RHRealityCheck.org's Features

Falling Between the Cracks: Why Abortion Funds Exist and How You Can Help Them Help Women

Eesha Pandit — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:43:47 +0000

Melissa is 26 years old. She has a husband serving in the U.S. military overseas and a young daughter with numerous special health care needs. When they learned that she was pregnant, Melissa and her husband considered their limited resources and decided to seek an abortion. The ban on federal funding for abortion meant that this basic medical service was not covered. Melissa managed to raise half of the cost of her procedure by delaying payment of non-essential bills. The New York Abortion Access Fund (NYAAF) pledged the other half.

Erika is a 19-year-old college student with an infant. When she became pregnant, her boyfriend had recently been laid off, leaving their family uninsured. She called NYAAF for help when her family refused to offer assistance. She’d saved $100 dollars from her student loan check. NYAAF pledged the remaining $250 and Erika received the abortion care she needed.

Since 2001, the NYAAF has helped 764 women from 25 states, including Melissa and Erika ^[1], gain access to safe abortion care. In fact, the need for abortion funding is so great that over 100 grassroots abortion funds exist across the country, all members of the National Network of Abortion Funds (NNAF). NYAAF, a member of NNAF, is a volunteer-run, non-profit organization that provides financial assistance to low-income women in New York state who can’t afford to pay for an abortion. This year, we’re celebrating a decade of ensuring accessible, funded abortion care in New York State.

Click here to see full invitation to the 10th Anniversary Celebration of the NYAAF.

Many people wonder why New York State, where women can get public health insurance coverage for abortion services, needs an abortion fund. Abortion is prohibitively expensive for many women with the average cost ranging from about $500 at 10 weeks, to over $1,300 at 20 weeks gestation. Even in New York and the 16 other states that provide Medicaid coverage for abortion, thousands of low-income women fall between the cracks. Many women may be too poor to pay for abortion procedures, but they are uninsured or not poor enough to obtain public health insurance coverage like Medicaid.

In addition to helping local women, NYAAF also assists women from out of state who need help covering the costs of their procedures in New York. New York City is a major destination for many women across the country seeking abortions for a number of reasons. Some women find that abortion is more affordable here than in their home states, others come from areas where there are no abortion providers at all, and others come because they may be able to have procedures later in their pregnancies here.

Our board is made up of 12 people, all of us under 45 years of age. Some of us are activists who’ve worked in the reproductive rights movement at both the grassroots and professional level, while others work in public health or in completely unrelated fields. As board members, we rotate responsibility for the hotline, each person taking a shift once a week every 12 weeks. We know it’s unusual for board members to be involved in the daily work of an organization. Besides the fact that we have no paid staff members, we feel that being directly involved in the service work of our fund keeps us grounded in remembering the importance of the work we do.

NYAAF has made grants to women coming to New York from many other states including Alabama, California, Georgia, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Utah, and even Bermuda. The demand for NYAAF’s services has been on the rise since the day we started. In 2002, we pledged $5000 to help 30 women access safe abortion care. Last year, we pledged over $60,000 to help 246 women.

Aside from Melissa and Erika, who are the women who call our hotline? In 2011, the average woman who called is 26 years old, has one child, no health insurance, and was about 12 weeks pregnant at the time of her abortion. While our average pledge towards a procedure is $252, the average total cost of an abortion for the women we serve is $846. Think about what you have in your bank account, what bills you have to pay. Could you afford that out-of-pocket expense?

Without donor support, NYAAF wouldn’t be able to help women like Melissa and Erika. There are a number of ways to help us keep abortion affordable in New York State. We have events almost every month. On February 9, we’re hosting a ten-year anniversary celebration at Housing Works in Manhattan. We’re honoring pro-choice champions New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Author and Columnist Katha Pollitt, and NYAAF’s original founder and early board members. Tickets are available here, as are electronic journal ads. Even if you can’t come, donations from $5 to $500 dollars go a long way towards helping women get the care that they need.

[1]: These women gave NYAAF permission to use their stories, with names changed.

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Women's Rights Abuses in Afghanistan: Searching for the Full Story

Jessica Mack — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:40:51 +0000

It was just a few weeks ago that the international news cycle was consumed with the gruesome tale of a young Afghan girl who had endured months of torture at the hands of her in-laws. Now there's another equally devastating story showcasing women’s rights abuses in Afghanistan. In the northern Kunduz province, a man and his mother are accused of strangling his wife, allegedly for giving birth to a girl.

“I have known women to endure emotional, economic, and physical abuse at the hands of their husbands for giving birth to girls. It’s heartbreaking,” said Naheed Bahram, Program Manager at Women for Afghan Women, a US- and Afghanistan-based women’s rights group.

