Monday, NPR’s Linda Holmes issued an open letter to Pixar asking for a movie about a girl who “isn’t a princess.”  Titled “From all the girls with band-aids on their knees,” Holmes’ piece asks Pixar to make a movie about little girls and things that happen to them, just like they’ve made movies (a lot of them– 10) about little boys and the things that happen to them.  I thought this was interesting, even if the “open letter” format leaves a little to be desired.  However, when I sent the link on to my partner, he informed me he thought this was “a stupid request” because Pixar does organic story development and doesn’t really have a “writers room” or whatever.

I’m not going to lie, this really pissed me off.  Of COURSE he didn’t think this was interesting because HE had lots of media about adventerous boys doing cool things and meeting all kinds of magical creatures.  Me?  I was stuck with princesses.

Sociological Images (a great, great blog about representations of people and their impact on society) has been following this Pixar and gender thing for a few months now.  While there is only 1 member of the Pixar writing team that is a woman, I find it difficult to believe that Pixar would have a hard time recruiting top female writing talent (also, it looks like a few future films will have female writers).  Anyway, the point of asking Pixar to make a feature film about a girl is not only about having a model for independent girlhood that is not about being a princess but about getting images of girls like that into mainstream culture.  I think that is the point that often gets left out in debates about girls and media representation.  It isn’t just that women need to be represented in the media, it is that they need to be represented in a variety of roles.  We’ve been working against racial stereotypes in media for a long time but, with a few exceptions, children’s program still heavily depends on gender stereotypes.

"Royal Life" wall decor (via Sociological Images)

I know kids are a lot smarter than we often imagine– I believe that girls and boys play in all kinds of unique and idiosyncratic ways.  I do not believe that a lack of girl-powered major studio films is going to ruin a girl’s sense of adventure or keep her away from playing soccer.  However, I do think that without strong female characters in movies girls who don’t conform to he princess stereotype are going to have a much harder time as a kind and young adult.  I remember having no model for girls who like to bike, read books, and who could give two sh*ts about makeup.  Princesses and tom boys can co-exist  in the girl-targeted media market.

Slightly unrelated– Sociological Images has also done a really good job covering the “redesign” of Dora the Explorer and how they’ve tarted her up.

Vigil for Dr. Tiller in Lawrence Kansas (image from the Lawrence Journal-World)

Many members of the pro-choice community have urged the Justice Department to treat Sunday’s events as an act of domestic terrorism.  At first, I thought “of course!”  As I’ve done more reading and heard the perspectives of some constitutional law scholars interviewed in the media I’ve become considerably more ambivalent about this.  Make no mistake, I feel that Dr. Tiller’s death is deeply tragic, but I remain unsure about labeling this event as “terrorism.”  I have two concerns about the expanding definition of terrorism, one is tied to civil liberties and ‘thought policing’ and the second is more political.

First my concerns about calling Dr. Tiller’s death terrorism:  On Monday, Rachel Maddow interviewed George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley.  He suggested that under the Bush administration the definition of “terrorism” expanded to include many, many crimes.  Turley also feels that murder or assination are not exactly the same thing as terrorism especially given that the Supreme Court has protected violent speech.  Perhaps a better category would be to call Roeder’s crime a “hate crime” defined as:

Hate crimes… occur when a perpetrator targets a victim because of his or her perceived membership in a certain social group, usually defined by racial group, religion, sexual orientation, disability, ethnicity, nationality, age, gender, gender identity, or political affiliation.

A “hate crime” can take two forms: “hate crime” generally refers to criminal acts which are seen to have been motivated by hatred of one or more of the listed conditions. The second kind is hate speech, which is speech defined as crime. While hate crimes are rarely debated, the hate speech concept is controversial, as criminalizing speech can be seen as impugning freedom of speech. Incidents may involve physical assault, damage to property, bullying, harassment, verbal abuse or insults, or offensive graffiti or letters.

