Truth Be Told
Utah v. Colorado
Or, the Shapeshifting of Roe v.Wade
by Desiree Rock
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“I’m pregnant,” she keeps muttering. And she has the test to prove it. She sits perched on the edge of my couch like a gargoyle, slowly blinking as if the dust from her world is crashing down around her and floating into her eyes. Her chest rises and falls, her only movement. A week and a half ago she was nervously giggling about whether or not she should take a pregnancy test this early. She wondered if she should tell the person she’s dating. She jokes about how maybe she shouldn’t go out drinking tonight, just in case...innocent jokes that any sexually active woman makes when she is not in a place in her life to be pregnant and she hopes that the situation works itself out and it’s not real.
But now it is real. “I’m 33,” she mutters. “How does this happen to a 33 year old?”
Not entirely sure what she’s implying with her question, I reply with a standard, “Sometimes birth
control fails.”
“But now? Now? Not in my 20’s when I was careless all of the time? Like, all of the time. This is when it fails?” She turns to look at me with perfectly round eyes like an owl repeating “why why why” instead of its constant inquiry of “who who who”.
I don’t have much to offer her. “What do you think you want?”
She decides not to decide. At least not right now. In the meantime, she wants to know what to do and where to go if she decides to end her pregnancy. She says that her friend went to Colorado to end her pregnancy due to Utah’s archaic laws. We pull out our smartphones and begin to research what the Utah experience would be. Right away we learn that she will be provided with required materials that contain graphic images from other procedures, including a video (“I don’t remember that being a requirement for knee surgery,” I darkly joke).
Colorado does not require this.
Utah’s government has prepared a detailed lecture that a healthcare provider must use to explain to the patient that the state of Utah will legally help her pursue and gain child support from her partner if she chooses to maintain her pregnancy through birth, as well as help her
utilize welfare programs, or even help her place the newborn up for adoption. A sort of strange bribe one would not be able to find in any other clinical setting.
Colorado doesn’t require this, either.
Once she has made it past those steps, she will need to receive a transvaginal ultrasound in which a probe is inserted into her body - whether or not there is a medical reason to do so. Only half of the states in America have the same requirements. What does this mean? It means that someone getting an abortion in Utah must get a transvaginal ultrasound even if they do not need one. This is because there are people who believe that if a woman is forced to see the ultrasound of the fetus, that she will be less likely to move forward with the procedure. There is nothing that supports this other than a single paper that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1983 that was based on two separate pregnant women and their reactions to seeing their ultrasounds, which would not be enough evidence to enforce any other invasive procedure but this one.
In Colorado, a transvaginal ultrasound is only utilized if deemed medically necessary by a medical professional.
Finally, my friend will have to leave this very appointment and return in three days to receive her abortion pills to take with her so that she can rest in the comfort of her own home during the experience.
In Colorado, she would receive the pills the day of her appointment.
She turns off her phone. It’s unclear to either of us why a patient would be treated so differently
based on state lines.
“Looks like I’m going to Colorado.”
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Sources:
https://www.plannedparenthood.org/planned-parenthood-utah
http://www.prochoicecolorado.org/in-our-state/current-laws.shtml
https://rewire.news/article/2013/03/01/challenges-in-the-trans-vaginal-ultrasound-debate/
https://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title76/Chapter7/76-7-S305.6.html?v=C76-7-S305.6_1800010118000 101
https://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title76/Chapter7/76-7-S305.html?v=C76-7-S305_2017050920170509
When in 2015 it hit the headlines that Planned Parenthood was illegally selling fetal tissue to laboratories, it was as if culture bomb had exploded in America. People pro or anti Planned Parenthood flooded social media and comment threads with their passionate cries of foul and or instance of innocence. As time went on, Planned Parenthood underwent multiple investigations and took to several news outlets to explain themselves, much to the chagrin of those who had already condemned them to wrongdoing.
