|
Banned
|
[QUOTE=AVoiceOfReason]This from the Investor's Business Daily Op Ed Page of Sept 30, 2005. Anyone see a problem with the facts or disagree with the conclusions? I didn't.
___________________________
I do.......
Quote:
http://www.louisianaweekly.com/weekl...e.pl?20050919x
..........Reality check.
As I wrote in my New York Times letter to the editor regarding Kristof's article, the Left, particularly feminists, have been struggling for decades to ensure that women- including poor women-have everything they need to manage their sexuality without judgment. That includes family planning services, birth control, over-the-counter emergency contraception, early pregnancy termination and accurate sex education, as well as the schooling and job training that will enable them to find hope, value and respect in other ways besides childbearing.
It is the Right-the Republicans and this administration-that have been blocking these efforts at every turn, hiding behind a sanctimonious pro-life banner, refusing to accept their own culpability in all of these "out-of-wedlock" births.
More reality. What all women need to flourish, to be productive and responsible, is self-esteem and self-respect. Both are intimately connected to the way women feel about their sexuality.
Unfortunately, our culture deals with that sexuality schizophrenically. On one hand it encourages women and girls to be wildly sexual, as in all those "Girls Gone Wild" videos, a message that pervades our music, advertising, fashion, movies and television programs.
On the other hand, our culture unconscionably withholds from women the means to prevent unwanted pregnancies, from accurate information about condoms, to over-the-counter access to Plan B or even being able to get birth control pills at the local pharmacy.
The message is clear: Being sexy makes you powerful; having babies makes you good. Choosing to have sex but not have babies makes you very, very bad. It's an old song in a new tempo.
The notion that women who have children out of wedlock are the cause of their own poverty and therefore undeserving of empathy, sympathy or help is just one more American myth. It ensures that such women wind up in the bin with all those other non-deserving poor.
Our social welfare system has long been based on separating the deserving from the non-deserving. Social Security and Medicare are for the deserving. Those benefits are easy to get and you're not stigmatized for getting them. Welfare and Medicaid are for the non-deserving. They're hard to get and carry a deep stigma.
In this way, the rich elderly are separated from the poor elderly. The wealthy disabled are separated from the disabled with little money. The acceptable widows and orphans are separated from the never-married and their "illegitimate" offspring.
Until Katrina. Like a raging goddess, she has come in and scrambled the mix, erased the caste lines. We cannot tell, as our hearts break, who among the streams of suffering humanity before us are deserving, and who, the undeserving.
We see thousands going hungry, and we want them fed; thirsty, and we want them to have water. Those without housing we want sheltered. Those who are unsafe we want protected. Those without means, we want to have opportunity. Those without health insurance we want to receive care.
All this is bad news for the president, the slashers of social programs and those who blame women and the poor for their own poverty. Certainly, there are poor women who have children they can't care for. But we have a culture where women are badgered into believing their ultimate value lies in their willingness to reproduce. Or, in their willingness to be utterly and totally sexualized.
After all this time, we still need to learn to value women for who they are. To help women to realize that value, to find routes to self-esteem besides reproduction. Women need to be able to be sexual on their own terms, even to discover what those terms are. And they need freedom from judgment for being sexual, but choosing not to be mothers just yet.
All this will require dramatic changes in men, too-of all classes, races and cultural traditions-in the way they view women and in the seriousness with which they treat protecting a woman from an unwanted pregnancy. But even all that will not solve our basic problem: inequity and its consequences.
That problem requires a different kind of "grand bargain," a meeting of the Left and Right at the Mississippi Delta where we've seen with stark clarity what it means to be human in what we've witnessed and what we've felt.
It raises portentous questions: Why do the poor deserve all of this support after a natural disaster, but not in the normal, struggling course of their lives? What is a nation's responsibility to its people?
Along with the landscape, Katrina has shattered the mantle of our benign neglect, forcing us, literally, to rethink America.
Angela Bonavoglia, MSW, is a New York-based freelance journalist and the author of "Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church" (Harper-Collins/ReganBooks, 2005) and "The Choices We Made: 25 Women and Men Speak Out About Abortion" (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2001).
|
With double the average national per capita incarceration rate, (the nation's highest), there may be a few families where the "bread winner" has been removed from a financial support role under circumstances that are not the norm in other states.(The following is published on Louisiana's state website )
Quote:
http://www.dhh.state.la.us/medialibrary.asp?Detail=206
........Why the continued poor performance for the Bayou State? It's how the numbers -- regularly referenced, statistically legitimate, officially collected numbers -- stack up. On 10 of the 44 indicators considered for the rankings, Louisiana's performance is among the nation's four worst.
