTV and Foursquare announced they will be introducing a badge that will encourage people to check-in when they get tested for sexually transmitted diseases.

This new partnership builds upon the long running campaign, GYT- Get Yourself Tested, which is a collaborative effort by MTV, the Kaiser Family Foundation, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

What is GYT? GYT is about creating a youthful, empowering social movement around getting tested for STDs.  GYT presents testing as an act of pride, not shame- promoting open communication about STDs and encouraging your people to ask to be tested.

The GYT badge, why and how do you get it:
First the why: 1) you’re a social networking star with as many friends, followers, fans, etc as Robert Patterson,  2) you’re a reproductive rights advocate who thinks, “Of course, everyone should get tested, duh!!!” and 3) you want to win a trip for two to NYC to watch a taping of MTV’s “10 on top.”

Ok, now for the how: 1)sign up for foursquare on your smartphone. (doesn’t work without a smartphone, maybe that should be number 1,)  2) follow MTV on foursquare,  3) head to a local testing center and then check in on foursquare (you can text your zipcode to GYTNOW to get the location of the nearest testing center.)

how do you feel about foursquare in general and particularly around STD testing?  Check out Digits blog on the subject.  I’m thinking this pushes the envelope.

Back when “W” was first running for office, he used to talk a lot about “compassionate conservatism.” None of us ever saw much of it on display during his eight years of power but at least he thought bringing up compassion was a smart move. Today’s right wing zealots don’t even pretend to care about compassion.

Take this summer’s emergence of the “anchor baby”.

Apparently, there’s a movement afoot to edit our nation’s Constitution by deleting the 14^th Amendment. Yes, that would be the one that makes sacred our nation’s due process and equal protection clauses, on which most basic civil rights decisions were based.

Today’s fired-up right-wingers seem to think those legal linchpins pale in comparison to the citizenship guaranteed by the 14^th Amendment to anyone born in the US. Thus, the derisive term “anchor baby.”

The right-wing-no-compassion party is now trying to convince us that the only reason immigrants have babies is to gain legal standing. It goes something like this. Babies born in the US are automatically citizens even if their parents (one or both) are not citizens. Think Collin Powell, Walt Disney, Fred Astaire and the list goes on.

Of course, the vivid imagination of the right has led them to conclude that illegal immigrants are intentionally having these babies to gain a foothold in this country. Just knowing that 50% of pregnancies in the US are unintended makes me doubt this fantasy a little.

But let’s just say they do. Let’s say undocumented immigrants are having babies left and right just to be anchored in our country. Turns out that’s not such a bad thing. The birthrate in the US is at its lowest in a century.

But we don’t have to worry. The birthrate of immigrants makes our overall rate higher than most wealthy nations and this means there will be plenty of working young people to take care of today’s aging population. I can just see it now. A ward of aging right-wing xenophobes taken care of by compassionate anchor babies.

Abortion was a rite of passage for most of the girls I knew in the small Southern town where I spent my teenage years. If you knew about it, the Pill was available at the local health department but you had to drive two towns over, which required a car and a good excuse for disappearing after school.

Even if you knew about the health department, where the mother of one of our most popular loud-mouthed football players worked, there was the whole issue of admitting to having sex. No one did it. Only sluts went on dates planning to have sex. Many of us were saving ourselves for marriage and, if that didn’t work out, we could always ask for forgiveness. But birth control was a premeditated sin.

Some boys may have carried condoms but I suspect many of them thought having one might insult the girl’s virtue.

So teenagers did what teenagers have been doing forever, they pulled out. Since teenage boys and girls, for that matter, aren’t known for great control over their bodies, this meant most girls I knew ended up pregnant at some point.

Back then teenage pregnancy wasn’t a glorified star-studded alternative. Despite the suffocating milieu, many of the girls I knew had dreams of college. They wanted more than what our town offered. So they made the trip to Birmingham to have an abortion and get their first prescription for birth control pills. No dreams deferred.

But here’s the rub. These very same girls who lives were literally handed back to them because they were able to have an abortion would become consistent anti-choice voters each and every election.

I’ll never forget one shopping trip in 1984. We were circling around the Limited’s sales rack, searching for deals and talking Ronald Reagan. We’d all just turned 18. I said, “But Ronald Reagan is against abortion.” One of my two Ronald Reagan loving friends who had had an abortion at 16 (they both had) and was blissfully shopping for cute shorts before going off to college, turned and said to me with the roll of an eye, “Paige, that’s just one issue.” Oh really, I wanted to say, where would you be without it.

Hypocrisy knows no boundaries. The year I moved to New York City for graduate school, I was assigned a Roman Catholic suitemate. She told me she’d marched for life in DC and written her undergraduate thesis against abortion. She was in law school, living her second generation Italian immigrant family’s dream.

One night she came to my room and told me her period was late. She told me emphatically that she was not giving up her dream. She and her boyfriend had decided to have abortion. In fact, they had already been through this once. They got pregnant as undergraduates and chose an abortion then. I don’t know if she had the abortion before the March for Life or after the anti-choice college thesis but she managed to work it in.

