House Bill 515, introduced early this year by state Rep. Ellen Story (D-Hampshire District), would amend a section of the “Crimes Against Chastity, Morality, Decency and Good Order” to legally allow unmarried persons to buy birth control or contraception from a pharmacist or to be prescribed a form a birth control from a pharmacist. The law currently reads (emphasis added):

A registered physician may administer to or prescribe for any married person drugs or articles intended for the prevention of pregnancy or conception. A registered pharmacist actually engaged in the business of pharmacy may furnish such drugs or articles to any married person presenting a prescription from a registered physician. A public health agency, a registered nurse, or a maternity health clinic operated by or in an accredited hospital may furnish information to any married person as to where professional advice regarding such drugs or articles may be lawfully obtained.

The Massachusetts Chapter of the National Organization for Women describes the bill as outdated and long-irrelevant, yet still technical law that should be modified:

This bill would repeal outdated, unconstitutional, and archaic laws that remain on the books in Massachusetts, including a pre-Roe v. Wade abortion ban, a medically unjustified and burdensome hospital mandate, and a birth control ban for unmarried couples. It would ensure that abortion rights are upheld in the Commonwealth should Roe v. Wade ever be overturned.

An Harvard Crimson news article from 1970 addressed controversies to the law more than four decades ago:

The Committee on Social Welfare held a public hearing last Thursday on House Bill 520, which would repeal the current Massachusetts laws on birth control. The committee listened to testimony that Massachusetts is one of two states which still prohibit the distribution of birth control information and devices to unmarried people. They heard ecology workers describe the dangers of the population explosion. They heard a psychologist explain that the current laws discriminate against the poor. They heard a gynecologist state that laws prohibiting contraceptives encourage illegal abortions. And they heard a doctor in the Department of Public Health testify that the current laws disqualify Massachusetts from Federal funding because they discriminate between married and unmarried people.

The committee was treated to a demonstration that the laws are selectively enforced. Debby Vollmer, a member of Worchester Women’s Liberation, opened an innocent-looking brown paper bag and held up a package of contraceptive foam she had bought in a drug store down the street. She pointed out that drug stores and department stores throughout the state sell contraceptive items to anyone, a violation of the law which the state ignores. At the same time Bill Baird is sentenced to prison for giving contraceptive foam to an unmarried woman.

Baird was present at the hearing and testified briefly for the bill. The committee seemed sympathetic to him, but the reason became evident as opponents of the bill began to testify. They claimed that the legalization of contraceptive care would destroy the morals of the citizens of Massachusetts. Two state representatives, a housewife, a businessman and a Catholic priest presented this viewpoint. The committee seemed particularly interested in whether the priest agreed that enforcement of the laws is discriminatory. He said yes, that the laws should be strictly enforced, that the state probably should crack down on stores which continue to sell contraceptives. The hearing ended on this note.

[...]

THE HEARING on House Bill 520 was probably typical of Massachusetts politics, and it may be naive to hope that it could have been any different. It was a farce, but it was only momentarily funny. The women faced with the prospect of bearing unwanted children will not be laughing.

Story’s bill would also repeal parts of the law that stipulates penalties for those who attempt to “procure miscarriage“; distribute advertising “for the purpose of causing or procuring the miscarriage of a woman pregnant with child”; or lend or sell “an instrument or other article intended to be used for self-abuse, or any drug, medicine, instrument or article whatever for the prevention of conception or for causing unlawful abortion.”

Additionally, the bill would remove language from a current abortion law that mandates an abortion after 13 weeks be performed in a hospital.

On Thursday, the House GOP unveiled what Politico referred to as “the most controversial of spending bills” — a $153.4 billion measure that proposes to cut $4 billion in spending from the 2011 budget. House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Chairman Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) authored and introduced the bill (PDF), which presents controversial cuts to education, labor and health services, particularly to women’s reproductive-health services: It would eliminate the Title X family-planning program, ban federal funding to Planned Parenthood Federation of America (unless the organization ends its abortion services), redirect teen-pregnancy-prevention programming funds to abstinence-only sex-education programs and ban private insurance companies from covering abortion.