In contrast, terrorism is defined by “a policy or ideology of violence intended to intimidate or cause terror for the purpose of “exerting pressure on decision making by state bodies.” The term “terror” is largely used to indicate clandestine, low-intensity violence that targets civilians and generates public fear.”  Pamela Sumners, who works for NARAL, wrote an excellent piece for RHRealityCheck.org defending labeling Tiller’s death as terrorism and an assassination used to intimidate women, doctors, and the public at large.  She chastized people (like me) who tend to believe that although Tiller’s murderer might have been in a climate of hate speech that doesn’t necessiarily mean he comitted an organized act of terror with the intent of creating a media presence and generating widespread public fear.  Sumners asserts that:

Don’t call it murder. Call it an assassination. George Tiller was the fourth doctor who performed abortions to be targeted, stalked, and executed in the United States since 1993. If the Scott Roeder in custody is the same Scott Roeder who posted on Operation Rescue’s website the thinly veiled invitation to OR’s supporters to help him scope out the floor plan of Tiller’s church, he may have had help with everything but pulling the trigger.  He pulled that trigger on the sixth anniversary of the capture of Eric Robert Rudolph, whose bomb at the Birmingham clinic contained five pounds of dynamite and hundreds of nails that killed a police officer and almost killed nurse Emily Lyons.

I’m nevertheless sympathetic to the claims that one ought not police thoughts, even hate speech, until it becomes an open incitement to commit a specific crime.  As of yet, I have not heard evidence that suggests (to me) that Roeder is more than a deeply troubled man under the influence of an especially radical group but who acted not based on the specific instructions of the larger organization.  While I feel this might be a perfect opportunity to reconsider how America defines hate speech and what counts as an open incitement to violence, Roeder seems to be that 1% you just can’t control for.  I stand corrected.  According to reporting at RHRealityCheck, Roeder had been at Dr. Tiller’s trial earlier this year and arrested with bomb making materials in the past.  Although he had the phone number of Operation Rescue in his car, it does not appeare that he was in contact with anyone in the organization about his specific plans. Specificity of the communication seems to be the most important thing to me.

Second, I think that the pro-choice movement calling for Dr. Tiller’s death to be labeled terrorism opens up a whole new line of attack by the anti-choicers.  I can just see years of “oh it wasn’t terrorism when the abortionists kill a billion babies a day in their so-called clinics but the death of one abortion doctor is ‘terrorism’– Hypocrites!”  Although I don’t think that the pro-choice movement ought to be making choices based on a defensive posture to the religious right, I’m bracing for the blow back from this debate.

I’m also ambivalent about labeling the anti-choice movement as a terrorist group because I think it grants them legitimacy that they don’t really deserve.  When I think of terrorists I tend to think of groups like AL Qaeda, the IRA, or other large quasi-nationalist groups that have an agenda beyond a single political issue.  This is, perhaps, an overly limiting definition but I think at some point it is important to differentiate between a “hate crime,” “terrorism,” and just average “crime.”

Roeder may have comitted a hate crime but I do not yet feel certain that he carried out an act of terrorism.

The news of Dr. George Tiller’s death shocked me. After an incredible and peaceful Sunday with friends the news came up on my Twitter feed and my first thoughts were “no no no.” There is little commentary for me to add to the many moving and touching tributes paid to Dr. Tiller in the past two days. I will say only this– in the summer I spent working for Planned Parenthood I never met anyone motivated by anything other than a deep compassion for women and their families. So much hatred and invective gets spewed at brave men and women who have chosen to help women in desperate circumstances.

I am deeply upset that in 21st century America women need to be escorted into clincis for routine medical procedures (abortion only makes up about 2% of Planned Parenthood’s services), that compassion for women is now a political act, and that moral cowardice characterizes a group of people who claim to have God on their side. How dare they kill a man in his own church! How dare the anti-choicers claim that this is a justifiable act. Anyone who thinks that doctors “talk women into” aborting a fetus has never spent time with the doctors, nurses, and abortion counselors who work in American clinics. They listen to terrible stories of abuse, of cancer and fetal deformity, of families on the bring of bankruptcy and they hold these women’s hands, keep their stories, and support the choices of all women without judgement.

After the jump I’e posted some links to a variety of stories on Dr. Tiller, his death, and how the new generation of pro-choice activists need to confront this challenge. Please consider donating to Medical Students for Choice and/or Physicians for Reproductive Choice. As they say, “without providers there is no choice.” You can also ask President Obama to revive the National Task Force on Violence Against Health Care Providers. Coverage of Dr. Tiller’s murder that is particularly interesting or useful (this is by no means exhaustive):