The tragedy is a dual injustice, demonstrating both how early on a disregard for women’s rights in Afghanistan begins and how senselessly and brutally it is manifest. Violence against women in Afghanistan has become a well-established fact. A 2008 survey found that 87.2 percent of women had experienced at least one form of physical, sexual, or psychological violence or forced marriage in their lifetime.

Think what you will about the U.S. war in Afghanistan, Naheed Bahram sees a correlation between the U.S. presence and expanded awareness of – and progress on – women’s rights abuses. “We would not have achieved what we have without foreign presence.” In part, that’s because US presence has enabled new platforms for drawing awareness to the rights abuses women endure countrywide. We hear about acid-throwing and torture, child marriage and self-immolation, and maternal mortality, which in Afghanistan is the highest in the world.

From the media, we get a bleak and disturbing picture. Last year, Afghanistan was ranked the worst place in the world to be a woman by a Reuters poll – worse even than the Democratic Republic of Congo, where it is estimated that a woman is victimized nearly every minute. All of this, as depressing as it is, is important to know. For every one woman’s tale we read, hundreds are likely to have endured what she did, or maybe worse. Yet the picture is wider than this.

“It’s very important for the world to know what’s going on with women in Afghanistan, but it’s not a complete without also talking about what local women’s organizations are doing to change things,” says Bahram. “The media shows only negative things about Afghanistan. We hear about teachers who have acid thrown on them, but not about the girls winning scholarships for higher education.”

Women for Afghan Women runs women’s shelters and halfway houses across Afghanistan and a community center in Queens, New York for Afghan women immigrants, among other programs. They are also providing a defense lawyer for Sahar Gul, the young girl whose brutalized image was splashed across media outlets just weeks ago. They have received a fair amount of media attention for their excellent work, but it is rarely in context of report on abuses.

Paying attention the hard-earned victories of women’s rights groups inside and out of Afghanistan is as crucial in the fight for women’s rights in Afghanistan as is bringing to light the many abuses women face. It helps preserve the dignity of women in Afghanistan as fighters, organizers, and advocates, even while many may be victims and survivors as well. It is also these groups who are largely responsible for carrying the voices of abuse survivors to the press and beyond.

And while they’re working to provide safety nets, and communicate their tales of abuse to the world, what they’re asking for policy-wise is surprisingly little. “If people followed the laws that we have properly, there wouldn’t be as much violence as we’re having right now. The government is corrupt and the authorities just aren’t responsible,” says Bahram.

In 2009, advocates were successful in passing the Elimination of Violence Against Women Act, which “strengthens sanctions against various forms of violence against women; including making rape a crime for the first time under Afghan law.” In 2010, Rachel Reid of Human Rights Watch testified in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the impunity of this law, asking that the US “provide long-term support to the government to embark on a training program for prosecutors, police, and judges to ensure that the Elimination of Violence Against Women law is implemented.”

Despite ongoing impunity of violence against women, Afghan women’s voices and experiences are increasingly being heard around the world. It’s important that these voices are continuously put in context of what is being done and what needs to be done so that things change. That chorus of voices should include both victims and victors. A recent report on women’s boxing in Afghanistan, likely to go largely unnoticed, depicts two sisters, gold and silver medalist world boxing champions, gearing up for the London Olympics.

“I’m very proud of the work that we’re doing in Afghanistan and there has been a change, though it may be very small,” says Bahram. “Afghanistan has had 30 years of war, so it will take at least another 30 years to be back in the place where we once were. The world needs to be patient with Afghanistan.”

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The Cancerous Politics and Ideology of the Susan G. Komen Foundation

Jodi Jacobson — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:30:38 +0000

See all our coverage of the Susan G. Komen Foundation's break with Planned Parenthood here.

This week it became clear there are things more important to the Susan G. Komen Foundation—the fundraising giant that each year during breast cancer awareness month virtually swathes the United States in pink, a la Christo—than ensuring women are able to access exams for early detection of breast cancer.

What could be more important to an organization ostensibly dedicated to the elimination of breast cancer? Answer: The politics and personal agendas of the organization's senior staff and board, both of which have been infiltrated by right-wing ideologues and both of which were instrumental in a decision to deny further support from Komen affiliates to Planned Parenthood clinics that provide breast exams. In fact, it is now clear that some anti-choicers on Komen's board and senior staff are actually willing to sacrifice poor women to breast cancer to satisfy their own agendas.

Nationwide, Planned Parenthood doctors and nurses provide nearly 750,000 breast cancer screenings annually, offering risk assessments, breast exams, breast health information and education, and diagnostic and surgical referrals. Over the past five years, Planned Parenthood health centers have conducted nearly 170,000 clinical breast exams with funds from Komen, out of a total of more than four million clinical breast exams performed nationwide by Planned Parenthood clinics. Komen grants also supported more than 6,400 out of 70,000 mammogram referrals made by Planned Parenthood. These are affiliate-to-affiliate grants between Komen and Planned Parenthood sister oganizations at the state level.