“We believe in protecting a woman’s ability to make personal, private decisions with her doctor, and Speaker [John] Boehner’s budget violates these fundamental American values in several ways,” said NARAL Pro-Choice America President Nancy Keenan in a statement Thursday. “How will taking away women’s freedom and privacy lead to the job creation he promised voters?”

Controversial still is how the spending bill was crafted.

After Rep. Rehberg posted the legislation online, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who sits on the subcommittee, issued a statement censuring the chairman for posting the draft before public debate and accusing the Republican majority of violating its pledge to follow regular legislative order in dealing with appropriations.

“I am very concerned by reports that the Chairman has no plans to convene a meeting of our subcommittee to consider and mark up this legislation,” DeLauro said. “While this posting of the Chairman’s proposals is interesting, it is by no means an acceptable substitute for public debate and amendment. The Chairman, by himself, is not the subcommittee. … If no House markup is held, this would be the first time in nearly a decade that our subcommittee has failed to report out a bill.”

DeLauro criticized Rehberg’s proposed spending cuts, which she said injects “40 brand new legislative provisions and riders, many of them highly controversial, and most dealing with complicated subjects well outside the expertise of the Appropriations Committees.”

She said that Rehberg’s bill prohibits use of federal funds to implement any part of the Affordable Care Act; nearly eliminates the Corporation for National and Community Services, which administers Americorps and related programs; cuts the nation’s job-training program by 75 percent (but protects reemployment programs for veterans); and prohibits public radio stations from using any federal funds to acquire programming from National Public Radio.

DeLauro warned of potential consequences of defunding Planned Parenthood.

“The main effect would probably be to prohibit Medicaid patients from choosing to receive services such as contraception and cancer screenings from Planned Parenthood clinics,” she said.

DeLauro noted that eliminating family-planning funding would likely impact about 5 million people annually.

The conference, scheduled for Jan. 22, 2012, at the North Bethesda Marriott just outside of Washington, D.C., falls on two important anniversaries for both sides of the anti-abortion rights movement: the 39th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions, marking the 39th anniversary of legal abortion in the U.S.

“This January, Students for Life of America calls on you to Envision the future of the pro-life movement, the overturning of Roe v. Wade/Doe v. Bolton, and a world where no more women cry and no more babies die,” wrote SFLA Executive Director Kristan Hawkins in a press release, which estimates the conference’s attendance at 1,800.

Already, SFLA has carved out panel discussions and strategy sessions that focus not on how to criminalize abortion in all cases, but how to shape the debate and the abortion movement once Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton have successfully been overturned. On the schedule now are sessions titled: “What’s the New Standard of Healthcare without Abortion?” and “How to Bring Healing to Those After Abortion.” Birth control is also on the agenda for discussion.

“Some may say that our theme is too grand, too forward thinking, un-realistic,” Hawkins said. “However, I think it’s just [what] our movement needs. If we are ever going to end legal abortion in America, we need to start talking about it, envision what it will look like, and make our plans for victory now.”

Confirmed conference speakers include the Family Research Council’s Patrick Fagan, Operation Rescue’s Troy Newman, 40 Days for Life’s David Bereit and representatives from the Christian litigation firm the Alliance Defense Fund.

SFLA’s 2011 national conference included Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), author of the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” which passed the U.S. House of Representatives this year.

