MOMocrats™

Celebrate International Women's Day with the White Ribbon Alliance

The White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood is an organization working to get women worldwide better access to lifesaving prenatal and childbirth care. Last year, on Mother's Day, we at MOMocrats encouraged our readers to share their own birth and adoption stories to promote the White Ribbon Alliance's Mother's Day Every Day initiative.

This year, we are hoping you will help us spread the word about a new WRA initiative, the White Ribbon Alliance Global Dinner Party. In honor of International Women's Day on March 8th, the White Ribbon Alliance is asking women around the world to hold dinner parties at their own homes and invite their friends to raise money and awareness to reduce maternal mortality. 

Details on the many ways you can participate and suggestions for making your own party a success are available at the WRA website in their Global Dinner Party Guide. If you are planning your own White Ribbon Alliance Global Dinner Party, let us know here in the comments. We'll feature the MOMocrats' own dinner parties — and link to other bloggers' posts about their Global Dinner Party events — in an upcoming post.

One of These Things is Not Like the Other

I was looking at the list of invitees to the White House’s forthcoming summit on health care reform. Do you notice anything interesting about the list?

There is precisely one woman – Speaker Nancy Pelosi – on the list of invitees. Twenty of the 21 invitees are men, with the vast majority (everyone except Charlie Rangel and James Clyburn) being white.

I’m not a hard charger for identity politics. I’d take a Senate full of the late, great, and much-missed Paul Wellstone (D-MN) over a Senate full of Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) every day and twice on Sunday.

The FY2011 Budget: Impact on Women and Families

With much fanfare and more than a little trepidation, President Obama released his FY2011 budget on Monday.

In this post, I’ll be focusing on budget items that fall under the Department of Health and Human Services. I know that moms and others care about more than just health but before you start shouting “Where's education? Where’s money for veterans and their families? What about foreign assistance?” let me remind you that budget is BIG. Like many thousands of pages big.

I know many people have been reading about a spending freeze. Obama wants to – with some exceptions – freeze FY11 spending at FY10 levels to hold down our debt. Mandatory spending programs – Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security – would be exempt as would defense spending. When you carve out those exceptions you’re left with a relatively small fraction of federal spending, but, hey, you gotta start somewhere, right?

The explanatory document (read: actual, human English) about HHS is here. It is a nice, easy read. But it is only eight pages. Why? Well, it just an overview of the president’s outlook on HHS spending; no details. The appendix (read: wonkery on high) is here. The appendix is only about 50 pages but in teeny 8 point font and has most of the spending details on a wide variety of programs, agencies, offices and more. Finally, HHS’ own budget with lots of details about what they plan to spend their dough on is here (114 pages, and pretty readable if bone-dry).

Because the budget is so very, very large I’m just hitting a couple of highlights (and low-lights):

Dear Nate Silver...

Nate Silver, over at FiveThirtyEight.com has 20 questions for people who are coming out against the health care reform bill currently pending before the Senate.

Over the medium term, how many other opportunities will exist to provide in excess of $100 billion per year in public subsidies to poor and sick people?

Subsides don’t make coverage affordable nor do they guarantee access. The penalty for noncompliance – that is, for not obtaining coverage – in some versions of the bill have been significantly lower than the cost to actually buying a plan. Baucus tried to get round this by including a “young invincible” plan since it is critically important for risk-spreading that young healthy people become part of large insurance pools. The “young invincible” plan morphed into the “catastrophic plan” (Section 1302(e) in the Senate bill) and would be available to those aged 30 or younger. Nevermind that this is when preventive care is most important and this plan limits it to three visits.

And furthermore: Coverage does not equal access. Opening Medicaid up to poor people someplace around 150% of the federal poverty line does not mean that they suddenly will have good health care. Will they be protected from catastrophic injury? Yes. Will they be able to find a dentist, psychiatrist or other health care provider in a timely fashion? Doubtful. Look at the story of Deamonte Driver and remember that Maryland is a population-dense state with loads of medical providers and yet a 12-year-old boy died for want of dentist.

2. Would a bill that contained $50 billion in additional subsidies for people making less than 250% of poverty be acceptable?