A large share of the clients served at Planned Parenthood clinics are low-income African-American and Latina women. The National Cancer Institute identifies lack of access to early and effective screening for breast cancer (and hence lack of early treatment) as a primary reason that African-American and Latina women die of breast cancer at higher rates than the general population. In fact, Komen itself recognized these links in a 2011 statement lauding its relationship with Planned Parenthood:

While Komen Affiliates provide funds to pay for screening, education and treatment programs in dozens of communities, in some areas, the only place that poor, uninsured or under-insured women can receive these services are through programs run by Planned Parenthood.

Komen further stated:

These facilities serve rural women, poor women, Native American women, women of color, and the un- and under-insured. As part of our financial arrangements, we monitor our grantees twice a year to be sure they are spending the money in line with our agreements, and we are assured that Planned Parenthood uses these funds only for breast health education, screening and treatment programs.

As long as there is a need for health care for these women, Komen Affiliates will continue to fund the facilities that meet that need.

But apparently those women no longer matter as Komen's support has now been withdrawn. Last month, the national office of the Komen Foundation, which maintains tight control over its state affiliates, sent a memo barring those affiliates from using money they had raised at the local level to partner with Planned Parenthood clinics in improving access to breast exams.

Why? Not science, not evidence, not concern for women.

Politics and personal ambition, pure and simple.

It's no secret that anti-choice legislators at the state and national level have made Planned Parenthood the central focus of their anti-woman agenda, spending well over half of entire legislative sessions in some states focused on cutting funding and limiting access to reproductive health services. At the national level, the ongoing witch hunt aimed at PPFA has taken many forms, one of which includes a "Congressional inquiry" launched by House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations Chairman Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.). Stearns sent a letter to PPFA in late September 2011 asking for an avalanche of documents to "investigate" whether PPFA has used federal funds to provide abortion services.

In a letter protesting the move, Democrats Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Diana DeGette (D-CO) called the inquiry a politically-motivated waste of time and taxpayer money, stating:

“Planned Parenthood is being singled out as part of a Republican vendetta against an organization that provides family planning and other medical care to low-income women and men. … The HHS Inspector General and state Medicaid programs regularly audit Planned Parenthood … These audits have not identified any pattern of misuse of federal funds, illegal activity, or other abuse that would justify a broad and invasive congressional investigation.”

Wasteful or not, any Congressperson can start such an inquiry, even for specious reasons. This is not equivalent to a legal "investigation" of an organization. What Stearns is doing is completely unfounded and politically motivated, but when you have power you can abuse it.

What does Stearns have to do with Komen? Anti-choice groups have long targeted Komen for its partnership with Planned Parenthood, in part by haranguing the organization and listing them as targets of various protests and boycotts, and in part by touting the medically-disproven and specious claims about non-existent links between abortion and breast cancer. A group known as Life Decisions International (LDI), the website of which is "fightpp.org," has long had Komen on its boycott list.

These efforts hardly appear to have affected Komen's bottom line since the foundation's total gross revenue in 2010 was nearly $421 million, only several hundred thousand dollars of which were granted over the past five years by Komen's state affiliates to local Planned Parenthood partners for education, screening, and referrals. Moreover, as a large and well-known organization (albeit one criticized for its work on many levels) Komen appeared until now to stay above the ideological mud-pit of the anti-choice movement.

Last fall, however, things began to change. LDI began quiety telling other anti-choice groups that it had "won" the battle with Komen and that they should await public announcement of a policy change.

And suddenly, Cliff Stearns' inquiry became a reason for the Komen national office to change what state affiliates could do with their funds. Komen's board recently approved a new policy stating that affliates can only provide grant funds to other organizations if:

• The applicant is not currently debarred from the receipt of federal or state funding.

• No key personnel of applicant or any of its affiliates has been convicted of fraud or a crime involving any other financial or administrative impropriety within the last year.

• The applicant or any of its affiliates is not currently under a local, state or federal formal investigation for financial or administrative impropriety or fraud. ("Affiliate" means any entities that control, are controlled by, or are under the same control as applicant or independent entities operating under the same name or brand as applicant.)

While the policy ostensibly affects "any" organization to which Komen affiliates might grant money, the memo sent to state affiliates specifically targets Planned Parenthood.

"Currently, however, various authorities at both the state and federal levels are conducting investigations involving [Planned Parenthood] and some of its local chapters, and the organization is barred from receiving government funding in numerous states. Under these new criteria, Planned Parenthood will be ineligible to receive new funding from Komen until these investigations are complete and these issues are resolved."