In a recent blog post titled, “A Question the Pro-Life Movement Must Answer,” the youth-focused anti-abortion rights group Students for Life of America (SFLA) describes what it refers to as “the pro-life movement’s stance on contraception,” boiled down to four main points:

1. Birth control – in any form – doesn’t prevent abortions; it provides a false sense of security.

To support this claim, SFLA cites the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that studies reproductive-health issues, which it claims reports that “condoms fail 14% of the time.” This claim links to a report from December 2003 about the implications of public policy that promotes abstinence-only education. This is the paragraph with the 14 percent failure-rate statistic about condoms:

People deserve to have consistent and accurate information about the effectiveness of all contraceptive methods. For example, if they are told that abstinence is 100% effective, they should also be told that, if used correctly and consistently, condoms are 97% effective in preventing pregnancy. If they are told that condoms fail as much as 14% of the time, they should be given a comparable typical-use failure rate for abstinence.

SFLA uses another Guttmacher report to justify the claim: “over half of all abortions are on women who were using some method of birth control. This is a cry in the face of pro-abortion propaganda claiming that if women had better access to birth control, abortions would become unnecessary.”

What this Guttmacher report, from May 2011, says:

Fifty-four percent of women who have abortions had used a contraceptive method (usually the condom or the pill) during the month they became pregnant. Among those women, 76% of pill users and 49% of condom users report having used their method inconsistently, while 13% of pill users and 14% of condom users report correct use.

2. Birth control comes with complications and risks. “I[n] some cases, it’s deadly for both the child and mother.”

Here, SFLA claims that hormonal birth control has “been proven to end the life of a preborn human mere hours or days after conception by thinning the uterine lining and making implantation more difficult for the developing person.” The group reports that oral contraceptives, commonly referred to as “the pill,” have been categorized by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a “Group I carcinogen.” The corresponding link takes readers to a WHO statement (PDF) from September 2005, which states that the use of combined oral contraceptives (COCs) “modifies slightly the risk of cancer, increasing it is some sites (cervix, breast, liver), decreasing it in others (endometrium, ovary).”

According to the National Institutes of Health, oral contraceptives generally consist of the female hormones estrogen and progestin and work by preventing ovulation. They “change the lining of the uterus to prevent pregnancy from developing and change the mucus at the cervix to prevent sperm from entering.”

3. Condoms and birth control are everywhere … “yet the abortion and STD rate hasn’t fallen.”

SFLA claims that despite Planned Parenthood and public health departments giving out “free condoms and birth control for years,” the rate of unplanned pregnancy and abortion has “failed to fall” and that the rate of sexually transmitted diseases has “significantly increased.” SFLA: “What’s even more scary is that Planned Parenthood knows this. They actually rely on the failure of the contraception they provide to increase their abortion profits.”

No sources (or years) are cited for these claims.

A Guttmacher report on induced abortions in the U.S. shows that in 2008, there were approximately 1.2 million abortions, with a rate of 19.6 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-44, which was an increase from the rate in 2005 (19.4 per 1,000 women). According to Guttmacher, the abortion rate has been on a steady decline since 1990, when the reported abortions in the U.S. was at 1.6 million and the rate was 27.4 abortions per 1,000 women.

As far as the rate of STDs in this country, some, such as gonorrhea, have declined over the years, while others, such as chlamydia and syphilis, have increased, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (PDF). The rate of other STDS varies depending on region and demographic.

4. Birth control –- in any form -– is a Band-Aid.

SFLA does not suggest an alternative for contraception but offers the following advice:

Dolling out free condoms isn’t social justice. Handing over a pack of pills to an uneducated mother living in poverty with a man who doesn’t respect her enough to marry her isn’t restoring proper relationships in her life. … Protecting women from the scarring trauma of abortion and repairing broken relationships in her life seem to be the best way the pro-life movement can restore true social justice – Christian justice – to this woman’s life.

SFLA is not alone in its stance on contraception.

During a June appearance on the PBS TV- and Web-news magazine “Need to Know,” Charmaine Yoest, president and CEO of another prominent anti-abortion rights group, Americans United for Life (AUL), said her group does not address the issue of birth control, “because there are differences of opinion on that.” She went on to explain that contraception is “a red herring that the abortion lobby likes to bring up by conflating abortion and birth control.”

In a profile of Yoest published last week, the Christian Science Monitor reported that the anti-abortion rights leader “bristle[d]” when asked about her personal use of birth control and refused to answer the question.

