Anti-abortion activists wearing pins that read, “I (Heart) Pregnancy Resource Centers” packed a House hearing room in Olympia this afternoon to testify in opposition to HB 1366, which would force pregnancy resource centers (also called limited service pregnancy centers) to inform women that they offer free over-the-counter pregnancy tests (and a healthy dose of religious guilt!) in lieu of actual, comprehensive medical services. Both sides were given equal time to testify (testimony ended after an hour), but opponents of the bill reportedly outnumbered proponents four to one.
Religious activists argued that the bill would put religious pregnancy centers (which are primarily privately funded) out of business by allowing women to press charges against centers in superior court for failing to inform them about the services that they don’t provide—namely, information about birth control, or abortion referrals. (The bill would also allow women to press charges for not delivering pregnancy tests in a timely manner or provide accurate information to women who aren’t native English speakers.) Opponents say the bill goes too far—and its penalties even farther. “These centers are staffed by volunteers—they’re not armed robbers or timber thieves,” testified John Panesko, an estate lawyer from Chehalis, WA. “They don’t belong in superior court. They’re the epitome of good Samaritans.”
But women’s rights advocates say the bill is necessary precisely because the centers are staffed by volunteers who can currently lie to women about the dangers of abortion and premarital sex and withhold pregnancy results—which women need in order to qualify for medical coupons or Women, Infant, and Children (WIC) programs in Washington.
*This post has been updated.
“I felt I was being held hostage,” testified Jennifer Adams, a woman who found herself pregnant at age 30 and without health care coverage. Adams visited the CareNet Pregnancy Center in Tacoma to get a pregnancy test administered by a clinic in order to enroll in prenatal health care. Instead of a quick, easy test, Adams testified that the woman administering the pregnancy test was “judgmental, especially when she realized my partner and I were not married. She then asked me to read a Bible verse aloud and then said she wanted me to know how important abstinence is before marriage. I felt my joyous event was being marred by this course of events.” In the end, the pregnancy center withheld Adams’s pregnancy results from her. “They said sending those results out wasn’t their policy. My access to coverage for prenatal care was delayed. If this bill were in place, CareNet could not have withheld my pregnancy results.”
Not only can these centers withhold health information from their clients, they’re also not required to follow HIPAA guidelines for keeping medical information private (as clinics staffed by trained medical personnel are required to do) because they’re primarily staffed by volunteers.
Other women testifying in favor of the bill said that young and low income women are particularly vulnerable to being trapped at these clinics. “The women I spoke to [who visited these clinics] all lacked health care insurance and lacked a healthcare provider,” testified Sara Ainsworth, a senior lawyer with Legal Voice. “They were never told that the center didn’t provide abortion or birth control. Women reported being asked to wait from 20 to 40 minutes to an hour and a half for test results [for a three-minute test]. Some were told to wait 12 weeks and see if they miscarried before making a decision [about having an abortion].”
@52
Odd. My brother worked during college at a restaurant. His wife was a cosmetologist. They may have cleared poverty level, but I doubt it. They took not one dime of welfare to support their first child, born during his college years. They took not one dime to support the next two born in the first years of his career in the medical sciences, still clearing poverty level if at all by only a little.
By graduation he had paid off 60% of his college loans. They bought a house, while he was in school. They kept their vehicles in good repair, and paid all bills on time religiously. 15 years after college, he runs the laboratory at a large hospital, making a good living for his family. His wife doesn’t work. His house is paid for, his college loans paid off, and they own both their cars.
All without a single bit of help from others. Not a dime. He didn’t get grants at school. He got his job from his good grades and apprentice work during school. Our parents aren’t wealthy, and hers were very poor, so it wasn’t the good old boy network that helped him achieve a good life for his family.
What he also didn’t do? Take expensive vacations, or keep cable television or even a cell phone. He didn’t buy new cars every 2 years, or buy clothes outside of his budget. He and his wife ate well, by cooking at home, taking lunch to work and sending them with kids to school, and eating out only occasionally. He has never had an outstanding credit card balance in his life, or a late payment on a single utility or mortgage.
But to hear liberals talk, the only way to have kids is to take half your income in welfare, have a few at the top pay everyone elses medical bills, and generally make us a beggar society.
I’ll have to tell my brother that he in fact didn’t do all that. It’s impossible. It must be, because liberals say it is.
@ 51
What, are you really that reading comprehension challenged?
That was a specific response to a specific post @17.
Well I’ll be damned. Seattleblues says he knows someone with great bootstraps for up-pullin’. We might as well dismantle the entire safety net. If his brother can catch a few lucky breaks, why everyone ought to be able to.
If your story is true, your brother and his family got lucky, son. They got plumb lucky. Good for him taking advantage of his luck and making something out of it.
No liberal I know says it’s impossible to get lucky. Most of the liberals I know say we ought to create a system to protect the unlucky.
And the smart liberals I know say that system isn’t in place to protect the unlucky. It’s there to protect the people with resources from the wrath of those without. Do you think poor people will just disappear if we stop giving them food and economic welfare?
