NEWSBYBRITTANY SHOOT

Not that anyone needs a reminder, but family planning in this country tends to be a service that is too often only available to those with money. Nevermind that unemployed and underemployed folks may be the ones most likely to want to prevent an unwanted pregnancy. Nevermind that contraceptives can help prevent the spread of STDs, infections that carry stigma as well as an unpleasant treatment price tag. Nevermind that for every dollar spent on preventative family planning, roughly four dollars will be saved from Medicaid spending. Some people still think family planning is a privilege. They're wrong.

As I wrote on the Women's Rights blog, a new piece of legislation could help level the playing field for poor women and their families. The Prevention First Act is a packet of eight bills that includes more funding for everything from teen sex education to emergency contraception for rape survivors. The Act could not only save some serious federal funds; it could help provide much-needed family planning services to low- and middle-income women.

Let's take a look at some statistics: Unplanned pregnancies for uninsured poor women rose by 29 percent between 1994 and 2001. Twenty-nine states still don't require health insurance plans — assuming you can even afford insurance — to cover contraceptives in the same ways other prescriptions are covered. The United States has one of the highest STD rates in the industrialized world. One in three girls become pregnant before the age of 20, and 80 percent of those pregnancies are unplanned. You don't have to watch Teen Mom to know that teenage mothers are more likely to drop out of high school — not to mention that their children run a greater risk for low birth weight and developmental problems. Let me say it again: Preventative care — contraceptives that prevent the transmission of STDs and unwanted pregnancies — are a lot cheaper in the short term than the otherwise long-term consequences.

Women's health care costs a lot across the board, but what always costs more are the necessary steps that have to be taken when something has gone awry. Unplanned pregnancies, treatment for sexually transmitted diseases and infections, and emergency contraception all cost more than any of the alternatives: planned pregnancies, safer sex, and reliable contraceptives. When you look at federal funding spent on solving problems rather than offering prevention, it quickly becomes apparent that our tax dollars aren't being spent in the most efficient ways possible. More importantly, women's health care isn't supported in the ways most necessary for our well-being.

The Prevention First Act is built on a simple idea more commonly associated with women's health care in the Global South: Spend a little up front on contraceptives and sex education to prevent spending more down the line for abortion services and subsidized childcare. Domestic examples are easy to find, and here's a great one: For every dollar spent on family planning services, an estimated three dollars of pregnancy-related and newborn care Medicare expenditures is saved. This isn't just about women's health. This is a basic public health concern.

The Prevention First Act will truly accomplish bipartisan goals by increasing access to services through the national family planning program (Title X). By passing this omnibus package of eight health care-related funding bills, covering everything from emergency contraception to teen pregnancy education, our federal programs will be more fully equipped to support planned pregnancies, eliminating the need for some abortions. It would provide emergency contraception to more sexual assault survivors. It would even support state-specific sex education programs to more effectively teach young people how to have safer, better sex and make better choices about sexual health and contraception.

There's nothing political about safe, affordable health care. Ask your representatives to pass this comprehensive, much-needed bill.

Photo Credit: leoncillo sabino

Anyone who has gone to college knows that even the smallest university campus doesn't function without the efforts of underappreciated institutional employees: folks who work in the food service, clean the dorms and campus buildings, and maintain the lawns that so many undergrads use for Frisbee games or lounging around in the warmer months, pretending to study. What may shock you is that many of those vital service employees aren't paid a living wage.

Ask the University of Memphis to pay its workers a living wage!

At the University of Memphis, workers are fighting back. Some university employees arrive as early as 4 a.m. and don't leave work until mid-afternoon. Even some clerical workers and adjunct professors make poverty-level wages. Worse, health insurance premiums are slated to go up by more than 30 percent this January. Some workers have said that not getting a recent raise has been hard enough, forcing some onto food stamps and into government housing; now, they'll be forced to drop their health care plans too.

We know times are tough, but can't the University of Memphis pay workers a living wage? This would boost morale and show workers that their efforts are appreciated. Most importantly, it would help some workers avoid having to take a second job or accept government benefits. Minimum wage isn't a living wage, and employees that keep public universities functioning on a daily basis deserve more. If other public employees can make a living wage, university employees should receive the same.