In fact, AUL has taken a position on contraception, by testifying against (PDF) and condemning the IOM’s recommendation that HHS include FDA-approved contraceptive services among “preventive services for women” to be covered under all insurance plans, without co-pay. AUL’s central argument against these recommendations is that they include coverage of emergency contraception such as Plan B and ella, which can “kill a humans embryo even after implantation” and are therefore “abortion-inducing.”

Despite these attitudes toward contraception promoted by anti-abortion rights groups and religious organizations, current data suggests that women with religious convictions do use contraception.

A recent report produced by the Guttmacher Institute, revealed that about 99 percent of “all women who have had sex” have used a contraceptive method other than natural family planning. Among “sexually experienced Catholic women,” that number is 98 percent. Additionally, 69 percent of sexually active women of all denominations are using a contraceptive method other than natural family planning.

The study’s findings led Guttmacher to conclude: “Policies that make contraceptives more affordable and easier to use are not just sound public health policy – they also reflect the needs and desires of the vast majority of American women and their partners, regardless of their religious affiliation.”

Blunt’s “Respect for Rights of Conscience Act of 2011,” Senate Bill 1467, thus far has two co-sponsors, Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), and it is an identical copy of a House bill that was introduced in March.

Five months before HHS ordered all Food and Drug Administration-approved forms of birth control to be offered to all insured women without a co-pay — a move that has become controversial, especially for anti-abortion rights advocates — Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb) introduced the “Respect for Rights of Conscience” bill, which anticipated HHS’s decision. One aspect in the Findings and Purposes section of both bills is:

PPACA [Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act] creates a new nationwide requirement for health plans to cover “essential health benefits” and “preventive services” (including a distinct set of “preventive services for women”), delegating to the Department of Health and Human Services the authority to provide a list of detailed services under each category, and imposes other new requirements with respect to the provision of health care services.

Fortenberry’s bill has 44 co-sponsors and hasn’t seen any congressional action since March 28, according to bill records documented by the Library of Congress.

This legislation is intended to amend the Affordable Care Act by adding a section titled “Respecting Rights of Conscience With Regard to Specific Items of Services,” which states that a health plan will not have failed to provide “the essential health benefits package” described in the health care law, if the reason to deny coverage of certain services is because one or more of the services “is contrary to the religious beliefs or moral convictions” of either the sponsor, issuer or entity offering the health care plan. That also applies to individuals, in the case of individual coverage, whose “religious beliefs or moral convictions” are in conflict with any services covered under the health care law.

Under the proposed legislation, health care providers will not be required “to provide, participate in, or refer for a specific item or service contrary to the provider’s religious beliefs or moral convictions.”

The day before Blunt introduced the Senate version of this bill, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), put out a press release criticizing the “new HHS ‘preventive services’ mandate requiring private health plans to cover female surgical sterilization and all drugs and devices approved by the FDA as contraceptives, including drugs which can attack a developing unborn child before and after implantation in the mother’s womb.” Declaring that the new ruling violates “conscience rights,” the USCCB called on Congress to pass the “Respect for Rights of Conscience” bill.

Despite the Institute of Medicine disputing claims that the FDA-approved contraceptive methods offered to be covered fully under the health care law cause abortions, statements such as USCCB’s have been perpetuated by influential policy groups such asAmericans United for Life and the Family Research Council.

This week on the FRC’s Washington Watch Daily Radio Commentary, FRC President Tony Perkins said:

Starting next August, fertility might as well be a disease–because that’s how the government will be treating it. This month, HHS ordered all health insurers to offer free birth control–regardless of anyone’s objections. Drugs like Ella and Plan B are part of the mandate, even though they can destroy a developing baby. Once the regulations go into effect, this “emergency contraception” will be considered basic medical care–and taxpayers who don’t agree will still have to pick up the tab.

Blunt’s bill has been read twice and referred to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions for review.