@17 — Your statement doesn’t make sense even in regard to what @17 says. The poor have the right to be parents. The stupid have the right to be parents. Even waiters who should know better have the right to be parents.
“If your story is true, your brother and his family got lucky, son. They got plumb lucky.”
No. He did not. Not at all. He took advantage of the opportunities any one has, and he did well. He overcame the inevitable obstacles, and didn’t let them stop him. Anyone else could do it. Luck had not one thing to do with it. Good planning, smart use of his money and hard work did, but luck didn’t.
I have 4 brothers. All own homes and have careers which support their families. All have investments to support their retirement and savings to deal with what you would call bad luck. All take the necessary steps to protect the things they’ve worked so hard to obtain. It has not one damned thing to do with luck, ‘son.’ The brother I wrote of isn’t even the highest earning among us, just financiallly the most careful.
And that’s just my family. Most of the families in my neighborhood weren’t born wealthy. They did some variation on what my brother did. Just as I did. Yes, we all had lucky breaks, but we all had some pretty unlucky ones too.
What you see as luck is the standard liberal excuse for laziness and profligacy. ‘ I didn’t succeed because I was so unlucky’, is the whiney excuse I get so damned tired of hearing. Everyone has setbacks. Those who let the setback define them are the unsuccessful ones. Those who let the goal define things and adjust for the setbacks are those who succeed. It has not one little thing to do with luck.
“The poor have the right to be parents.”
Absolutely. What they don’t have is the right to pick my pocket after becoming parents to support their children. If you can’t afford kids, you shouldn’t have them. If you do have them, that’s your problem, not in any way mine. If I didn’t sleep with your wife, I have no reason to support your children.
As for defending my property against the poor-
They can’t even be bothered to feed themselves or get medical care without help. My dogs do the same thing, but they have the saving grace of being decently grateful for it. I’m not worried about the poor taking sufficient initiative for social uprising. Even when they do all they manage is the destruction of their own communities. For reference, see the Watt riots and the King riots in LA.
@57: You don’t understand how lucky your brother was. What if he or his wife or one of his children had developed cancer? What if their house had caught fire? What if he’d been laid off and been forced into a few years of underemployment?
The fact is, most people who are so poor as to live in the projects aren’t lazy shiftless leeches. Huge fractions of the poor are regular working-class citizens like you or me who have been struck by one or two hardships, who need the assistance of the more fortunate in society in order to get their feet back under them.
I’ll tell you about my father, who was the first in his family to finish out high school. He’s a highly trained and experienced engineer who has worked for several large companies over his career. He had the misfortune to be laid off (due to the state of the economy) while going through a divorce. For a few years, he worked shitty jobs because no engineering companies could afford to hire him. For months at a time, he could find no work at all, and collected unemployment benefits so that he could provide for his children while job-hunting. He’s now one of the tip-top engineers where he works, but it’s anyone’s guess where he’d be now without that little helping hand.
The fact is that shit happens. Sometimes when shit happens, it’s the sort of shit that nobody can handle on their own. Since when did America stand for “screw you, I’ve got mine”?
Since when did America stand for “screw you, I’ve got mine”?
@59: Since the term “trickle down economics” was first used, as best I can tell.
Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”
“Are there no prisons?” asked Seattleblues.
“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.
“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Seattleblues. “Are they still in operation?”
“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”
“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Seattleblues.
“Both very busy, sir.”
“Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Seattleblues. “I’m very glad to hear it.”
“I wish to be left alone,” said Seattleblues. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned — they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.”
“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”
“If they would rather die,” said Seattleblues, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides — excuse me — I don’t know that.”
“But you might know it,” observed the Venomlash.
@61:
ETERNAL WIN. You deserve a prize turkey.
@ 62: I was going to respond to you with: “What? The one as big as me?” but that seemed ill advised. 😉
Alas poor Lissa,
Compassion can mean telling someone to do for themselves so that they know how to do so in future. It can mean that enabling poverty is encouraging poverty. It can mean that no-one learned lessons from mistakes without suffering the consequences of them.
Interestingly, Dickens conception of charity was entirely private. He railed in several of his books at the emerging social safety net, which included the treadmill and poorhouses you mention.
Also interestingly, the very people who tell you to keep your religion out of politics chaff at you for not being sufficiently Christian to endorse ‘charity’ at the point of a federal or state gun.
And frankly I do get sick and tired of the left saying that no-one did well for themselves except by luck, or connections or inherited wealth. Maybe they really don’t know any successful people, and this is why they are so abysmally ignorant on how success happens. Maybe their own lack of drive and discipline make them seek an excuse for their own failures. Maybe it’s cynical political gamesmanship, knowing that 70% of the population makes ends meet but not much more, through their own choices. Give the less intelligent of that 70% a bad excuse for why they just scrape by that isn’t their fault, add in the ivory tower intellectuals who never had to compete in the real world, and you have yourself a voting block.
