Family Planning

Your article "Ugly Payoff for Penny-Pinching" (Dec.3) described a perfect example of why our country has so many problems. Our leaders seem to spend more time trying to put the blame on others than they do trying to correct the problems. They almost always manage to cut funds in the wrong places at the wrong times. How could they not see the consequences of removing two-thirds of the funding for essential family-planning clinics? I believe everyone would benefit if instead of debating whether or not abortions should be allowed, we put our efforts into preventing them.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced Tuesday that it has approved the sale of the emergency contraceptive pill, Plan B One-Step, without a prescription for females ages 15 and older. The action comes roughly three weeks after a federal magistrate harshly criticized government regulators for their handling of the drug's approval process, calling their actions "politically motivated and scientifically unjustified. " FDA officials said Tuesday that their decision was based on a pending, amended application submitted by the drug's manufacturer, Teva Womens' Health Inc. It was not, they said, intended to address a recent court order that the FDA make the drug available, over-the-counter, to all customers without age restrictions.

Re "The other war in Afghanistan," Opinion, Aug. 23, and "A Taliban victory?" Opinion, Aug. 25 In our great effort to demonize Iran, we ignore its state-run family planning, which is one of most progressive and effective in the world. Because a great portion of Afghanistan is linguistically and religiously an extension of Iran, could we invite them to teach family planning to Afghanistan's women? It could be more effective than dropping bombs and be more acceptable to the local Muslim population.

The family of a 15-year-old Northern California girl who committed suicide after she was allegedly sexually assaulted last fall planned to speak to reporters Monday. It would be their first public comments since three teens were arrested last week in connection with the alleged assault. Audrie Pott 's family will join attorney Robert Allard to talk about the investigation and alleged assault, according to a spokesman for the family. They plan to ask students to come forward with any information they might have.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced Tuesday that it has approved the sale of the emergency contraceptive pill, Plan B One-Step, without a prescription for females ages 15 and older. The action comes roughly three weeks after a federal magistrate harshly criticized government regulators for their handling of the drug's approval process, calling their actions "politically motivated and scientifically unjustified. " FDA officials said Tuesday that their decision was based on a pending, amended application submitted by the drug's manufacturer, Teva Womens' Health Inc. It was not, they said, intended to address a recent court order that the FDA make the drug available, over-the-counter, to all customers without age restrictions.

It's being billed as a major smack-down: prominent Catholic laywoman versus the pope. Melinda Gates, Microsoft founder Bill Gates' wife and one half of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,  “disagrees with the Vatican on the use of contraceptives,” according to the Guardian newspaper. With the British government, the foundation this week sponsored a London Summit on Family Planning designed to provide 120 million women in the world's poorest countries with access to contraceptives by 2020.

The Obama administration's willingness to defend insurance coverage for family planning services against attacks from conservatives and religious groups is good news for women and for the health of the nation. Last year, the administration first proposed that, like other preventive medical goods and services, contraception and general family planning coverage should be available under the healthcare reform law without a co-payment or deductible. Not just churches but many of their affiliated organizations protested — with the backing of conservative Republicans — that they should not have to pay to provide insurance coverage for medical services that run counter to their beliefs.

Re "Family planning and Filipinos," Editorial, Dec. 19 The Times wrote: "The church has every right to try to persuade women to follow its dictates, but women must ultimately have the right to choose. " Although the Roman Catholic hierarchy exercises its right to penalize those who do not follow church dictates, it fails to recognize the relationship between population and poverty. Access to contraceptives would limit unintended pregnancies and enable families to feed their children and maintain a better quality of life.

For too long in the Philippine Congress, the priorities of the Roman Catholic Church took precedence over what most Filipinos wanted - and needed. Finally, after 14 years of debate and delay, lawmakers passed a bill that will provide free or subsidized birth control to poor people as well as require sex education in schools and mandate training in family planning for community health workers. Even though 80% of the nation's population is Catholic, birth control has long been available to those who want it - as long as they could pay. Contraception has been out of reach for most of the poor, though.

Re "Bending the population curve," Opinion, Dec. 2 The world doesn't want to consider abortion as a method of family planning, but women worldwide do to the tune of about 40 million a year. Half of these are illegal and unsafe, resulting in millions of injuries and deaths, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Universal access to contraception would certainly reduce population pressures, but thanks to gender inequality and religion, women often don't have safe access to abortion and contraception.

President Obama has several stated ambitions for his presidency. He wants it to be "transformative. " He wants to unite Americans of all parties. He wants to build an economy from the middle class out (whatever that means), and he wants to help what you might call the domestic refugees of America's economic transformation. Given the principled disagreements dividing left and right in America, it's hard to see how he can accomplish these goals when it comes to conventional economic policy.

At one point, the prevailing wisdom was that nations needed robust birthrates to protect their economic welfare, and that if only we could produce food more efficiently, feeding the Earth's burgeoning population wouldn't be a problem. Now, with 1 billion of the world's people chronically hungry and the population expected to increase by 50% before the end of the century, we know better. Or we ought to. A recent five-part series by Times reporter Kenneth R. Weiss detailed the multipronged dilemma facing the thinkers and global leaders whose aim is to reduce famine and sickness without devastating the world's finite resources.

It's being billed as a major smack-down: prominent Catholic laywoman versus the pope. Melinda Gates, Microsoft founder Bill Gates' wife and one half of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,  “disagrees with the Vatican on the use of contraceptives,” according to the Guardian newspaper. With the British government, the foundation this week sponsored a London Summit on Family Planning designed to provide 120 million women in the world's poorest countries with access to contraceptives by 2020.

LIJIN China - Six months pregnant, 38-year-old Ma Jihong was healthy and fit, her body toned from working in the cotton fields. So when 10 people from the local family planning office showed up one morning in October, she slipped through a gap in the concrete wall around the house and bolted like a sprinter toward the main road. Five-year-old Yanyan, the younger of Ma's two daughters, was alone in the house with her mother at the time. Her father came rushing in from the yard when he heard the screaming.

Once, only the wealthy paid other people to perform their most personal tasks: finding mates, raising (or even having) children, making meals. Now those professionals have become available to the upper-middle and middle classes. We hire people to name our children and love our parents, shop for the gifts we give and walk our dogs. We even hire people to help us figure out what it is that we want. (That's right, you can grow up to be a wantologist.) But these are complicated transactions, and we all need to pay attention, according to UC Berkeley sociology professor Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of the new book "The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times.