She got her period the next day and told me that it must have been the confession.

Abortion is a life-giving back, life-saving, dream granting, human mistake forgiving medical procedure. And, I’m sick of the hypocrisy.

Opt-out for STD testing and treatment for unmarried patients for the Abstinence Until Marriage supporters?

Opt-out for Obesity related diseases for fitness fantatics who believe obesity results from a lack of will power ?

Opt-out for prenatal care for Zero Population Growth proponents?

Opt-out for all medical intervention for “God’s Will” Congregants who believe in prayer alone?

Opt-out for sports-related injuries for those who don’t approve of organized sports?

This month marks the 90^th Anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States and it’s looking more and more like time for another Suffrage Parade.

In 1913, Alice Paul and friends organized the Suffrage Parade in Washington, DC. They were frustrated by slow, incremental progress in their fight to win the vote. On March 3, more than 5,000 suffragists hit the streets in support of a woman’s right to vote. The Suffrage Parade was timed to coincide with Woodrow Wilson’s Presidential inauguration. The suffragists wanted to send a clear message—they would hold Wilson accountable for women’s suffrage.

Of course, there were many mainstream supporters of women’s suffrage who discouraged demonstrations like the Suffrage Parade. These supporters clung to incremental change, believing that state by state, women would gain the right to vote. They didn’t want to rock the boat and, of course, they didn’t want to risk offending their friends in power.

More than ninety years later and we’re still having the same debate. How much rocking do we do when our friends are captaining the boat? If this last year is any measure, it’s time we start moving.

  Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, a somewhat amazing thing happened.  Senate committee members voted in favor of an addmendment to permanently repeal the Global Gag Rule.  

      The Global Gag Rule, which prohibits family planning funding to any international organization that provides, refers, or mentions abortion, was first instated via executive order by President Reagan.  The repeal essentially denied access to needed information and services to millions of women who desperately needed it.  The Global Gag Rule was rescinded by President Clinton and then reinstated by President Bush.  The Gag Rule was lifted again in 2009 by President Obama, but could be reinstated by a future president.  The only way to avoid this see saw policy change is legislatively.

Here’s a breakdown of the action in the committee yesterday by Population Action International

This afternoon, Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) successfully offered an amendment to permanently repeal the Global Gag Rule during the Senate Appropriations Committee’s consideration of the bill that funds the State Department and U.S. foreign assistance programs.

The amendment prevailed on a vote of 19 to 11 with all committee Democrats, except Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), and two Republican women—Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)—supporting the amendment.  The other ten Republicans on the committee opposed the Lautenberg amendment.  Joining Sen. Lautenberg in cosponsoring the anti-Gag Rule amendment were Sens. Collins, Diane Feinstein (D-CA), and Barbara Mikulski (D-MD). 

The next step will be a vote on the bill by the full Senate.  This ammendment is not in the House version, so its future is not certain, but it sure is nice to see legislators showing a little courage and conviction on behalf of women and their health.

I’ve now spent over three years of my life working for Planned Parenthood of Central North Carolina.

One of the most unique things about working in a field such as reproductive rights is that it’s always challenging. There’s always something new up ahead, something that affects you in ways that you wouldn’t think possible. Working in the clinic, patients were constantly sharing with me their stories, and it was difficult for me to not internalize their struggles and make them my own (and I don’t know if I always succeeded with that). Writing this blog, the challenges have been different, but no less affecting. Because I have a bizarre fascination with anti-choicers (as one could probably tell from the subject matter of my posts), I spent a good deal of time on far-right wing and uber-religious websites… and let me tell you: if you thought some of the stuff that I shared with you was bad, well… that was nothing. The degree to which some people hate always amazes me.

But as frustrating as times spent trolling those websites could be, I value it. Because like the time I spent in the clinic, I think that I’ve learned from it and grown from it. And that’s all I can ultimately hope for.

Perhaps you’ll be seeing my rants around here again sometime in the future, but this may be my last post for the PPCNC blog… and if it is, I didn’t want the occasion to go by without saying a few things. I need to thank Mitchell and Alison at PPCNC, for allowing me the opportunity to do this and for reining me in when I needed it.

But mostly, thank you. If you’ve read one of my posts, or commented, or even just skimmed a few… thank you. You’re why I’m here, and you’re part of the reason why this has been such a great experience for me.

I honestly believe that the things Planned Parenthood works to protect (and works to attain) are some of the most important social justice issues that exist today. These are good fights. These are important fights. So let’s keep fighting.

The battle over sex ed is one of those “issues” that I feel is generally blown way out of proportion. Not because I don’t think it’s an important issue, but because it seems like most reasonable people believe that some type of comprehensive sex ed should be at least be an option for kids in school. The linked article shows that it’s not just a simple majority of individuals in North Carolina who believe comprehensive sex ed should be available… it’s almost 70%. Those are huge numbers of support (especially in a state which, despite turning blue in the most recent presidential election, isn’t always known to be a bastion of liberalness). So, in some ways, it seems that the controversy sounding this issue is just the result of a very vocal minority expressing their opinion, albeit loudly.

