Letter to the Editor Re: Family Planning Waiver

Re: Crossroads Editorial on Family Planning Waiver

All research states parents have the greatest influence on children to avoid sexual risk behaviors. Teens know it and prove it by going to doctors and clinics that let them avoid their parents’ disapproval or disappointment. Through the Family Planning Waiver, adults give teens birth control and adult taxpayers pay for it. This version of adult responsibility insures that teens will be sexually active before they are planning families. Clinic adults have eliminated parents from the best shot a child has to avoid or stop sexual behavior. The Planned Parenthood coalition has created the perfect business model--create, expand, serve and profit from your client base—and neutralized their opposition. In the process, children get the diseases, babies and heartbreak.

If children have sex once, without any aggressive adult intervention and guidance, they will continue to have sex. The younger they start, the more sex partners they have, and the greater their exposure to pregnancy, STDs and AIDS. Sex, not lack of access to contraception or condoms, causes all three. “Dual protection” is the newest promotion and, as with all the others, is a theory without proof in reality. Adults offer damage control. Teens deserve better. Parents deserve better.

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It is not the dispensing doctor and nurse who are at the girl’s bedside when she is dying of HPV-induced cervical cancer, or comforting her when diagnosed with sterility, or helping to manage her HIV meds, or losing their golden years raising her children. The parents will be there to pick up the pieces of what other adults denied them the opportunity to prevent or even monitor. Parents deserve better.

WAC position paper on Family Planning Waiver

This organization never has and never will oppose access to health services for anyone. However, we do oppose the way female reproductive health care is currently being delivered, especially to low income women and teens. We ask legislators to look beyond the rhetoric, the tax savings, and the examples of worse-case scenarios to take this opportunity to really analyze the impact of the Family Planning Waiver in Wisconsin.

Family Planning

Sexually active teenagers and unmarried adults are rarely planning families. Generally, they want to have sex but not babies. Generally, that is a personal choice, one with immense public repercussions. But rather than address that behavioral choice, Wisconsin governmental departments deal only with the consequences of it. The behavior is deemed a personal right, but the right to have a baby is not. Only prevention of a baby is equated with personal responsibility. The waiver was not about family planning. Wanting children is a prerequisite to family planning. Surely testing and treatment of low income women and minors for infections and diseases is funded by other government programs. The waiver was unneeded except to put teens on birth control.

Pregnancy and giving birth are detrimental for teens, their babies, and our society. Billions are spent to prevent births among low income women and teens. That begs the question “Just who is doing the “family planning”? There is an inherent problem when teen pregnancy prevention is a program of temporary sterilization with a pill, a patch, a device or an injection. Lack of results could lead to a permanent sterility initiative. Amidst all the statistics, focus of medical care has to be on individual girls. What is best for a teen is that sexual activity be delayed until, as a mother, she and baby can thrive. That keeps the government out of family planning and limited to an educative function.

A solid teen pregnancy prevention program is proactive and centered on empowerment of girls to be change makers in their own lives and in their communities. There has to be positive alternatives to teen motherhood available and teens must be mentored to pursue those alternatives. To say no to sex, teens have to say yes to something better. Birth control alone changes nothing in teen lives or in our country. Our kids deserve more than damage control.

Tax Relief

If an American can’t pay for health services, the taxpayers do. It is irrelevant whether that entitlement is generated by city, county, state or federal taxes or fees. A federally subsidized program doesn’t save Wisconsinites money by adding layers of administration. Millions are spent on salaries and supervision before one dollar reaches patient services. According to Planned Parenthood calculations, Wisconsin family planning services cost more than $18.2 million annually. Statistics indicate that has bought increased pregnancy rates, barely fluctuating birth rates, escalating STD rates, spread of HIV to new populations, and increasing abortion with the advent of drug induced options. The quality of life for low income women benefits little from this largesse; the case could be made that low income teens are actually victimized by the “safety net”.