“Our eye was on evidence,” said Dr. Linda Rosenstock, dean of the School of Public Health at the University of California-Los Angeles and chair of the IOM Committee on Preventive Services for Women, in response to recent criticism from anti-abortion rights groups that requiring all health-insurance plans to cover birth control and emergency contraception attacks consumers’ conscience rights.

Rosenstock said the 50 percent rate of unintended pregnancy in America is one of the highest in the developed world. That statistic, coupled with health risks for mother and baby if the pregnancy is unplanned (IOM found that babies were born healthier if they were born at least a year after older siblings) informed the committee’s recommendation regarding birth control services, which includes counseling of the different methods of birth control available.

Another IOM committee member, Dr. Paula Johnson, who is chief of the Division of Women’s Health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, noted that different contraceptive methods have adverse effects on different populations of women. It is important, she said, for women to learn about the full range of available methods approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

IOM is recommending HHS to require all insurance plans not only to cover all FDA-approved birth control methods available but to eliminate shared consumer costs, or co-pay.

“As someone who has worked on women’s rights for nearly 30 years, I can say that today’s news marks one of the biggest advances for women’s health in a generation,” said NARAL President Nancy Keenan in a press statement after the report dropped Tuesday.

IOM’s other recommendations for HHS include:

At least one well-woman preventive care visit for adult women annually
Annual counseling on sexually transmitted infections for sexually active women
Screening for gestational diabetes
Adding human papillomavirus (HPV) DNA testing in addition to “conventional cytology” testing every three years for women over 30
Annual counseling on sexually transmitted infections for sexually active women
Annual HIV counseling and screening for sexually active women
Comprehensive lactation support and counseling and costs of renting breastfeeding equipment
Screening and counseling for interpersonal and domestic violence
Despite the panel’s insistence that the recommendations reflected “critical gaps” in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and were based on previous recommendations from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, anti-abortion rights advocates have suggested that IOM’s recommendation would essentially be demanding that all insurance companies pay for women’s abortions.

National anti-abortion rights policy group Americans United for Life recently likened the recommendation to Planned Parenthood getting a “bail-out from the federal government.”

Predicting IOM’s decision, AUL staff counsel Anna Franzonello wrote in a blog post Tuesday:

“[I]t seems that Planned Parenthood is about to get another bail-out from the federal government and that no American will be able to choose an insurance plan that does not cover abortion-causing drugs, such as ella. Inconsistent with longstanding American values, such a coercive measure would be, unfortunately, all-too consistent with the anti-life agenda of the Obama Administration.”

The conservative online publication LifeNews.com criticized a recent NPR story, arguing the FDA-approved “morning-after pill” ella works the same way as the abortion pill mifepristone (despite contradictory opinions from many American medical associations such as the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists) and “can kill an already-implanted human embryo.”

“Any group that attacks [IOM’s] recommendations looks far outside the mainstream,” NARAL spokesperson Ted Miller told The American Independent. “Currently, nearly one in three women finds it difficult to pay for birth control. This is a decision that unifies most Americans.”

In light of IOM’s report, NARAL is working to convince HHS to ensure that insured American women will have access to all forms of FDA-approved birth control without having to pay a co-pay. This is the final phase of the organization’s BC4ME campaign, which began last fall and was updated in June with a Facebook application that generates how much money women would be able to save on various forms of birth control

“Unfortunately, the current anti-choice majority in the U.S. House of Representatives has voted twice this year to defund family-planning programs that provide contraception and other basic care to millions of women and couples,” Keenan said. [W]e will fight them every step of the way.”

Austin LifeGuard — the education arm of Austin LifeCare, a Christian faith-based nonprofit CPC operator — offers four-hour “abstinence-based comprehensive” presentations for middle and high school students. The program has something of a checkered reputation since 2009, when the Austin Chronicle highlighted the program’s flaws and a study of sex education in Texas by the watchdog organization Texas Freedom Network found holes in the curriculum when referring to STDs.