At this point, real health reform would be acceptable. The federal poverty measure is a joke. It hasn’t been retooled in decades and $55,125 for a family of four isn’t a lot of money, particularly when you consider that under some provisions in the bill, a family could be stuck paying 3:1 for older members, 1.5:1 for tobacco users, etc. And the subsidies would reduce the cost of insurance to 2% of income for those at 100% of the FPL but could be as much as 9.8% of income for those at 400% of the FPL.

And the deductible for small employer plans could be as much as $4000 (Sec. 1302(2) of the Senate bill). That’s almost 10% of the above family’s income.

The Season of Giving

A terrific blogger, Alias Mother, is doing a blog-link-y thing where she's writing about her favorite charities and encouraging readers to do the same.

To that end, a couple of MOMocrats will be posting about our favorites charities - ones that help women and their families - in the coming weeks.

APOPO - HeroRat
Apopo was founded in the 1990s and it works with rats. Special rats. Rats that detect land mines. Following the long civil war, many areas of Mozambique were virtually uninhabitable due to heavy mining -- children cannot play in open areas for fear they will lose a limb or worse.

The rats find the landmines (they find scent from the TNT) but aren't heavy enough to set off the mine. The mine then can be removed or detonated. And, just in case you think this sounds...odd...keep in mind that the rats passed official licensing tests according to IMAS standards under supervision of the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining (GICHD).

You can watch a great video about the rats from PBS/Frontline here

UNIJECT
PATH, a non-profit with offices in Seattle and DC/MD, is devoted to improving the lives of women worldwide. To that end, they created Uniject.

Uniject can be used my minimally-trained people to deliver vaccines (Hep B, mostly) and drugs to prevent postpartum hemorrhage. It is single use, so helps lessen the worry about proper sterilization and transmission of HIV/AIDS.

Again, a great video is here.

My husband and I are tremendously lucky that our daughter will never have to run a gauntlet of land mines to attend school. And while childbirth carries risk, the likelihood that I or any woman in the first world would die from postpartum hemorrhage is infinitesimal compared to women in the developing world. And we won't lose our daughter to neonatal tetanus, a major killer in areas without access to vaccines.

"Off With Their Heads!" (Hey, They Aren't Using Them Anyway)

I'm sure by now most MOMocrats readers have seen the video of Billionaires for Wealth serenading Bill McInturff as he speaks to America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). But, if you haven't yet witnessed the spectacle, please feast your eyes:

I saw the video on Rachel Maddow. "Gleeful" might be too weak a word to describe my reaction. My husband, ever the professor, reminded me that I'd be all kinds of annoyed if someone interrupted a meeting of say, Trust for America's Health or the National Partnership for Women and Families.

I thought about that all evening. You know what? He's right. I would be FURIOUS. And if that makes me a hypocrite, so be it. I'm ready to fight for health care reform. 

Kay Hagan Embarrasses Me

This week the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee wrapped up their multi-week debate on the Affordable Health Choices Act -- passed 13-10!.

Yesterday, the committee approved, by voice vote, an amendment by Sen. Kay Hagan (D-NC). The amendment that would exclude “temporary or seasonal agricultural workers . . . for the purposes of determining the size of an employer.”

What does that mean? It means that large agricultural employers wouldn’t have to count the tens of thousands of farm workers (sometimes called Immokalee, after the town in Florida) as employees. If they manage to exclude enough folks, then they – voila! – become a small business, exempt from the employer mandate to provide health insurance benefits.

Hagan was already on my radar after voting against the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. Now she’s earned a place on the sh*list for, essentially, denying health insurance coverage to some of the most vulnerable workers in the United States.

Farmworkers have the worst health indicators of any US subpopulation. Since we’re about helping other mothers, I’ll start there: 97% of farmworker mothers are accompanied by their minor children; only 42% had any sort of prenatal care (compared with 76% nationally); infant mortality rates among farm workers are at least 25% higher than the national average (around 10 per 100,000 births); irony alert! 82% of farm workers households experienced food insecurity and 49% went hungry; 88% of children were exposed to toxic pesticides; women farmworkers are more likely to be depressed and attempt or commit suicide.

Think this is a travesty? Call Hagan’s office at 202-224-6342 (if you’re a constituent, you might also want to call either her Greensboro office at 336-333-5311 or the Raleigh office 919-856-4630). You can email her here.

Maybe we should start a campaign. Mail Sen. Hagan a pack of seeds and ask if she thinks the people who plant them, water them, and pick the resulting fruit and vegetables that feed her and the nation deserve health care.