But these are lies and innuendo: There are no "authorities" investigating Planned Parenthood and Planned Parenthood is not barred from receiving federal government funding in any state. No mature organization concerned about the health and well-being of women at risk of breast cancer would have created a policy targeting another respected organization with a record of saving untold lives.

But Komen can no longer claim the mantle of a respected organization. First, Komen last year hired Karen Handel, a former Georgia anti-choice gubernatorial candidate and Sarah Palin acolyte who promised as part of her platform to defund Planned Parenthood and other vital health services. Handel, who lost her race but is said to have future political ambitions, is now Senior Vice President for Policy at Komen. She was originally endorsed in her race by and received money from current GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney, with whom some sources suggest she remains closely allied. Romney, in turn, has suddently become more anti-choice than thou and has promised a federal personhood amendment as well as to defund Planned Parenthood.

Second, sitting on Komen's Advocacy Alliance Board is Jane Abraham, the General Chairman of the virulently anti-choice and anti-science Susan B. Anthony List and of its Political Action Committee. Among other involvements, Abraham helps direct the Nuturing Network, a global network of crisis pregnancy centers, organizations widely known for spreading ideology, misinformation and lies to women facing unintended pregnancy and to use both intimidation and coercion in the course of doing so. Also on the board of Nuturing Network is Maureen Scalia, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, no hero to women's rights and health.

That Komen—an organization ostensibly dedicated to scientific exploration of cures for breast cancer—has invited on its advocacy board women so closely allied with organizations that so blatantly ignore science and medicine and spread outright lies to other women about their health and welfare speaks volumes about Komen's ethical principles as an organization.

While anti-choicers including those on Komen's board are spreading lies, Komen's steps will ensure that more women who might have been screened will now lack access to early detection and treatment and may die from breast cancer. This is in keeping with a general and patently insane approach of the anti-choice movement: Decry abortion, for example, but limit funding for contraceptive education and supplies which can prevent the unintended pregnancies that lead to abortion. Decry the plight of minority women, but make their access to care increasingly limited. Cry for the "babies," but defund pre- and post-natal care, nutritional support, and other forms of life and health care for infants and mothers. It is a venal and disgusting strategy that until now I would have thought well beneath the Komen Foundation no matter other issues.

But Komen as an organization now appears so little able to stand the truth that it is deleting comments from its website protesting the policy change. And this is not the first time Komen has come under fire for misinformation or questionable affiliations. Some point to concerns about Komen's influence on a recent Institute of Medicine report playing down environmental factors in breast cancer, and its close affiliation with many companies that manufacture products using cancer-causing agents.

Given these and other links, it may be no surprise that Komen's own memo to its affiliates spreads lies about Planned Parenthood, nor that Komen's actions belie its own claims to care about racial, ethnic and income disparities in access to breast cancer screenings.

Data from the Centers for Disease Control on disparities in access to care noted that women without insurance (38.2 percent) and women without a usual source of health care (36.2 percent) were least likely to be screened for cancer and that such disparities remained stark among Latina, African-American, and Native American women.

In response, Ambassador Nancy G. Brinker, founder and CEO of Komen, said: “This gap in care for uninsured and low-income women is particularly troubling and one we have been working very hard to fill at Susan G. Komen. It’s clear that we have far more work to do for women who have no resources, no insurance, and no steady source of healthcare. They need our help the most.”

Not sure how she explains the foundation's recent decision to those women who otherwise would have gotten that screening along with other health care at Planned Parenthood clinics.

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Jodi Talks on Democracy Now About Komen's Break with Planned Parenthood

Child Abduction for Adoption and the Tangled Web of Deceit in Guatemala: A Review of Erin Siegal’s “Finding Fernanda”

Karen Smith Rotabi — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:05:10 +0000

Because much of my research has focused on reforming intercountry adoption and most especially Guatemala, I opened Siegal’s “Finding Fernanda” cautiously. She began the story by capturing the meager life of a determined mother, Mildred Alvarado, and her children living on poverty’s bitter edge.

By the end of this captivating read, it is impossible to see Alvarado as anything but a strong and resilient woman who is determined to fight circumstances of poverty and oppression--its impact on human dignity and the destruction of her family.

This main thread of the story makes Alvarado not only an interesting woman, but the underdog that everyone must hope for the ‘right thing’ to happen in the end.

However, when Alvarado and many other women’s stories of child abduction for adoption went ‘public’ it seemed everyone in the intercountry adoption community was routing against 'the truth.' It was unthinkable that some [1] of the beautiful children who had been adopted from Guatemala came to their adoptive families from sinister pathways. ‘Orphan’ adoption is viewed by most as an honorable act and to suggest that children are not truly orphans (and may be trafficking victims) is more than impolite to most people. Unfortunately the historical context and story of Guatemala is far too complicated for such fantasized notions about ‘orphans’ to always be true and when interrogates the facts, a grotesque reality unfolds.