David Wiley, a professor of health education at Texas State University and co-author of the TFN report, says the Austin LifeGuard curriculum generally casts sexual activity before marriage in a negative light, exaggerates the failure rates of contraception and discusses STDs but not how to get tested.

“There is clearly a lot of obfuscating, dodging of words, manipulating statistics, and use of nuanced semantics,” said Wiley, a former president of the American School Health Association. “It is essentially political posturing.”

According to the TFN report, the curriculum’s flaws include:

- ALG incorrectly tells students that “condoms provide little to no benefit in preventing the spread of HPV.”

- The curriculum states, “there were only two STD’s before 1960,” when in fact there were only two STDs commonly tested for before the 1960s, though there were plenty of others out there.

- When discussing failure rates of condoms, ALG fails to point out that operator error is the most common reason for failure, not faulty condoms.

- An ominous reference to “post-abortion effects,” without specifying what those may be.

‘A health issue’

Pam Cobern, executive director of Austin LifeCare, dismissed the criticisms of the ALG program. “This is a health issue, not a political issue, and not even a religious issue,” she said.

“We talk about abstinence but also about contraception, which not everyone does,” Cobern said. “We show them the condom box and let them read it. We try to help them make their own case for abstinence, we feel kids are intelligent enough to make the right choice when given all the information.”

Around the time LifeGuard came under criticism in 2009, the Austin Independent School District developed a review process for its outside sex education speakers and ended its relationship with ALG.

That happened for a few reasons, said AISD’s School Health Coordinator Tracy Lunoff, chief among them the medical inaccuracies and lack of evidence-based information in the LifeGuard program. Lunoff said AISD heard concerns about ALG’s religious and faith-based content.

Today, three organizations work with the district to offer supplementary sex education, including the City of Austin’s Maternal and Child Health Department and Planned Parenthood.

But even when aware of LifeGuard’s medical inaccuracies, some school districts have not rid themselves of the flawed curriculum. That’s the case in Liberty Hill Independent School District, 30 miles northwest of Austin.

The district’s School Health Advisory Committee (SHAC) recently reexamined the ALG presentation against other sex ed programs and opted for a different one, but Liberty Hill ISD curriculum director Claudeane Braun said they plan to keep ALG in the mix as supplemental instruction.

Braun said the SHAC is aware of the bad science in LifeGuard’s presentation — including “skewed” numbers regarding condom failure rates and “overstating” the negative consequences of sex, she said.

“When we went over the curriculum carefully, we felt like it didn’t go far enough in informing our students,” Braun said. “It skirted around some of the important issues and the dangers of having sex with multiple partners. Their program numbers look inflated over some of the others, but we didn’t think anything was too far off base.”

The district maintains its relationship with ALG because students respond well to the program’s speakers, who tend to be relatively young and relatable, she said. “We are a conservative, Church-based community,” said Braun. “The pastor of one of our largest churches is on our SHAC.”

“What’s really important to us is just making sure the kids listen and respond,” she said.

Lax oversight, uninvolved communities

The Texas Independent previously reported on Austin LifeCare’s violations for mingling religious and educational materials, and found the state-funded nonprofit’s leaders made overt references to Christianity during an informational training session.

CPC reviews are typically pre-announced and conducted by the state contractor in charge with running the program. Oversight over Texas’ sex education curriculum is lax as well.

Evaluations rest with the SHACs, composed of concerned parents with little to no training on how to evaluate health curricula, said the TFN report co-author Wiley — but he found that most districts don’t even bother consulting with the community groups. Some 81 percent of districts were unable to produce any formal SHAC recommendation on sex education, bypassing a Texas law requiring input on sex education from the SHACs.

Monica Rodriguez, president of the Sexuality Information and Education Center of the United States (SIECUS), says Austin LifeGuard’s factual holes are in keeping with a national trend among CPC-backed sex-ed programs.