• Rachel Maddow dedicated about 40 minutes to coverage of Dr. Tiller’s death and the many attacks on doctors by anti-abortion extremists.
• Gloria Feldt’s piece at Salon.com, “George Tiller needs more than candlelight vigils“
• Frank Schaeffer, a former leader in the anti-choice movement, wrote in the Huffington Post
• Ann Friedman’s piece in The American Prospect emphasizes why clinic violence needs to be addressed as a national secrutiy/federal level issue.
• The New York Times blog “The Opinonator” did a round up of opinions on Dr. Tiller’s death as a ‘moral murder’
• Anderson Cooper interviewed a doctor based in Colorado, Dr. Hern, about his relationship with Dr. Tiller and the threats abortion providers face daily (also, unrelated, they show some footage from the DC vigil and you can see me! on CNN! toward the end of the clip– about 5:40).
• Check out the National Abortion Federation’s documentation of the history of violence against providers/clinics.
• Many, many members of the Feministing community wrote about Dr. Tiller’s death.
• Check out your local news about vigils in support of Dr. Tiller and/or your local abortion clinic. Find organizations to get involved with! There were nearly 200 people at the vigil here in DC.

The semester is just about over, the election is behind us, and I’m feeling confident that Barack Obama is going to keep the world’s uteruses safe (for the time being).  I’ve so enjoyed sharing this space with you all and having to form (what I hope are) cogent thoughts on American political issues.

I’m finished with the class I started this blog for and am trying to decide what to do with the space.  The content here doesn’t easily fit into my personal blog, BashfullyDesigned, but I am not sure that I can keep up a commitment to this space too…  In the next few days I’m planning to figure out just what this space will be used for– in many ways it is as much a part of my life as Bashful but there are ways in which the tone I take here is hard to keep up– that kind of perpetual criticism is exhausting, don’t you think?

Stay tuned, I wont leave you hanging like this, I swear.  Plus, there are all sorts of rumors and speculation swirling about the inauguration and I’ll be following those like crazy.

Each week about this time I report in on how social networking technologies (usually Facebook) and politics (usually Planned Parenthood) interact.  This week, I’m still going to do that, but I’m going to point to an article I heard last night on NPR’s All Things Considered.  Referencing the work of Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs, Phillip Reeves interviewed a number of Mumbai citizens using txt messages to organize a mass protest Wednesday (today).

Reeve notes that the texts urge people to consider holding the Indian government accountable:

The real terrorists are not only those who have come through boat but those who have come through vote.  We can change the system, if America can why can’t India?  Please pass it on.

Although I’m so sorry to hear about the events in Mumbai last week, I suddenly felt this huge sense of relief.  America is, again, a model for peaceful transitions of power and the potential for democracy to hold the powerful accountable.  Suddenly, I know America made the right choice.  Obama is the person we need to show the world and just moving away from the policies of the Bush years is already restoring some of America’s standing abroad.

Today’s New York Times is reporting that “tens of thousands of people” are protesting in Mumbai today (see also photo above).  The BBC also notes that, “The Mumbai protest drew thousands of people who blocked traffic and shouted slogans, including ‘down with Pakistan’ and ‘shame on politicians’.”  Neither article, however, mentions the use of text messages as a way to organize the protest, that may come out of some of the techy blogs in a day or two.

I’ve never really quite understood the mobile politics thing, I have to admit.  It just felt like a cruddy way to use the Internet.  However, I recognize its value in places that aren’t the US (i.e. where the desktop or laptop is not the dominant way to interface with Internet and SMS is cheaper… so like, most of the world).

Unlike reading Rheingolds book, which I enjoyed but was skeptical of on a personal level, hearing the NPR story last night and then seeing images from the protests today was just the kind of real evidence I needed to believe in the “smart mob.”

Neal Stephenson & J. Frederick George's "Interface"

I think that the Seattle Weekly got it right. Interface is “a Manchurian Candidate for the Computer Age.”  In fact, the whole time I read the book I kept thinking that the plot had kind of been covered in that movie a number of years ago.  This isn’t to say that I don’t adore Stephenson. When I finally got around to reading Cryptonomicon, thanks to the nagging of my partner, I adored it: really brilliant, enthralling, and exciting.  What attracts me to Stephenson’s work is that it is Sci-Fi but not the kind of Sci-Fi with spaceships and aliens, it is a world that looks just like this one except for one little thing… and that one little thing, which always seems like a good idea at the time (i.e. brain implants for stroke victims) turns out to have huge consequences.