Siegal pulls together many of the facts in her book, often allowing them to speak for themselves. The villain, an executive director of a notoriously bad adoption agency in Florida, gives the reader some insight into the inner workings of a ‘Christian’ woman who uses faith to manipulate her clients as needed. Then, there is the more subtle manipulation of the US Government, ranging from the US Department of State to the many Senators and Congressmen who demand that their constituent’s adoptions be completed—regardless of fears of fraud, coercion, and abduction of children for adoption.

Siegal rightly identifies that one should follow the money! [2] I am left wondering how an executive director of an adoption agency can make in the range of $250,000 annually with six figure bonuses for her husband (with little documentation for ‘why’ such a payment is legitimate). How can the IRS allow such ridiculous money management of a ‘non-profit’ agency? Further, some suspect that this agency director’s home and vehicle are paid for by the organization. While these allegations are not substantiated, the suspicion is telling.

Then there are the hopeful families who pay outrageous sums to adoption agencies, sometimes ranging upwards to $50,000 USD. How is it really possible that these families honestly believe that such a sum is anything other than the fuel that fed the fires of graft and greed in Guatemala? This is a nation where the average worker makes $2 daily and extreme poverty is almost an understatement.

Then there is the corruption of Guatemalan officials, all captured well by Siegal while the reader is left with questions about corruption of US officials including our diplomats serving in the Central American nation—again Siegal challenges our own assumptions about honesty and integrity. If US officials were enriched is a question that will likely go unanswered, but we know that hundreds of people in the US and Guatemala became adoption millionaires during this era. The majority of them were the adoption attorneys in Guatemala.

Some of the Guatemalan-based villains include the Bran family who appear to be low-medium level actors in a large pyramid of organized crime. Abducting the children of poor women was only the first step and this family that developed a system feeding children into a larger scheme under the guise of child adoption. This was only possible in a nation in which civil society is essentially non-existent, law enforcement is impotent, and violence against women is endemic.

Siegal touches on femicide in the nation where two women die daily as a result of the crime. Siegal even briefly mentions a theory that illegal adoptions underlie some of these brutal murders of women. I wish that Siegal had taken that thread farther as I am convinced that a significant percentage of the killing of women over the past decade were connected to and motivated by human trafficking, including child abductions for adoption. As Siegal documents, Alvarado narrowly escaped her own death at the hands of the Bran family and their associates. Then she persevered through endless death threats. Mildred herself recognized the fact that her own life being spared was a miracle. How many other women were less fortunate as they fought find their abducted children? How many women desperately begged for their children to be returned only to be met with extreme violence and even death to silence them? That is a convenient scenario to truly make a child an ‘orphan’.

As we come to the happy conclusion of “Finding Fernanda” we are relieved that Alvarado and her two daughters are reunited. We also learn more about the US-based woman who had hoped to adopt Fernanda. Following her gut instinct to connect the dots and ultimately provided needed information make the reunion possible, Betsy Emanuel was one of the few who acted ultimately with integrity. Again, this act of ‘truth telling’ was not without risk and with the great criticism of the families hoping to adopt from Guatemala—many of whom saw Emanuel’s intervention as risking the future of pending adoptions.

The reader is left to wonder about the other mothers who are still fighting for their children to return to their families after being abducted for adoption. As the years go on, chances diminish but there is some hope that a recent Guatemalan court ruling in July 2011 will yield the return of one child. Unfortunately, to date, the Missouri family who adopted the child in question has resisted the court order. However, some members of the Bran family and their associates are now serving jail sentences including a well-connected Guatemalan adoption attorney. However, the Americans involved in the force, fraud, and coercion of child abduction remain above the law—including the aforementioned adoption agency director—as legal pursuit of these individuals is just too time consuming and difficult for prosecutors in Guatemala. Ultimately there are larger and more pressing issues of narco-trafficking, human trafficking for sex and servitude, and the aforementioned murder rate of women.

While there have been criminal prosecutions in the nation, the future of these abduction cases in terms mother-child reunions has many unknowns and one certainty. The unknowns are related to the political environment in Guatemala and the will of the US government to do the right thing—which has yet to be done thus far. With a newly elected president in Guatemala, one known to be directly connected to genocide orders during the civil war, the country is in transition. These are tenuous times for a nation that has suffered the longest civil war in the Americas and lack of civil society today. However, one constant is Norma Cruz the human rights defender who stood by Mildred and pushed her case forward at every corner. Known by many as simply “Norma,” she has become a national hero. I am fortunate to call her a friend and colleague. As Norma has taken these cases to the US public in her requests for justice, I have accompanied her including one American University Law School presentation in which top State Department officials were in attendance. I can say with all certainty that she will fight for these women and the return of their children until her final breath. For these cases of child abduction for adoption have come to symbolize what is wrong in Guatemala, a country seized by greed, corruption, and the desperation of poverty so deep that the selling of its citizenry into human trafficking schemes is far too common. And, as a US citizen, I am embarrassed to say that the exploitation is all too often for the sake of the U.S. dollar!