“Most often crisis pregnancy centers teach abstinence-only until marriage, and when they do attempt some sort of sexual education, more often than not, what they do is leave out critical information,” she said.

According to the TFN study, more than 95 percent of Texas public school districts teach abstinence-only or nothing at all when it comes to sex education. Texas receives more federal dollars for abstinence-based sex education than any other state.

In conjunction with Gov. Rick Perry, the Department of State Health Services opted out of applying for $4.4 million from the federally administered State Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP), which helps finance evidence-based sex education — both abstinence and contraception — to prevent teen pregnancy, the Texas Tribune reported in 2010.

Meanwhile, Texas did apply for $5.4 million in federal funding for abstinence-only education. But the federal pot for abstinence-based funding has dwindled, Rodriguez said, leaving the majority of CPC sex-ed programs, like LifeGuard, to rely on private funds. (ALC director Cobern agrees: since Community-Based Abstinence Education funding was cut last year, she said they’ve been getting by on donations.)

That’s a trend that further decreases oversight on the curriculum, Rodriguez said. It’s up to school districts, parents and students to “step up efforts and hold these groups accountable” for medical inaccuracies and mistruths, she said.

“It’s critical for local advocates to play a role. It’s incumbent upon them to make sure these program are medically accurate, not biased toward a particular philosophy and are rounded in adolescent reality, rather than the reality some adults operate under­,” she said.

On Tuesday The Wall Street Journal highlighted various health studies (one of which showed that hormonal birth control, in some cases, affected to whom female lemurs were attracted) and reported that birth control use can affect women’s attractiveness to other people, as well as their own preferences for romantic partners.

The Journal ran the story with the headline “The Tricky Chemistry of Attraction.” On Wednesday, FoxNews.com re-reported the story with the headline “Study: Taking ‘The Pill’ Affects Women’s Attractiveness to Men.” The Fox version was picked up by Heroic News, recently launched by Heroic Media to aggregate news. But the headline was slightly tweaked to read “Taking ‘The Pill’ makes women unattractive.”

The Wall Street Journal story focuses on how hormonal contraception impacts women’s desires particularly when she is ovulating, the opposite of what Heroic News conveys in its headline.

The Journal dedicates brief space to how hormonal birth control can also tweak men’s desires, writing that based on “accumulating evidence,” men react differently to women when they are on birth control. The paper cites a 2004 study in the journal Behavioral Ecology which showed that of 31 men most experienced the greatest attraction for non-pill-using women when they were ovulating.

CBS New York also reported on the studies with the headline “Study: Hormonal Contraceptives Could Wreck Relationships,” and the subhead “Various Birth Control May Zap Some Of The Woman’s Desire.”

Heroic News’ version of the CBS New York story: “Study stuns scientists: hormonal contraceptives wreck relationships.”

Yet, the actual content of CBS’ take on the contraception studies is that the evidence is inconclusive and that the sexual interest between men and women does not ride solely on the use of hormonal birth control.

In other news of anti-abortion rights publications using science news to fit into their views, a single article from an Australian publication about medication abortions has flooded anti-abortion news channels. As The Florida Independent recently reported, at least four anti-abortion rights websites — LifeSiteNews, National Right to Life News Today, CatholicCulture.org, and LifeNews.com — re-reported the same Australian report claiming that medical abortions are “less safe than surgery.”

TFI points out that several publications have contradicted the article in The Australian, offering evidence gathered overtime that contradicts the survey’s findings.