My partner and I are in that early stage of our relationship when we've settled into domestic bliss and plan our next move. I grew up poor, and he was raised by frugal parents, so generally speaking, we agree on financial priorities. Just the other day, I asked with some trepidation, "You don't ever want to live a giant house do you?" I was so pleased when he looked at me, horrified, and said, "What in the world would we do with all that space? We'd have to pay for it! Then we'd have to clean it! All the time!"

Imagine my delight that we're not alone in shunning large, overpriced houses. In fact, there's a whole movement devoted to this idea: the small house movement, also called the tiny house movement. The idea is remarkably simple but particularly exciting when considered from an anti-poverty activism angle: tiny houses are sustainable, affordable and some are even portable. Job market on the downturn in your area, and relocation too expensive? Mortgage overwhelming? This solves a couple of those issues if you can scrape together a bit of cash up front.

While there are architecture firms that build small houses, I'm talking specifically about the small house movement that enables you to build your own tiny, portable house and helps people reclaim small spaces already in existence and feel good about taking up less room. Buying a house is no longer an investment, but building your own small home on wheels can be.

Dee Williams, for example, built her own 84-square foot house on wheels before she began teaching others how to do it. It cost her about $10,000 — a quarter of which went to paying for solar panels, and she pays no rent, mortgage nor property tax. In her case, she pays a negligible $8 a month for utilities: solar panels, a composting toilet and skylights keep her small space warm, well-lit and mostly self-contained.

Dilma Rousseff isn't a household name outside of Brazil, but the newly chosen first-ever female President-elect has a lot of reasons to be celebrated by the international community and women's rights advocates.

Sixty-two-year-old Rousseff is a lifelong civil servant who worked in outgoing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's administration for a number of years before launching her own Worker's Party campaign earlier this year. Impressed by her years of service and common sense values, Lula has dubbed her the "mother of the nation," signaling her commitment to continuity from his administration, under which the standard of living rose for many Brazilians. Perhaps no surprise, Rousseff's most prominent voter support came from households earning just under $800 a month.

Rousseff's personal struggles lend just as much to her credibility as a strong candidate of the people. A recent survivor of lymphatic cancer, she has also survived being imprisoned and tortured by her own government for leftist political involvement after the 1964 military coup. The daughter of a Bulgarian immigrant, she's uniquely sensitive to the plight of poor workers in Brazil; even though she grew up in an upper-middle-class neighborhood, her enduring socialist and leftist politics help her lead with an empathic voice for the people.

In a time when Americans are bombarded with stories of female candidates who want to outlaw abortion even when a woman's life is at risk and are attacked and publicly shamed for their sexual history, it's refreshing to hear that Rousseff is flipping the script on gender in Brazil.

Photo Credit: alexandre_vieira

We've written before about how domestic workers face extreme conditions in the Middle East and Asia. In Kuwait, maids are trafficked, abused, and have no legal recourse when their host families kick them out. This is truly horrific, but a case in Saudi Arabia is making these types of situations seem almost desirable.

Rizana Nafeek, a Sri Lankan woman working as a domestic helper in Saudi Arabia since 2005, was 17 years old when she was accused of killing one of her infant charges. Nafeek lost her Supreme Court appeal this week, and as a result, her death sentence will be upheld. You read that correctly: even though she was a minor when the alleged crime was committed, Nafeek will be killed.

Saudi Arabia has a record of handing down the death penalty in unfair cases, especially those involving poor migrant workers from the Global South, and Nafeek's case is no exception. She wasn't given any legal representation during interrogation or her first trial. She reports being assaulted during interrogation, which led her to offer a false confession, and that confession hasn't been thrown out as her case as progressed. And, because her passport and birth certificate show two different dates, there has been much confusion about whether she was a minor at the time of the crime or not. This could have been cleared up by allowing her birth certificate as evidence, but the courts refused to do so.

Though Saudi Arabia is bound by the Convention on the Rights of the Child to not execute someone who was a minor at the time of the crime, Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa has had to ask King Abdullah for clemency in Nafeek's case. There's no word yet whether fairness will prevail in this sad, unreasonable bastardization of justice.

Photo Credit: pradeep jeganathan

Earlier this month, we reported how poverty has reached into the suburbs more than ever before. It's going to take a while for a lot of folks to recognize the ways that poverty is spreading from urban and rural areas into the seemingly untouchable suburbs, but at least one West Chicago county has already begun taking measures to protect children affected by poverty sprawl.