@64: I don’t see anyone saying that “no-one did well except by luck, or connections or inherited wealth.” I would certainly never say that. I have done well, and I worked hard to do so. I know many others who have also done so.
What I do see is you saying that no-one does poorly except as a direct result of their own personal failings: “70% of the population makes ends meet but not much more, through their own choices.” You seem unable to recognize that some people may be in reduced circumstances because of factors beyond their control.
You also fail to recognize the assistance and support that those who have done well through hard work and good choices have also benefited from. To give one example: in your posts @54 and @57 you tell us that your family was not wealthy, but that you and your brothers worked hard and succeeded. Congratulations. I assume that you and your brothers attended school, and possibly college or university as well. Given your admitted lack of family wealth, I further assume that these were public schools and probably public universities.
How much government support and tax money went to the public schools and universities you and your brothers attended?
@ 64: Whatever Ebenezer. Expect the first tomorrow, when the bell tolls one.
@28- By this point, a vasectomy would have saved you money over the condoms.
I hope.
@54- “What he also didn’t do?”
Have health problems, obviously.
@64- “And frankly I do get sick and tired of the left saying that no-one did well for themselves except by luck, or connections or inherited wealth.”
No one says that. Maybe if you actually listened to anyone else you’d have a better understanding of the world.
No one does well for themselves WITHOUT luck. “By luck AND by pluck.” This is a really basic and I’m amazed you work so hard to deny it.
@Seattleblues
I hate to break the news, but your brother did receive public money if he went to college. In the form of lowered tuition fees.
Good to know that your still trolling 🙂
70
….you’re….
And SB’s brother obviously went to school a while ago…let’s total up my STATE SCHOOL education circa 2005.
*Federal poverty level for 2005 for a single person (as I was): $9,570/annual. (http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/05poverty.sh…
*Cost of attendance at my university: $8,235/standard academic year, 2005-2006 year.
*Rent (small one bedroom 6 miles from school): $5400/annual (I would have paid more for a shared place in town).
*Utilities (natural gas, electricity, water, basic cell phone…no home phone, cable, or internet): $1600/annual, ballpark based on what I remember my budget billing being.
*Transportation (gas, maintenance, parking pass): $500/annual (miles to town & back * days per week * weeks in year / MPG * cost of gas; plus two oil changes and a parking pass).
*Groceries: $1300/annual, best of recollection as to what I spent a week.
I worked in a restaurant as well (that’s why my grocery costs were so low, I was fed for free one meal a day 5 days a week). I made well above minimum wage, but that still only came out to about $11,000/annual. As you can see, my BASIC expenses exceeded that number by a healthy sum (around $6K per year). This doesn’t even include books, printing fees, any additional educational fees (supplies, specialty software, technology fees assessed on stats classes for use of labs, etc.), and the fact that I was a grad student at the time and the tuition was just a *smidge* higher. Or ANY entertainment, clothing, expenses to travel to see my family EVER, emergency expenses like car repairs or whatnot, or, most importantly for this scenario, ANY MEDICAL BILLS.
It costs my insured friends thousands of dollars for pre-natal care and delivery. There’s a lot of ground between “wow…I can’t afford the thousands of dollars to deliver a child, and I unfortunately don’t have insurance” and “I can’t afford to feed, clothe, and care for a child.” I couldn’t have afforded a child at the time, but many people who are in much healthier financial circumstances than I *was* COULD afford the child, but not the birth. I have numerous friends who temp (economy and whatnot), make pretty good money, but don’t have insurance. In fact, I have a friend who does just that and is about to hit 2 weeks in the ICU for an illness she had no choice in. I’m a big believer in planning for kids, if you want them, but some people will never see a situation where they could afford the birth without assistance. It’s pretty elitist to say that if you can’t get a job that provides quality health insurance and enough money to pay all those deductibles and co-pays you can never have a child.
Yes it is pretty obvious that Seattleblues and his family have been lucky. Not that he sees that. Really, it only takes one medical set back to screw you right into the ground. As SB is fond of the anecdote I would like to offer one for his consideration.
Some of you may be familiar with my Slogging as part of the Unemployed in Seattle project that the Stranger ran in 2009. As judged by people like Seattleblues, I had done everything right. I worked 2 jobs, and with the exception of my mortgage I had no debt at all. I had an IRA, a 401k and I saved money from my pay checks every month. I even brown bagged my lunches! And what do you think happened? I got laid off and breast cancer. I supported myself on my Starbucks gig for 18 months, until I got a contract job as an Admin. And what do I have now, staring down the barrel of 50? A crappy job that pays 17$ an hour with even crappier benefits (385$ for a mammogram out of pocket) a condo that I cannot sell, and has lost a huge amount of it’s value, and 5 grand left of my savings. Oh, and debt!
My story is most appalling in that it is far from unique.
So I say to you Seattleblues, you are a privileged ass.
@71
Sorry for the typo. I’m a horrible typist and will REMIND you that I AM A WOMAN.