The report found that the use of IUD’s in the US is at its highest level since the early 1980’s. The 2006–08 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) found that approximately 2.1 million American women use an IUD as a form of birth control in the United States. #

The report makes the case that IUDs provide an effective and safe way of battling the high rates of “unintended pregnancy in the United States”–an epidemic the report describes as a “stubborn problem.” According to the report, “intrauterine contraception is in the top tier of contraceptive effectiveness and provides better protection from unintended pregnancy than many alternatives.” #

The report says many changes in the past few years have contributed to this increase, including: #

• “In-migration from Mexico, where use and acceptability of the IUD is high, has created additional demand.”
• “A greater number of clinicians are trained and competent in insertion and removal.”
• “Evidence and expert opinion [suggesting] that increased voluntary uptake of intrauterine contraception, which is highly efficacious and requires minimal user involvement, may help alleviate the national problem of unintended pregnancy and high rates of abortion.”
• “U.S.-based organizations (e.g., the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals and the Society of Family Planning) have assisted in the dissemination of evidence-based information on the safety and efficacy of IUDs.”
• “U.S. providers [becoming] more aware of the higher level of IUD use in other countries”

The report also explained that “contraceptive equity laws” have played a major role in the rise of IUD use in the states. #

“Many states have passed contraceptive equity laws that require insurance plans to cover contraceptive methods, including intrauterine contraception. Equity laws are particularly relevant for IUDs because the products have high initial costs. Many states have Medicaid family planning expansion programs (“waivers”) that increase the income cutoff below which women can receive benefits, including access to all FDA-approved contraceptives.” #

In Florida, however, Medicaid overhaul approved by the Legislature would allow providers to opt-out of providing family planning services, such as IUDs, on “moral or religious grounds.” #

Last week, State Sen. Nan Rich, D-Sunrise, sought to include an amendment that would uphold these equity standards by adding language that would “ensure the availability of federally-required benefits if it is not covered by the plan.” The amendment failed and the Medicaid reform bill passed with original opt-out provisions. #

The report concludes that “universal access to the full range of options and a true choice of family planning methods, including intrauterine contraception, is critical to reducing unintended pregnancy and improving reproductive health in the U.S.” #

Here is the full report:

j.contraception.2010.09.004 –

Yet as a new report by the Guttmacher Institute (PDF) demonstrates, in refusing to defund Planned Parenthood, the senators voted to protect family planning services that are important to some of the same people who so vehemently oppose abortion: Christians, Evangelicals in particular.

The study released Wednesday (the day before the House and Senate voted on spending bill) shows that 99 percent of all women who have had sex have at one point used a contraceptive method other than natural family planning (such as periodic abstinence, temperature rhythm and cervical mucus tests). The study found that only 2 percent of Catholic women use naturally family planning and that more than four in 10 Evangelicals rely on male or female sterilization, a figure higher than that of other religious groups.

This is the breakdown of religious women who are sexually active but do not want to get pregnant and, therefore, use a “high effective” method of birth control, such as sterilization, hormonal birth control pills or the IUD:

• 69 percent of all denominations
• 68 percent of Catholics
• 73 percent of Mainline Protestants
• 74 percent of Evangelicals

Based on findings taken from the 2006–2008 National Survey of Family Growth, which gathered information on contraceptive use from a nationally representative sample of women, Guttmacher concludes that “policies making contraceptives more affordable and easier to use reflect the needs and desires of the vast majority of U.S. women and their partners, regardless of their religious beliefs.” Guttmacher based “religious beliefs” based on women’s admitted attendance to religious services and questions about their religiosity. The NSFG study showed that 83 percent of women reported a religious affiliation: 48 percent identified as Protestant, among whom 53 percent said they are Evangelical and 47 percent who claim to be Mainline Protestant (including Methodists, Presbyterians and other groups); 25 percent are Catholic; and 11 percent identify with another religion such as Buddhism, Islam or Judaism.

Gutthmacher’s conclusion:

This research suggests that the perception that strongly held religious beliefs and contraceptive use are antithetical is wrong—in fact, the two may be highly com- patible. Contraceptive use by Catholics and Evangelicals, including those who frequently attend religious services, is the widespread norm, not the exception. Add to this Mainline Protestant denominations’ historic support for contraception, and the implications for policymakers are clear: Policies that make contraceptives more affordable and easier to use are not just sound public health policy— they also reflect the needs and desires of the vast major- ity of American women and their partners, regardless of their religious affiliation.