Stephenson and George successfully indite the media-savvy political process of the late 20th and early 21st Century.  I think they’re also right about how it will be medical technology that get people to surrender at least some of their rights to a computerized network- after all, who wouldn’t want their father back from a stroke he was never supposed to have.

Although I did feel like the plot had already been done, the details were uncanny.  Although Stephenson and Frederick wrote in 1994, some of the details could have come from the 2008 election– especially how Cozzano stages a huge rally in Grant Park in Chicago, IL.

In some ways I thought the most insightful part of the book occured right when Cozzano is kicking off his campaign.  I underlined and starred when Eleanor says:

[A big campaign] shakes everything up.  Everything’s in flux for a moment, you have the chance to go off in new directions, fix old problems in your life.  Believe me on this.

Although I personally felt a little like the female characters were one-dimensional (especially Mary-Catherine), Eleanor does serve as a useful speaker of the truth.

The other concept I found interesting was the tension between words and images.  The only people who really understand that Cozzano is different after the implant, Mary-Catherine and Floyd, are the ones who’ve listened to what he says.  At one point, the authors write that

Images were all fakery and manipulation cobbled together by the evil gnomes of Ogle Data Research… what counted were words.

Along that line, I’ve missed reading fiction.  Spending some time with Interface reminded me just how powerful fiction can be.  In many ways, because Stephenson and George can push on the edges of reality just a little bit, the point is driven home that much more.  Getting lost in a novel that still makes you think is a wonderful way to spend the Thanksgiving holiday.

Oh good lord…  via BoingBoing, a Boob Job piggy bank?!  Sold at an online store specializing in girls’ room decor!  I can’t even tell you how worked up this got me.  Plus, after that long post a few days ago I’ll keep this one oh so short.

On one hand, I try to remember that sometimes things are funny and even if they’re a little bit sexist or mean… well, sometimes that is part of humor.  So, while I might laugh at this if it was in an adult friend’s bathroom or on her desk I might also ask wonder just how tongue-in-cheek it really is.  I’m not sure its actually funny to imply that dissatisfaction with your body is normal.  Well, I mean… disatisfaction with your body is a normal part of growing up life but “fixing” it with plastic surgery is a fairly drastic step.

Could you even imagine a piggy bank for girls that said something like “ice cream,” “books,” or– God forbid– “birth control.” (Frankly, with the way things are looking in DC girls might need to save for the pill– unless a friend gets them a certificate to Planned Parenthood for Xmas).

Frankly, when I was a teen girl the last thing I needed was for my parents or friends to give me something that implied I needed a different body.

First, please allow me to appologize for my silence here lately.  Now that the election is over and Obama is doing all the right things, well… some of the pressure is off.  However, I just saw HBO’s Iron Jawed Angels and… well, it might be the red wine, but I loved it.  Sure, it was a little corny and the soundtrack hardly matched the era but I’m a sucker for a powerful story.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about feminism (er, Feminism?) and what it means to me.  After all, almost nothing I’m doing right now would have been possible without incredible sacrifice by brave, powerful women who came before me.  I’m unmarried but living with a man I love, I am getting an MA at a Major East Coast University, I control my reproductive system, and voted in the last election.

So, stay with me, this may take a while.

In many ways I am not an expert on gender theory or politics—I tended to doze through my classes on feminist art criticism in college; I’ve resisted the term feminist longer than many of my peers; and it is hard for me to get angry about someone using the phrase “you guys” instead of “you all.”  Also, and this may not make me popular with the feminist blogosphere, I think that American women have it pretty good– not in every way, and not perfect, but pretty good.  Hillary Clinton, after all, could only put “18 million cracks in that last glass ceiling” years after many countries, even countries generally considered hostile to women’s rights embraced female leadership.

As the daughter of a quiet second-wave feminist, I grew up wearing T-shirts that said “little me” and reading books about powerful, historic women (Nellie Bly and Margaret Sanger continue to be an inspiration).  I had no doubt that America will see a female president in my lifetime; I supported Barack Obama from day one and never looked back.  Until, that is, I had the opportunity to meet a woman named Michele who worked as an underground abortion counselor in the late 1960s in Minnesota. 

I spent several months working at an abortion clinic in Sioux Falls, SD last summer—ground zero in America’s abortion wars.  While there, I met a variety of educated, articulate, and passionate men and women, including Michele, working to protect women’s health by protecting their choices.