Systemic Failure

If the government had paid Phillip Morris and other cigarette companies to provide free filter cigarettes to teens, to teach the benefits of smoking them in our schools, and to manage the medical care for lung damage, we would all recognize the preposterousness of the situation. Yet, the government pays Planned Parenthood’s coalition to provide free contraceptives, to teach contraception in our schools, and then to provide medical care when contraception is used. With their in-house research, political clout, government partnerships, government funding and access to teens, these agencies are so powerful, they become unaccountable and untouchable. Claiming success for pregnancy prevention alone is gratuitous when co-infections and diseases are also outcomes of sexual behavior. Claiming that access to free contraceptives constitutes pregnancy prevention is misleading since a cause and effect relationship is lacking.

Age Limits

The age limit in the Family Planning Waiver would be a non-issue if
teen parenthood was beneficial
parents were unrestricted participants in the reproductive medical care of their children
underage patient confidentiality was not used to justify government reimbursement
child-bearing age wasn’t now 4-5 years younger than the law-stipulated 15 years, and
existing laws were followed and enforced.
At the 2003 legislative hearing on this bill, Planned Parenthood claimed
incest and domestic abuse warranted their universal actions in loco parentis
patient confidentiality requires categorizing minors as low income “families” of one, thus making their treatment reimbursable by the government
medical privilege trumps the law in the treatment of children under the age of fifteen.
By their manipulation of the law, family planning clinics have created the taxpayer-paid burden for 85% of teen pregnancies that they now use to justify their service contracts. This legislation is a legitimate response to a situation of the family planning clinics own making.

Testing and Treatment

Sexually transmitted diseases, most HIV, pregnancy, and cervical cancer are results of sexual activity--period. A law neither puts people at risk nor keeps them safe. People put themselves at risk and have to be aggressively warned that sexual behavior, regardless of intervention with contraception or condoms, will keep them at risk. In view of the epidemic proportions of many of these outcomes, relegating medical interventions to teenagers, without the consistent, caring supervision of a parent or adult mentor, is folly. Teen brain development research contradicts the possibility of success with this approach. Once infected with a viral STD, the disease and its treatment can be intensive, long term, painful and stressful. Infected teens need loving adults, not just medical professionals.

Recommendations

Pass this legislation as the first step in the reform of reproductive health care in this state.
Form an unbiased blue ribbon citizens committee to review and assess the state’s reproductive health program

Letter to CDC/African American HIV/STD initiative

Sent in response to recent data on infection rates among African Americans and the launching of a new CDC initiative:

I received a letter from Dr. Gerberding distributed via the WASH ListServ that cited facts about the disproportionate incidence of HIV/STD among the African American population. I applaud the proposed discussion with those “whom CDC has not traditionally engaged”. With the current listing of partner organizations, there is great message buy-in but little diversity of thought. I very sincerely believe that you need to talk to groups other than government departments and the agencies they fund. There are an increasing number of Milwaukee agencies and churches contacting us who want to try an alternative approach to condoms and testing. They want more than measures that assume black youth are incapable of abstaining from sex.

Since a new working group was announced that will develop an action plan, I would hope this group would consider the successful ABC approach. If you would embolden and fund inner city youth development agencies, schools and churches to encourage fidelity and abstinence, not as a contraceptive choice but as a way to live for the betterment of their communities, you may find a greater buy-in by concerned community leaders. The community has to be empowered to change outcomes.

Damage control efforts alone are insulting to our humanity. But when policy is driven by protection of individual sexual freedom at the expense of public health and societal well-being, perhaps the existing situation is to be expected. There is a great line in a Law and Order episode. In response to a teen saying “This is a free country”, the cop responds “No, it’s a democracy”. Maybe we can’t have it both ways.

While I understand that there are many factors operating within inner cities that add to the “big picture”, I am very concerned that stubborn adherence to a condom risk reduction program is at the cost of lives. It is a theoretical solution without proof in reality. It is a hope-less approach without a promise of a better future. Potentially, the African Americans are the start of the domino effect that will sweep the country.

Is someone wise enough to ask “What if We Are Wrong?”