That includes things like median household income, percentage of population not covered by health insurance, low birth weight babies as a percentage of total births, and percentage of population that has graduated from high school. The state's most favorable ranking comes in the category of warmest daily mean temperature -- fourth behind Hawaii, Arizona and Florida. And by August that won't seem like a good thing after all.
In some categories, Louisiana's performance is the worst in the nation. It has the country's highest infant mortality rate -- more than double that of the overall "most livable" state, New Hampshire. Louisiana also has the highest percentage of its population receiving food stamps. At 16.4 percent that's approaching twice the national average.
One of the most startling rankings highlighted by Morgan Quitno is Louisiana's distinction as the state with the highest state prisoner incarceration rate -- nearly double the national average -- and this without the accompanying nation-leading crime rate. The national incarceration rate is 430 state prisoners per 100,000 people. But Louisiana's rate is 801 per 100,000. This raises serious questions about crime and punishment in Louisiana, issues which get too little attention in public policy discussions and media coverage and which certainly can't be separated from the state's troubled indigent defense system and growing record of overturned capital cases.
The bottom line is that while Louisiana leadership deems construction of reservoirs, hotels, and sugar mills responsible use of taxpayer money, the state remains deeply troubled in both relative and absolute terms. Increased opportunities to fish, to house phantom conventioneers and to process the product of an already struggling industry aren't likely to improve Louisiana's performance on the things that really matter.
Emily Metzgar is a free-lance writer who lives in Shreveport. Write her in care of The Times, P.O. Box 30222, Shreveport, LA 71130-0222. E-mail to shreveportopinion@gannett.com
|
The IBD article offers a one sided, simplistic assessment that is riddled with undertones of racial prejudice, conservatist moralisms, and sexism. NOLA does not exist in a vacuum, social and economic strata there are the result of many factors out of the control of it's poorest residents.
Manhattan, for example, has the largest per capita population of single households, along with one of the highest per capita income levels.
NOLA is infamous, in the past, for having a corrupt police force. New Hampshire has a one percent black population, yet half or it's state prisoners are black. Out of wedlock births to white mothers has also sky rocketed in the same time frame that it has for blacks.
Access to competent legal aid by the poor in NOLA is lacking, compared to what is available in other US metro areas. The high infant mortality rate suggests that health services are also below par.
Louisiana ranks among the ten states with lowest per capita annual income:
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0104652.html
Could the following, zealous effort to restrict low income NOLA women from access to publicly subsidized abortion, be a mitigating factor ?
Quote:
http://www.bpnews.net/bpnews.asp?ID=17559
.......Louisiana received high marks because in 2003 the state legislature appropriated $1.5 million in federal funds for services related to abortion alternatives for needy families. Also in Louisiana, a physician may not perform an abortion until at least 24 hours after a woman has been provided with information about the proposed procedure, the alternatives to abortion, the probable gestational age of the unborn child, the risks associated with abortion, and more.
Taxpayers in Louisiana are not required to fund abortions except when the procedure is necessary to preserve the woman's health or the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. Additionally, Louisiana is one of only 12 states that define nonfatal assaults on an unborn child as a crime, the report card said.
Vermont received low marks because the Vermont constitution has been construed to provide a broader right to abortion than the U.S. Constitution. Vermont does not provide even rudimentary protection for women considering abortions, the report said, and the state does not have an informed consent law, parental involvement law for minors seeking abortions, abortion clinic regulations, ultrasound requirements or a prohibition on anyone other than a physician performing an abortion.
Taxpayers in Vermont fund most abortions for women receiving public assistance, and Vermont is one of only four states with no protection for the rights of conscience of healthcare workers. ...........
|
Sweden is a place with none of the obsession with abstinance and moralism and restriction of women's reproductive rights. STDS and abortion rates are much lower in Sweden than in the US. They have policies that promote the exact opposite of those forced on states like Louisiana by conservative christian politics, and the enjoy an opposite, and enviable result. Safe sex, low abortion rates, non-judgmental and healthier attitudes about sex.
This is not a simple problem. It is a national disgrace and conservatism sermonizing in a right wing financial publication does not provide a satisfactory or a fair explanation to inequality of wealth in America.
Last edited by host; 10-01-2005 at 09:43 AM..
|