I spent an hour or two with Michele, hearing about her work with a leading pro-choice physician, Dr. McCoy, her experiences with a back-alley abortionist, and the desperation many women expressed when they came to her.  My passion for the women’s health movement had always been fairly intellectual, my generation has never known a time before Roe v. Wade, and Planned Parenthood has always just been there to provide Pap smears, birth control, or STI screenings.

During my visit with Michele, she told me about a time she and a male colleague were involved in a “sting” on a back alley abortionist.  The woman who offered to perform the abortion, a bartender who “did abortions on the side,” worked out of her old, brick apartment in a “dingy” part of St. Paul, MN.  When Michele and her male companion came in, they saw a big spaghetti pot on the stove in which the abortionist was boiling some catheters and needles.  When she walked down the hall, Michele saw a group of men in one of the bedrooms smoking silently, she described them as “the muscle” and did not understand why they were there.  Women should never, ever need to seek out medical care in a situation like this.

Although some argue that it is not so bad to leave “the abortion question” to the states, this would create a country in which women in states like California and New York have different legal rights than women in places like South Dakota or Mississippi.  America tried this in the 1960s and it was precisely this situation that lead to the landmark Roe v. Wade case.  Trigger laws, which Washington Post columnist Linda Hirshman wrote about in late September, set women in anti-choice states up to feel the effects of Roe being overturned or challenged incredibly quickly.  These laws are already on the books and will go into effect as soon as Roe v. Wade is overturned.  Some of the laws make traveling to other states to obtain an abortion illegal.  Although these laws do have exceptions for the mother’s health, if they are worded anything like the law currently on the ballot in South Dakota they will make performing an abortion a felony if the state later deems that the woman’s health was not, in fact, in danger.  Not only does this open the medical community to endless second-guessing by the government, it removes the ability for women to make decisions about their own health care.  Even if a woman can afford to travel across state lines to obtain medical care, she may still be punished under the theory that the fetus has a “home state” in which abortion is illegal.

At the end of our visit, when the coffee she made had run out, Michele looked me in the eye and thanked me.  Thanked me.  I was speechless.  All I did was walk past a few protesters.  I did not find women tickets to Mexico, I was not helping them offset the cost of international air travel or find sympathetic doctors willing to do follow up exams.  I was not breaking the law.

The abortion wars my generation fights tend to take place in the ballot box or on petition sheets.  They are nothing compared to working with doctors in Mexico, smuggling birth control, or setting up “stings” on back-alley abortionists.  Michele also apologized that her generation had not been able to secure a woman’s right to choose, that we are all still fighting this battle 30-something years later.  Standing in her small home in South Dakota, I realized that I owe a larger debt to my mother’s generation than I realized.  Today’s feminism ought to mean protecting the private choices of all women and ensuring that all options remain open—to work, to have a family, to terminate a pregnancy.

When Senator McCain put “women’s health” in air quotes, not unlike how some people put them around “evolution” or “God,” I knew it was time for me to recognize that Roe v. Wade is not secure and we are not living in an era friendly to women’s choices.  Who seriously doubts that women’s health ought to be a consideration in the abortion debates?  It has become something of a cliché, not to mention an understatement, to call the 2008 election a “turning point” in American history.  Americans are talking about ageism, racism, sexism, and elitism in a more sustained way than we have in years—certainly in my lifetime.  This election cycle has also forced the women’s movement, feminists (they are not, I think, the same thing), and all women to reconsider just what it is that American women expect from our society, our candidates, and ourselves.  When John McCain selected anti-choice Governor Palin as his running mate, the woman’s movement suddenly had to do some serious soul-searching.  The “liberal feminist elite” no longer looked so welcoming and supportive of all women.

Choice issues will prove to be the new litmus test for the American strain of feminism (and probably for the next justice on the Supreme Court).  When women demand that they have every medical option open to them, it is because the consequences of illegal abortion will hit women hardest, first, and most frequently.  For a long time feminism sought equality under the law and in society.

When it comes to healthcare, women and men simply are not equal and will never be equal.  Women give birth, they are also more likely to be raped than men, and are more likely to be the parent in a single parent home.  Women need choices.  Michele told me about women calling Dr. McCoy in the middle of the night, blood running into their shoes, and nowhere to go.  This cannot happen again in America.  It is a shame that it ever did.