As a social worker, I would have never thought that such a seedy story could emerge from the very important social intervention of child adoption. When I began my own research on the underlying problems of adoption fraud in Guatemala, dating back to the year 2000, consistent and solid evidence of abduction was not yet clear. However, over time if became obvious that some unknown number of adoptions were touched by many different forms of force, fraud, and coercion. And, Siegal has captured it in one woman’s story.

Finally, because I personally know a number of the individuals identified, quoted, and sourced in this book, I can say that Siegal has captured much the same oral history that I have been told. [3] I would take only one minor dispute with Siegal. I applaud Siegal for writing the book and I am amazed by the details that she documented. To travel in a country with extreme violence against women and investigate organized crime is not for the faint of heart. I thank Siegal for her courage to give voice to women like Mildred Alvarado for they are often the voiceless and misunderstood, but when they seek justice they are often marginalized. Now, we are moving forward in setting the record straight.

Footnotes:

[1] Not all child adoptions from Guatemala were illegitimate or corrupt. However,there were enough problems that human rights defenders and some scholarshave asserted that birth mother payments were relatively frequent andabductions also occurred. Learn more and view reports here.

[2] The idea of ‘follow the money’ has been asserted in various ways by many scholars and advocates who observe private child adoptions. Adam Pertman (2011) captures the issues well in his book Adoption Nation and Mirah Riben’s book The Stork Market: America’s Multi-Billion Dollar Unregulated Adoption Industry.

[3] The idea of ‘follow the money’ has been asserted in various ways by many scholars and advocates who observe private child adoptions. Adam Pertman (2011) captures the issues well in his book Adoption Nation and Mirah Riben’s book The Stork Market: America’s Multi-Billion Dollar Unregulated Adoption Industry.

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Looking Forward, Looking Back: Two Perspectives on Leadership, Culture, and the Sexual Health Movement

Debra Hauser — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:43:51 +0000

My first reflection as President of Advocates for Youth is what a kick it was to work hand-in-hand with James Wagoner. Sure, he had his idiosyncratic side (using terms like “troglodyte” to describe a recalcitrant Democratic Committee Chairman, or wearing his omni-present black T-shirt inside-out on occasion) but he was also visionary, authentic, transparent, and a really great friend. I’m going to miss him a great deal. But I’m also looking forward to a continuing partnership with James in his new role as a part-time advisor to the organization- particularly now that I might get a chance once in a while to tell him what to do!

But, seriously, I am both excited and newly energized to be taking over as Executive Director of Advocates for Youth. I love our cause and the young people we serve. I value Advocates’ staff for their passion and commitment to our issues. I admire and respect my colleagues in the field for their incredible expertise and steadfast work in challenging times. I am excited to continue collaborating on efforts to champion the sexual and reproductive health and rights of young people.

That said, I thought I would provide colleagues and friends of Advocates a sense of where I see the organization headed over the coming years – and perhaps a snapshot of my own priorities within that journey.

In the years ahead, Advocates will continue to be a dynamic leader in promoting the rights of youth to information, education, and services. I am deeply committed to our current, innovative work expanding adolescent access to contraception domestically and internationally; fighting homophobia in schools and communities across the United States; and using our policy work on the Hill and with the administration to advance the goals of our state and local partners.

Advocates will continue to call out politicians and others that subvert the health and rights of young people for their own political expediency. The recent rejection by the Obama administration of the FDA’s recommendation to make Plan B One-Step available without prescription for all women, including young women, illustrates the long road ahead. The FY 2012 federal budget stands in further witness with the restoration of $5 million for failed community-based abstinence-only programs (CBAE) and a 25 percent cut to the only dedicated federal funding stream for school-based HIV prevention education.

In addition, I think there is an opportunity for us to break new ground by expanding the rights framework to include issues of sexual health equity. Effective strategies to improve adolescent sexual health must address its interconnection to economic and social justice. These issues are critical to communities of color, impoverished communities and GLBTQ youth – in short, those most affected by the social and structural disparities that drive high rates of unplanned teen pregnancy, HIV, and other STIs.

With that overview, I see four concrete opportunities in the near- to mid-term that we can leverage to further the sexual health of young people.

