Archive for the ‘News Items’ Category
Unofficial Election Results!
November 24th, 2011 by catherineWhy? Apparently Astorino is considered a rising star and a possible challenger to Governor Cuomo in 2014. (GOP Viewing Westchester as a Big Test, 11/8/2011)
Judy Myers, CLD #7 YES!!!
Plus 2 Open Seats that We Won
that were previously held by pro-choice legislators:
Catherine Borgia, CLD #9 YES!!!
Virginia Perez, CLD #17 YES!!!
These legislators are 100% pro-choice.
They protect our women, children, and families.
They understand the importance of our clinics, childcare, and health centers.
Breaking News: The War on Women Hits Westchester!
October 18th, 2011 by catherineRight to Life County Executive
Cuts Funding for Contraception for Teens, Well-Baby Care and Sex Education
This is outrageous! Less than three months after the Department of Health and Human Services announced that contraception is so important that it is being designated preventive care, in accordance with the recommendations of the Institute of Medicine, and joining the list of key services such as mammograms, cervical cancer screenings, prenatal care, well-woman visits, and gestational diabetes screenings, Astorino puts his right-to-life, anti-birth-control, far-right mentality into action, attacking our teenagers’ health and rights.
Nothing seems more like preventive care than contraception!
Why is Astorino doing this? This is clearly not about reducing our taxes or about jobs.
Just like the tea baggers in Congress who are seizing every opportunity to attack women’s reproductive rights, Astorino has chosen this moment, when Westchester has sky rocketing unemployment and depleted tax revenues to put his personal anti-choice tea party stamp on our county.
Simply not funding contraceptives and not teaching sex ed does not make sex go away. Instead, it will most likely lead to a dramatic increase in teen pregnancies.
When these babies are then born there will be no well-baby care available because Astorino has cut that too.
Astorino is the true embodiment of the right-to-life philosophy: care about the fetus, but when it’s born, throw it and its mother under the bus.
Who is most effected by Astorino’s actions? Anyone who utilizes any one of Westchester County’s community health centers—teenagers, the unemployed, the working poor, those without health insurance.
Who won’t it affect? Astorino and his financially secure friends.
On Election Day
Astorino Wants Your Help In This Attack
Astorino has hand-picked candidates to challenge incumbents. The Astorino gang have all sworn their allegiance to him as attested to at the press conference held on October 7th. On the steps of the County office building and in their own press releases, these candidates have said they will be a [guaranteed] vote for the Astorino agenda and that they share his [governing] philosophy more than 99% of the time.
That means they too believe in outsourcing jobs including the Community Health Centers, as well as cutting funding for contraceptives for teens, well-baby care and sex ed.
Astorino and his gang are committed to creating a sick Westchester, not a healthy one!
2011 – The Number of Abortion Restrictions At An All Time High
July 19th, 2011 by catherineAccording to a new Guttmacher Report, in the last six months—from the beginning of January through the end of June—states across the country have enacted a record breaking 162 new laws or changes to current law that impact our reproductive health care and rights. Of those, 49% (80 new laws!) are targeted at restricting access to abortion. The 80 new laws are more than double the record set in 2005 of 34 enacted restrictions, and triple last year’s number of 23.
New laws in five states seek to ban abortion completely after 20 weeks, and Ohio wants to ban it as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be detected, at approximately eight weeks. (All of this appears to conflict with existing Supreme Court precedent that prohibits bans on abortion prior to viability, which occurs several weeks later—but with today’s Supreme Court, who knows.) These 2011 changes have all occurred in just 19 states.
New York?
The bad news is that it can and is happening here in New York.
Just last week, a Federal Court judge for the Southern District of New York, Federal Judge William Pauley, blocked New York City from enforcing its new law requiring Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs)* to disclose what services they do and do not provide. The focus of the law was/is transparency. It had been carefully studied to ensure protection of First Amendment rights of all involved.
The meaning inherent in the judge’s decision is that it is okay to trick women, and to mislead us about to the full range of medical services of which we might legally avail ourselves.
In Albany every year, we battle back against anti-choice legislation. This past May, Assemblyman Katz, newly elected to represent the 99 A.D., introduced a bill, A07841, that calls for “no state aid allocated, transferred, or given to the organization known as Planned Parenthood or any of such organization’s affiliated entities or any organization which performs abortions.” Our pro-choice elected officials were waiting!
Even under a Democratically controlled State Senate in 2009, we could not get a vote to pass the much needed Reproductive Health Act that would update New York State’s abortion law, establish a fundamental right to reproductive privacy, treat the regulation of abortion as an issue of public health and medical practice, and remove it from the penal code provisions.
The Vote
We are represented by those whom we elect. Last November, voters across the country turned out in droves to vote for anyone promising to reduce taxes and who was not an incumbent—no questions asked. No questions about Choice, about Jobs, about the Environment-nothing. Candidates only needed to disparage the then-office holders and all existing programs. They were not asked to offer a single concrete course of action.
And it worked. Disguised as concerned citizens, extremists with right-wing anti-social agendas were able to get elected to State and Federal government. The key was to avoid discussion about social issues but to promise key supporters to advance their ultra-conservative agendas.
That is exactly how we ended up with this record-breaking number of anti-abortion restrictions. Our rights are too hard to come by to allow this to happen again, not in Albany, not in Westchester County and not in Washington D.C.