That minority recently got a perceived boost to their cause, when a new study was published this month in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine. The study aimed to examine success rates of varying types of sex ed curricula on 662 African-American sixth and seventh graders. The students were enrolled in one of the following: an abstinence-based program, a program that dealt only with “safer sex,” a comprehensive-based program, and a control program that focused on health issues that were unrelated to sex ed. Students were then tracked for two years, at which point the researchers attempted to find out how many of the students had engaged in sexual activity.

The study found that those students who took part in the abstinence-education program had the lowest rate of sexual activity. This, as you might imagine, caused the abstinence-only crowd to go a little wild. One organization, Abstinence Clearinghouse, declared that it meant that “comprehensive sex ed [is] a big flop.” You might consider the generalization that all comprehensive sex ed programs are worthless because of the findings of this study to be a little suspect. And, unsurprisingly, you would be right.

As a result of these distortions (let’s call them what they are), the study’s authors felt the need to clarify a few things. They point out that comprehensive sex ed programs have consistently be shown to work and therefore, this study should not be indicative of any great failure on the part of comprehensive sex in general. Also, they clarify that the abstinence-based program that they examined was not a typical one. As another organization reported, this particular program “did not advocate abstinence until marriage, did not portray sex in a negative light or suggest that condoms are ineffective, and contained only medically accurate information” (quite different than most abstinence-based programs). In other words, the authors say that this study should be seen as an indication that this particular program seems to work for this particular population… which is not even remotely close to the conclusion that all abstinence-based programs are successful.

Now, my reasoning for mentioning all of this isn’t to denigrate all abstinence-based programs (though I will confess to having a strong bias for the alternative). Instead, I simply find it interesting that abstinence-based groups took something that could have been a small, positive turn of events… and twisted it into a lie. Maybe they’ve been lying so long that it was just a reflex action on their part, trying to turn this into something much more. Regardless, I think it’s a shame that the fact that researchers are finding successful interventions at all is being overlooked to engender hyperbolic propaganda. Because that’s what it should be about. Helping kids learn about sex ed in a way that makes sense to them. It’s too bad that some groups had to make an issue out of it.

We’ve written several posts tracking the disturbing trend of NC county and municipal governments cherry-picking what reproductive health care services they want to cover and subsequently voting to eliminate abortion coverage for their employees. For these employees, July first marked much more than a new fiscal year. For employees in the counties and towns that voted to eliminate coverage of abortion care, yesterday also meant the first day that they were without comprehensive reproductive health care.

Check out this blog post written by our friend at Planned Parenthood Health Systems and NARAL Pro-Choice North Carolina with a perspective on the divisive “wedge-issue” politics that are making their way into local governments across the state.

Today is the beginning of a new fiscal year. To many, the first day of July is primarily of financial significance. But for some municipal employees in North Carolina, today marks a new limit on their Constitutional right to choose abortion.

Vehement anti-choice state Rep. Paul Stam provoked local elected officials across the state — from Apex to Gastonia and Pitt County to Lincoln County — to remove abortion coverage from governmental employee health plans. Many municipalities made this change in their new budgets effective today. While some city and county managers made the decision to cut off benefits for their employees, others decided to put the coverage to a vote. How many of them would want their private medical issues debated in a public forum? (links added by Choice 2.0)

Read the rest of the story here. (Cross-posted from our partners at the Progressive Pulse)

In case you missed it, May marked the 50th anniversary of the birth control pill’s approval by the Food and Drug Administration. This seems like both an extremely long and an extremely short amount of time. On the one hand, it’s somewhat amazing to me that there existed a time in which birth control wasn’t readily available (though, rationally, I know this must be true)… and on the other, there seems like so much work left to accomplish on issues surrounding birth control (i.e. access, price). For an interesting perspective on some of the latter issues, check out this editorial published in the New York Times.

But, as you might expect, it’s not all fond looks back. Some groups are attempting to use this anniversary as a rallying point, as a way to convince anti-choice individuals to speak out against the evils of birth control. And birth control is pretty evil, if you weren’t already aware. Full explanations for can be found here, but here’s the Cliffs Notes version:

1) “The mentality of contraception opposes life”
2) “Contraception encourages risky sexual behavior” and leads to sexually transmitted infections
3) “Contraception only increases abortion”

The last one is kind of a doozy, isn’t it? I’d attempt to break it down a bit for you, but I don’t really understand the argument myself, so just rest assured… there’s very little logic behind it.

Regardless of the crazed individuals who want to control every aspect of a woman’s medical decisions, I think it’s important that we take a minute to appreciate what the introduction of birth control has meant to our lives. To acknowledge the (probably somewhat difficult) decision the FDA made fifty years ago. And to come together to continue to work to make birth control accessible and affordable to every one who wants it.