Real equality means having the same degree of control over health care as men do. Is any state seriously considering a ban on vasectomies?  When anti-choice laws go into effect they push women into a state in which they are not in control of their bodies, health care, or families.  Today’s feminism means supporting women who choose not to have abortions for whatever reason, but it also means supporting women who, for whatever reason, do not wish to give birth.  For far too long the right has labeled the pro-choice movement as “pro abortion.”

Let me be clear, nobody is “pro abortion.”  True pro-choice politics is about supporting (and respecting) the choices of all women within the context of complete access to a variety of services.  When someone asks if being pro-choice is a requirement for the label feminist, the answer must be an emphatic yes!  No air quotes.

This semester I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about successful campaign organization and messaging.  One common thread, in all my classes and volunteer work, is that without a solid message or a good candidate all the technology in the world wont help.  Nowhere is this clearer to me than in the presidential election.  Although Obama certainly did have an exceptional social networking strategy, it helped that he is an extremely charismatic man with a talent for oratory and keeping calm in stressful situations.

I can’t help but think that the exact same online strategy wouldn’t have helped John Kerry nearly as much– Obama’s talent was connecting with the voters and Facebook was just a tool to get that done.  In contrast, men like Kerry and Howard Dean never got over initial stumbles or the perception that he’s inaccessible.  Sure, Facebook creates the illusion that someone is accessible (we know he likes Bob Dylan, for example) but Obama isn’t making these pages– his communications staff is.In a similar way, I think that Planned Parenthood created a successful online presence by combining Facebook, YouTube, and guest articles on the Huffington Post but another organization might not have the same results.

Although I think it is too soon to say that the abortion wars are over, I do think that what we witnessed this autumn is Americans saying “enough” to the abortion ballot measures (sadly, not with the anti-gay legislation).  Thus, I’d conclude that Planned Parenthood really did have the message people wanted right now– the technology just helped them achieve it, but without that message all the technology in the world wouldn’t help.

Perhaps we’re getting into a chicken-or-egg problem: which came first, the message or the campaign?  My semester of reading and observing, however, makes me think it is the message first– the campaign (tech, design, and all) has to come second.

Just when I thought my private bits were safe from harm, I read this article in today’s New York Timest.  Apparently, all the letters that H*yas for Choice collected were for nothing.  Although he missed the May 1 and Nov 1. deadline, G.W. Bush is planning to push through the so-called provider conscience regulations.

I’ve said this before, I don’t think being pro-choice means you need to be 100% comfortable with abortion.  This is a complex issue and reasonable, educated, intelligent people will probably disagree about it forever.  But, and this is a huge thing for me, your own personal choices do not need to be the personal choices for everyone else.

My major problem with the legislation is that it allows doctors and nurses to refuse to reffer someone to another place where they can obtain birth control, condoms, an abortion, EC, etc.  I think that it is one thing to personally opt out of these services, tell your patients long before they get into the exam room, and publicize this personal choice for your personal practice.  It is not, however, in any way okay with me to deny women the information they need to make informed medical choices.  A rape victim should never have to wonder if the doctor in the ER will proscribe EC.  If an assault victim asks for EC she is making a choice for herself and that doctor, whose role in her life she had little control over, should carry out her wishes.

Please, please contact HHS or the White House using the Planned Parenthood online form.  You can also submit your own letter using my text (after the jump)

Office of Public Health and Science
Department of Health and Human Services
Attention: Brenda Destro
Hubert H. Humphrey Building
200 Independence Avenue, S.W., Room 728E
Washington, DC 20201

RE: Provider Conscience Regulation

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am writing to voice my strong opposition to HHS’ proposed “Provider Conscience Regulation.”

While I fully agree that physicians and other health care providers should not be punished for their beliefs, I am deeply concerned about allowing physicians to refuse referral.  It is one thing to allow physicians to opt out of performing particular procedures but they should not be put in a position to use the exam room to advance a political or moral agenda.

Patients trust their physicians to provide them with complete, comprehensive, and accurate information regardless of their own political or religious belief.  That information includes the names of physicians willing to treat the patient as she wishes.  Patients deserve information so they can make fully informed decisions about the course of their own treatment.

Abortion, birth control, emergency contraception, and other reproductive health care options are legal, safe, and approved for use in the United States.  Access to this care should not be withheld from a patient because she and her doctor do not share the same religious, ethical, or political beliefs.

I appreciate HHS’ willingness to review comments from the general public. Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

The letter can be submitted via mail or via the HHS website.

P.S. Thanks to the women of Feministing for that amazing photo of W.