However, from the very start of the divisive and volatile accusations against Planned Parenthood, there stood a group of people who were immediately skeptical of claims of illegal activity…and it’s this group of people who make up the tireless and selfless efforts of the organ and tissue donation field.
Think for a moment about why selling fetal tissue is illegal. We’ve all heard about organs being sold on the black market and we know that it’s illegal; we may even be aware of an urban legend or two that warns us not to trust strangers or we might lose a kidney. Then again, many of us might be recipients of an organ or tissue transplant, or know of someone who is. Consider someone who receives a corneal transplant. Are they paying for that tissue? Did the surgeon buy the tissue from the deceased persons family in order to use it in the surgery? No and no. So how does it work, and how does it prove Planned Parenthood's innocence?
The easiest way to remember how a human tissue is not involved with finances is remembering the three S’s: services, skills, and supplies. When an organ procurement establishment is notified that an organ donor has passed away, they provide a “service” of using “skilled” staff to collect the –for example – heart using the appropriate “supplies”. That heart is then provided for transplantation and the organ procurement establishment receives payment for the three S’s.
For a patient receiving the heart, the hospital provides the “service” of scheduling the surgery and proving adequate accommodations (clean sheets for their functional hospital bed, meals and clean water while in recovery, electricity, adequate privacy in their room, access to a restroom or other bathroom necessities, etc), the “skills” of the cardiothoracic surgeon, anesthesiologist, nursing staff, technicians, and all other needed staff, as well as the appropriate “supplies” needed to perform surgery, like instruments and all sterile items.
The bill will not include the transplanted heart.
This, too, is how Planned Parenthood ran their fetal tissue program. I say “ran” in the past tense, because unfortunately, this program is no longer a service they provide.
Let’s rewind for just a moment and reacquaint ourselves with this notorious organization. Planned Parenthood was founded just over 100 years ago and has since been a leader in providing reproductive education, reproductive healthcare, contraceptives, and options in terminating unwanted pregnancies…all of which have repeatedly landed them in the legal and political arena rather than behind the closed doors of privacy where they belong. They have long advocated for both men and women to have access to a proper and thorough sex education, access to birth control, availability of affordable STD testing, treatment of STD’s, and options regarding terminating a pregnancy. In recent years, they have stressed the importance of sexual health for the transgender members of our community and pushed back when lawmakers try to make achieving an abortion extremely difficult.
As we rolled into 2015, Planned Parenthood would find themselves trying to defend the 2 out of their 700 facilities that supplied donated tissue for research as legitimate – and it would soon come to light that out of those 2 facilities, only 1 of them would be reimbursed for the three S’s. Providing donated fetal tissue for research was a labor of love, and once Planned Parenthood had been through the ringer and was found to be innocent in every investigation, they decided that a way to try and earn back some of the public’s trust was to end their fetal donation program. Fetal tissue at those clinics will no longer go towards trying to cure genetic disorders or debilitating illnesses.
The attack on Planned Parenthood wasn’t about them behaving illegally, it was about attacking reproductive rights and the organization that represents those rights so well. In this day and age, when Google is at our fingertips, we must be vigilant with our research when we hear something on the news that doesn’t sound quite right. If it sounds too wild to be true, it probably is.
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Sources:
https://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/our-leadership/cecile-richards
https://www.thenation.com/article/genius-cecile-richards/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/planned-parenthoods-president-on-the-offensive/
"I Would Check Your Source."
A Profile on the Dynamic and Unstoppable Cecile Richards, by Desiree Rock
IN 2015...
"My body, my choice !" "They are selling fetal tissue!" "Protect Women's Health!"
"Defund Planned Parenthood!" "Our tax dollars are funding abortions!"
"#StandwithPP" "Planned Parenthood is unnecessary, go see a REAL doctor!"
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In 2015, America found itself divided by a reproductive rights scandal involving the popular healthcare center Planned Parenthood and whether or not undercover videographers had unearthed vicious and illegal transgressions. News about the videos seemed to swirl throughout America’s living rooms, a tornado of confusion, misinformation, and at times, rage.