The Chicago Tribune reports that a DuPage County preschool specifically designed to accommodate at-risk suburban children from six weeks to 5-years-old will be built using funding from private foundations. Only a decade ago, one child per classroom might come to kindergarten a bit behind developmentally, needing help with some basic skills like the ability to count or name letters. Today, that number has increased to nearly one in four, largely due to poverty that affects low-income families, teen parents and immigrant parents who can't help their children with basic English skills. With the rising poverty rate affecting families in all sorts of locations and living situations, this trend is likely to get worse before it gets better.

The DuPage County school may end up based on a Naperville preschool that opened its door this year to more than 40 at-risk children, whose attendance was funded by a grant. But the problem in West Chicago is unique due to the factory jobs available. More and more immigrants families settle in the area to work at processing plants like the General Mills facility. Naperville, by contrast, is thought to be a more affluent area where — at least until recently — the percentage of at-risk kids enrolled in preschool was manageable both in terms of funding and teacher availability.

One Boston College law student, set to graduate in spring 2011, is so fearful about his job prospects — in part because he's currently unemployed and an expectant father — that he publicly asked the BC interim law school dean if he could have a refund.

The student, whose name is not known, wrote an open letter that was posted on the BC law school blog, asking if it might be possible to leave school a semester short of graduation and in return, receive all of his tuition money back. He writes that his debt, the size of a mortgage, is not even protected by bankruptcy filing and that he fears it is simply not a "tangible asset."

He goes on to explain that this plan would not just benefit him. By offering a refund and thereby removing him from alumni records, he writes "this will help BC Law go up in the rankings, since you will not have to report my unemployment at graduation to US News." The young man has said he will return to his teaching career and explain the resume gap with the truth: he went to law school but was unable to finish.

The question here, one that's equally about recession-fueled job market fears and buyer's remorse, is one that few seem to actually voice. Has a degree — including a graduate degree — been nothing more than a financial burden to you?

One of the most female-friendly pieces of legislation to be introduced in the last few years isn't terribly interesting or sexy at first glance. But once you consider the impact that the Healthy Media for Youth Act could have, the innocuous bipartisan bill starts to seem pretty empowering.

If it passes through Congress, the House (H.R.4925) and Senate (S.3852) bills, collectively known as the Healthy Media for Youth Act, would do a couple of key things. It would provide federal grant money for media literacy programs and youth empowerment programs and endorse research about the role and impact of girls' and women's images in the media. Best of all, it would enact a National Task Force on Girls and Women in the Media.

As Rachel at The F-Word.org points out, other countries have been considering similar legislation for a while now. With a whopping 90% of girls saying they feel pressured by the media to be thin, don't we think it's time to enact some girl-friendly legislation of our own?

The Girl Scouts of America have been avid supporters of the bill, convinced that it will help curb the alarming trends in media and popular culture that promote thinness and false beauty standard over substantive personality and intelligence. Along with research from Girls Inc., some of GSA's research led to the act's proposal, and with 52 co-sponsors already signed on to pass the legislation, it looks like we could soon see healthier, more empowering images of girls and women in the media.

Please sign this petition started by Change.org member Sarah Robin to support the Healthy Media for Youth Act.

Photo Credit: stevendepolo

For-profit colleges have been in the news for months due to their sketchy recruitment tactics and abysmally low post-graduation job placement statistics. In June, the Washington Post reported that for-profit colleges had tuition rates that were more than six times as expensive as public universities. Worse, for-profit institutions like American University have forged partnerships with Walmart to entice low- and median-income applicants to enter their shamefully expensive programs — with no guarantee of post-graduation employment.

Tell Congress to rein in for-profit colleges today!

Back in August, I wrote about a report from the Government Accountability Office that provided evidence that for-profit colleges made deceptive claims to prospective applicants and encouraged students to take on unmanageable debt to pay inflated tuition costs. The Florida attorney general's office is already conducting a civil investigation into for-profit colleges, and it's not hard to believe other states will follow suit. Can you believe that they don't like all this negative press?

As pressure has mounted against them, for-profit colleges have been increasing their own lobbying efforts to help keep their $7 billion industry afloat. Afraid to lose valuable federal funding, which accounts for nearly one-fourth of their income, they've done everything from holding rallies to hiring expensive lawyers and lobbyists. If the new federal proposals pass, for-profit schools could end up being held accountable for graduates' debt, relative to their employment status. Cutting off federal aid to for-profit programs would also effectively put many of these schools out of business.