Putting Sex Education in a Rights Framework

For the past 15 years, Advocates for Youth, along with many of our colleagues in the field, has fought hard to expose the flaws and dangers of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. In so doing, we created the powerful message frame “science vs. ideology,” promoting an evidence-based approach to sex education. And by all accounts we have been incredibly successful, helping to eliminate two-thirds of the federal funding that supported abstinence-only programming in the U.S. In its stead, two evidence-based sex education programs have been established – the President’s Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative at $110 million and PREP – the first ever evidence-based federal funding stream for comprehensive sex education in America at $75 million.

But the pendulum has swung too far. Much of this funding supports implementation of only those programs that have been rigorously evaluated. And these programs must be implemented with complete fidelity. As a result, we now confront program and policy trends that focus on the narrow implementation of a short list of disease prevention programs that are difficult to scale and harder to sustain. Further, while many of these programs do effectively emphasize abstinence and protection, they often fail to adequately address healthy relationships, communication, body image, and other important components of quality sexual health education. In the long run, these disease prevention programs cannot serve as a wholesale substitute for comprehensive sex education.

In the coming years, we will challenge this paradigm and advocate for a recalibration of the current balance towards a vision of sex education that is evidence-informed and rights-based. One that recognizes the rights of all young people to healthy sexuality, provides them with complete and accurate information and demonstrates respect for their personal agency – their ability to regulate their sexual behavior in a positive and healthy way. Supporting a rights-based framework for comprehensive sex education demonstrates awareness that information and education are the cornerstones that help young people take personal responsibility for important life decisions.

Dismantling Stigma with a New Cultural Narrative on Abortion

After suffering years of anti-abortion rhetoric, we are again facing renewed zeal by abortion opponents in Congress and state legislatures to chip away, and ultimately undo, abortion access in this county. Youth access to abortion has been an easy target and remains a huge vulnerability for the field. Yet we know that a majority of Millennials support safe, legal abortion – and even more support abortion access in their local communities. This is one of the most pro-sexual health generations in history. Given their progressive profile on equal marriage, contraception, and sex education, there is a great deal of opportunity to nurture deeper Millennial support on the abortion issue. The polling also indicates that one of the lead indicators for being a pro-choice Millennial is knowing someone who has had an abortion. All of this tells me that we need a new cultural narrative on abortion to underpin the field’s legal and policy work. In my view, Advocates is uniquely qualified to leverage social media and grassroots organizing to take on this effort. Recently, in collaboration with Choice USA and Spiritual Youth for Reproductive Freedom, Advocates launched the 1 in 3 Campaign designed to use personal story-telling to de-stigmatize abortion among young people. In the years ahead, we will continue to roll out and ramp up this work through social media and on campuses and communities across the country. I believe it is an essential first step in mobilizing youth support at the cultural level and a pre-condition of garnering support at the political level.

Promoting GLBT Health and Rights in the Global South

Recently, Advocates has received a growing number of requests for assistance from LGBTQ youth living in the Global South. Many of these young people live in countries where homophobia is pervasive and homosexuality a crime. Often they contact us in the throes of crisis—sometimes they are suicidal, often they have been the victims of violence, always they are in need of information, affirmation and support. In the years ahead, we will proactively leverage our domestic LGBTQ initiatives to directly support these young people and to build the capacity of organizations in the Global South to meet their needs. This work is incredibly important and life saving.

Mobilizing Youth of Color in Support of Sexual and Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice

Advocates is deeply committed to creating authentic partnerships with youth. We recognize this as an organizational value and as a strategy for changing the world. Supporting this work means building youth’s skills, nurturing their talents, and empowering them to be leaders on their campuses, in their communities, on the Hill, and at international meetings. Our programs empower youth to take leadership roles on decision-making bodies and mobilize their peers through the use of social media and grassroots organizing. In the years ahead, Advocates will continue to embrace this work and to expand our reach even further into communities of color. By deepening our work in this area – by empowering youth of color to be leaders at Advocates – we can develop partnerships that help us to meaningfully promote sexual health equity among communities with disparate rates. Further, by encouraging these youth activists to be leaders within our organization and within the field, we can begin to change the field itself. These young people, empowered as leaders, trained in Advocates’ vision of Rights.Respect.Responsibility. and knowledgeable about their own communities, can help to revitalize the movement and to make it more relevant in a world that is increasingly diverse and that requires a more integrated, holistic, and rights-based approach to sexual health.

So these are some of the initiatives that excite me. I am honored to be surrounded in this field by so many incredible colleagues and such a phenomenal staff. I find myself a month into this new role and I am more inspired than ever by Advocates’ commitment to young people and to our vision of a sexually healthy culture. I am excited by the promise and by the challenge of this vision and I am looking forward to collaborating with as many of you as possible to make this vision a reality.