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In the eye of this storm stood Cecile Richards, the President of Planned Parenthood. Not long after we had all heard the rumors about Planned Parenthood, she found herself sitting before congress in an attempt to bring the facts regarding her establishment to the forefront of the gossip after a group of individuals from the organization "The Center of Medical Progress" had met multiple times with Planned Parenthood healthcare providers by means of pretending to be from an imaginary company called "Biomax Procurement Services, LLC”. The motives of this group were to secretly record conversations regarding private and protected patient and clinical information (often referred to as “PHI” in the medical field, or “protected health information”); they then painstakingly edited the videos to reflect their true agenda, which was to sabotage Planned Parenthood as an extension of trying to end the option of abortion for women everywhere.
The extensive editing of these videos would be lost on many people, including many of America’s politicians. Insidious and provocative claims can light a fire in the bellies of the best of us, and upon hearing about the contents of the videos – healthcare providers talking flippantly about fetal tissue, admitting to selling tissue illegally, willing to barter and be bribed in order to get what they want - people gathered up their pitchforks and demanded a witchhunt.
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And depending on who you asked, Cecile Richards was either the wicked witch of the west, or she was Glenda, here to soothe our worried brows.
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“LIFE AS AN ACTIVIST, TROUBLEMAKER, OR AGITATOR IS A TREMENDOUS OPTION AND ONE I HIGHLY RECOMMEND"
Cecile Richards was born in Waco, Texas in 1959 to a politician mother and a lawyer father. She was raised on volunteering and activism, which led to her dismissal from public school in 9th grade after protesting the Vietnam War. Starting fresh in a private school at age 16, she began assisting her mother’s campaign for attorney Sarah Weddington’s run for political office. Sarah Weddington famously won the 1973 Roe v. Wade case regarding the right to privacy and abortion, which one can only assume made a lasting impression on Cecile and her future community health interests. Once Cecile graduated from high school, she attended Brown University where she graduated with a bachelor's degree in history; from here she worked for union campaigns and more political campaigns. Some of her most notable work includes being a founder of "America Votes", a group that strives to promote progressive agendas in politics; being chief of staff for Nancy Pelosi, Minority Leader of the House of Representatives; and founding the “Texas Freedom Network”, an organization that tries to counter the political work of the Christian right.
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Grace Under Pressure
There is a term called "grace under pressure" which signifies facing insurmountable circumstances and remaining composed and confident, not letting anyone know chaos is brewing beneath your surface. In the case of Cecile Richards eventually facing the United States congress to discuss the delegation of Planned Parenthood's funds, what services they provide or do not provide, and whether the illegal videos had any merit, she summed up her knowledge with one powerful sentence: "I would check your source". That sentence is essentially an anthem in today's world, where so often people seem to think that having an opinion means that they know the facts of the matter.
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After extensive questioning and hours of time investigating and trying to unearth Planned Parenthood atrocities, all 15 states that investigated Planned Parenthood - as well as Congress, vice president Mike Pence, and chairman Jason Chaffetz - found Planned Parenthood to be innocent of the accusations regarding the selling of fetal tissue and the allocation of funds for abortion.
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Whether you love her, hate her, or are unsure of whom she is, Cecile Richards humanizes Planned Parenthood and the healthcare that it represents. She is educated, experienced, and proves this not only through her work with Planned Parenthood, but with all of her endeavors that strengthen our communities. She cares about the health and safety of society at large: all genders, all races, all abilities, all incomes, all ages, and more. She understands that things don’t go as planned, and that there needs to be a safe place to go to access safe and affordable healthcare. Humanizing can lead to improvement and the opening of minds. Cecile Richards strives to make Planned Parenthood more than just political fodder and leads a dignified march of truth and grace under pressure throughout her career and the ordeals hurdled her way. She is shining light of how and why we should stand up for reproductive rights.
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Sources:
https://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/our-leadership/cecile-richards
https://www.thenation.com/article/genius-cecile-richards/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/planned-parenthoods-president-on-the-offensive/