Photo credit: Korean Resource Center on Flickr. Creative Commons License.

Cynthia Davis is right: hunger is a motivator

Missouri State Representative Cynthia Davis, a Republican from O'Fallon, a St. Louis suburb with a median income 60% higher than the state average, recently criticized the state of Missouri's summer free lunch program for impoverished children in her monthly newsletter, saying that she thinks "hunger can be a positive motivator" for kids. Cynthia Davis argues that parents who have been laid off during the recession ought to be able to make do without government assistance:

Most parents put their children first, even ahead of themselves no matter what. If parents are laid off, that doesn’t mean they stop feeding their children, at least not any of the parents I know. Laid off parents could adapt by preparing more home cooked meals rather than going out to eat.

And she maintains that, if Missouri shuts down the free lunch program, children who find themselves going hungry will just be that much more motivated to feed themselves at no cost to the state by getting jobs at fast food restaurants:

Anyone under 18 can be eligible? Can’t they get a job during the summer by the time they are 16?  Hunger can be a positive motivator. What is wrong with the idea of getting a job so you can get better meals?

Tip: If you work for McDonald’s, they will feed you for free during your break.

No word from Ms. Davis yet on what those Missouri families who were already unable to afford regularly going out to eat before losing their income to recession ought to do to "adapt" to their new lack of funds to buy food. No word either on what teenagers are supposed to do if there are no jobs available at the local McDonald's because all positions there have been taken by recently laid-off adults. Or on how these kids are supposed to get to work if they cannot afford, say, a car, given that the local public transportation system recently cut bus services. No direction from Ms. Davis on what "motivated" younger children who cannot work at McDonald's are supposed to do to feed themselves.

Facing criticism by political bloggers and local and national press, Cynthia Davis continues to defend her position. I think Representative Davis is right about one thing: hunger is a motivator.

You never forget going hungry. Being hungry, well. That happens every day. As in, it's lunchtime. I'm hungry. Let's go out for a bite. I know a great little taco place down the street with fresh guacamole. That sort of feeling is commonplace. Forgettable. You don't always remember today what you ate for lunch three days ago, let alone the craving that drove you to eat in the first place.

Go Read It: Fixing health care - ideas from Congresswoman Allyson Schwartz

Pennsylvania Representative Allyson Schwartz, previously interviewed here at MOMocrats about her visit to BlogHer 2008 on behalf of the Obama campaign, has made fighting for Americans' access to quality health care a top priority during most of her professional and political career. As an executive director at a Planned Parenthood clinic in the 1970s and 1980s, she fought to improve low-income women's access to contraception, cancer screenings, and reproductive health care. As a state legislator, she was one of the principal architects of the of the Children’s Health Insurance Program in Pennsylvania, and in the late 1990s went to Congress to testify in favor of creating a federal CHIP program. And as the Representative for Pennsylvania's 13th Congressional District to the U.S. Congress, she has worked to expand the original SCHIP program to extend health care benefits to millions more uninsured children.

So when Congresswoman Allyson Schwartz talks about how she thinks we ought to go about implementing meaningful health care reform in the United States, we listen. Go read Congresswoman Schwartz's op-ed, Fixing Health Care.

Mother's Day Every Day Post Roundup

Happy Mother's Day, MOMocrats readers!

Many thanks to everyone who participated in our Mother's Day event to promote the Mother's Day Every Day initiative on behalf of The White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood. Here is a list of posts from bloggers (and politicians!) who participated to help raise awareness about maternal mortality, and save mothers' lives. If we've missed or forgotten you, please add your post in the comments below and we will add you to the list in this post.

Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner

Houston's First Lady Andrea White

Women with Big Dogs and Infertility by Julie Pippert

Once Upon a Time, When You Were a Little Baby by Cynematic

How I Became a Mother by Glennia

Mother's Day Every Day: My Story by Jaelithe

Birth: A Love Story by Catherine Connors

Birthing Babies by Robin

Birth Story by Joie

Peeper's Birth Story by Whozat

Geekery and Pregnancy by Nicole

And we would also like to thank Morra Aarons Mele of MomsRising for promoting our event in her BlogHer post, Three Great and Good Ways to Celebrate Mother’s Day Online.