Looking Back, by James Wagoner

December 31, 2011 marked my last day as Advocates for Youth’s Executive Director, a position I had held since 1997. As I look back on my time in this role, my first reflection is that time does indeed fly when you are having fun! Without doubt, the last fourteen years have been the best of my professional life, due to the incredible talent, commitment, and energy of my colleagues at Advocates and the field at large.

While I’m excited about continuing as a senior adviser to Advocates and engaging some new opportunities as a consultant, I already miss my co-strategist, thinker, and friend, Deb Hauser. Deb taught me the value of partnership in leadership; how adjusting the “fit” can dramatically improve a staff colleague’s performance; how effective decision making is an iterative process propelled by frank talk and honest differences of opinion; and how putting vision first not only builds a strong institutional brand but also helps regulate ego and other factors that undermine organizational culture. Simply put, she is the best - and Advocates for Youth, as well as our field in general, will benefit enormously from her leadership and collaboration.

I often referred to my time at Advocates as a “fountain of youth,” because it immersed me in idealism, principle, and passion – powerful antidotes to the calculation, cynicism, and dysfunction that too often defines Washington D.C.

The best gifts I will take from my years at Advocates are the lessons I have learned about leadership, non-profits, and social change. While I will certainly continue to reflect and learn from these experiences in the months and years ahead, for what it’s worth here are some highlights:

“Culture” eats “Strategy” for breakfast.

I forget which management guru made this pronouncement, but I have now adapted it as my mantra. If vision, passion, talent, and planning are the fuel of organizational success, then culture is the engine that determines how efficiently that fuel is translated into outcomes. A good organizational culture is grounded in clear core values and a leadership team willing to live – not just espouse – those values. The better the organizational culture, the better the opportunity to recruit, retain, and develop top talent and the higher the percentage of intellectual capital generated by that talent that will be translated into innovation and high impact outcomes. Ego, lack of transparency, poor communication, and double standards all undermine success by burning off the fuel that propels it. People do their best and most amazing work when they have the opportunity to connect their personal passion, drive, and vision to that of a larger cause and the non-profit that exists to advance it. Organizations with dysfunctional cultures rarely sustain effective strategies because they cannot sustain the flow of ideas and talent necessary to innovate and implement those strategies over time.

For much of my career, I thought that leadership was three smart people in a room telling the rest of the organization what to do. It turns out, I had it backwards. Advocates transformed my concept of leadership from one based on personality to one based on culture.

Washington-based policy is a means, not an end.

Social change doesn’t begin in Washington, it begins at the grassroots – and Washington, forever the lagging indicator, catches up later. It doesn’t mean federal policy isn’t important. It is, because policy allocates resources and sets parameters for programs. But when Washington policy becomes the driving force for movement strategy and tactics, bad things happen. The relationship between organizations that do federal policy and organizations that recruit and mobilize grassroots support gets distorted, and we lose power, which, in a democracy, is ultimately based on the number of people passionately engaged with your cause.

I worked in the Senate for ten years. I thank my stars each and every day that I gained a different perspective by working for a non-profit authentically connected to its grassroots stakeholders.

Invest in Millennials. They’re the generation we’ve been waiting for!

This is the most educated, diverse, open generation in U.S. history – all of which accounts for their also being the most pro-sexual health generation in history. Ultimately, we have to shift not just policy, but social norms to make America a sexually healthy nation. The best pathway to achieving both these goals is investing in young people who are not only current leaders and activists but future parents and opinion leaders.

The corollary to investing in youth is investing in technology and new media. We’re whistling past the institutional graveyard if we don’t.

Advocates taught me that technology is culture for young people, and that asocial networks have the capacity to bring social activism to scale.

You diversify to represent your constituency…and to remain relevant.

I used to view diversity as a positive cultural statement. I now view it as the best way to reach the marketplace. The most successful for-profit enterprises find ways to hear, reflect, and engage their consumers. Adapting that principle to the non-profit world, I learned that we need to diversify our staff, boards, and networks to remain relevant in a rapidly changing, multi-cultural country. Advocates taught me the value of having an organization that reflects its constituency, as well as the link between good culture and good recruitment.

Collaboration is not just the smart thing to do…it’s the right thing to do.

Darwin said that those who have learned to innovate and collaborate most efficiently have prevailed. I buy into that because I’ve seen the results that authentic collaboration has brought to the field of sex education. But I also feel that collaboration is an ethical necessity. All of the expertise gained by our organizations was financed by a foundation, individual, or government that invested in a pro-social outcome. That expertise is a trust, not a proprietary holding. Therefore, we all have an obligation in some sense to share what we know with each other. It is the best and the “most efficient” way to reach the social good.

Well, these are a few of the insights I’ve gleaned working for Advocates over the last 14 years. I am so very grateful that I had this opportunity, and I look forward to collaborating in new and exciting ways with my valued colleagues in the field!

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Second Author:

James Wagoner