One woman, one voice

Alison Gaulden is the vice president of public affairs at Planned Parenthood Mar Monte, and has spent many years as an activist for women’s access to health care and contraceptives.

It seemed silly to do a women’s health guide without acknowledging the political climate.

Why, yes! It is the entire political climate, apparently.

So, why is that? What has sparked this to be such a huge part of this political cycle?

It isn’t new. I’ve worked at Planned Parenthood as a volunteer and as staff for more than 20 years and have watched, similar to the frog boiling in the pot, that this has been something that’s been occurring increasingly over the last 20 years. Ten years ago, people were telling me when I was saying, “Look, they’re going after birth control,” they said there’s no way in hell, Alison, you’re kind of extreme, so relax. I don’t want to gloat and say, “I told you so,” that doesn’t make me happy, it’s not something I want to be right about. So, to get back to answer your question about why, I think this is a fundamental religious debate and why it’s at the federal level and cannot be decided state by state is because at some point, because we are Americans, we have to find that juncture where your religious ideals cannot infringe or discriminate against any body of person, especially when it’s half the population. And that’s what we’re up against.

So how did you know 10 years ago that birth control and these topics were going to become a big issue? Especially when everyone else was saying that it wouldn’t happen?

I had been watching the actions of the organization for a long time. I don’t know if you know the story of the frog and the pot. You put a frog in the pot of hot water, and it’ll jump out. You put a frog in a pot of cold water and turn the heat on, eventually it will boil to death. It doesn’t have a sense to get out. We have essentially done the same thing with women’s health care. Once Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, everybody goes “Oh, OK, we solved that problem, let’s move on.” And it was hard to stay engaged but there has been a 40-year plan that we are starting to live in the results of, very conservative, very religious individuals who have pulled together and overtook the Republican Party. They have been very methodical about their approach, and they’ve been widespread. They have a television news channel, they have created several funding sources for their activities, they’ve been very diligent about putting their vision into place and Planned Parenthood has been the lighting rod because we have said this is coming. So, yeah, 10 years ago we could see that. It starts piecemeal. If you overturn Roe v. Wade, if you, say, let pharmacists stop giving prescriptions because their conscience doesn’t believe in prescription, then people say that’s not too unreasonable. It’s kind of hinky, but never mind that 58 percent of the reason women have a contraceptive method prescribed is because of medical reasons and not related to preventing pregnancy. There’s some overlap. Some of those women, yes, are trying to prevent pregnancy too, but for a large percentage, it’s not about sexual activity at all. It’s insidious and little bit by bit. The women’s movement has talked about the chipping away because you can’t see it, it’s a little bit here, a little chunk there, a little slice. In 1990, when Nevada had a ballot initiative, a ballot referendum actually, referenced as Question 7, the state affirmed the tenets of Roe v. Wade … by a 67 percent vote. And there are only 10 states in the country who have affirmed the tenets of Roe v. Wade. There are 35 that have chipped away at it and eviscerated it in some form or another so that if Roe v. Wade were overturned, it would go to the different states, and all hell would break loose in terms of women’s access. And then the math of however many states that leaves, five I guess, have no legislation. I’m not sure how they got away with that.

What do you tell the people who are disillusioned with the current administration? I know you’re organizing a lot of efforts to get people to vote, but I know a lot of people are not enthusiastic to reelect President Obama, although his policies generally support women’s health. But there’s a lot of other things he’s done that people are upset about, so how do you talk to people who feel this way?

Here’s my perspective. From a women’s rights perspective, I don’t care what party the candidates are. So whether they are Democrats or Greens or Libertarians or Republicans is immaterial to me. The issue is more, where do they stand on women’s rights? And every candidate at every level, even to the judiciary, you need to understand where they are because while the economy and jobs and health care and education are the top of mind issues, if women don’t get to control their own fertility and their own bodies, all of that is irrelevant. Our economics are impacted by our lack of ability to control our fertility, let alone how many children you have who need health care or how many people we have to get educated in our family. So I ask them to put aside grandiose expectations. It took us several years to get into the economic situation that we’re in. And ask that people really look at who are the candidates supporting the equality of women as the full right regardless of what their political party is. So, yes, the majority are Democrats, but 25 percent of Democrats are not pro-choice. There are significant numbers of Republican women in this state who are very upset at the status of women’s issues. They do not want to go back to the pre-1950s days or pre-Roe v. Wade where women were self-inducing. Abortion doesn’t go away. It just becomes unsafe. Maternal death increases. We know because there aren’t providers in every county–only 16 percent of counties in the country–have a provider, that women today, in 2012, are self-inducing or taking action. You see cases of young people where the boyfriend uses a baseball bat to try and beat a girl’s stomach. These are the kinds of very serious consequences to denying women access to birth control and sex education. It is a far bigger thing than to worry about tax policy or jobs policy. Those will change. What I also tell them is how we handle the economy, what we do about education, those bills can go back and forth, they can change and they can be fixed. Any bill that is passed that impacts women’s rights is rarely reversed.

Why?

It’s a really hard struggle. You’ll have state politicians who are even supportive, in the Nevada Legislature, who just don’t want to deal with this topic because it’s difficult. We know that former state senator William Raggio used to say, “Don’t bring [it] up, it was settled in 1990, leave it alone.” But not every elected official believes that and so they keep trying, and those who are opposed to women’s rights never stop.

What are some of your efforts in the community to bring awareness to these issues?

First, we think it’s important that every woman use her voice. And the best way to use her voice is to vote. I get a little frustrated when people say, “Oh, I’m disenfranchised, politicians are terrible.” There are people dying across the globe for the right we have to be able to vote and so I think folks need to suck it up and go to the polls. Elections can’t be won from money or cheating if enough of us go to the poll. You can’t fake an election that often. And while there are debates about what happened in 2004, we’ve become a lot more sophisticated about transparency. And policy, whether you like it or not, whether you pay attention to it or not, affects your daily life. It affects your ability as a student to get sex education, it affects your ability as a young woman to access contraception without your employer demanding to know why you’re getting it. I mean there are states that are trying to pass that kind of legislation. Never mind HIPAA [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996] laws, right? Let’s just bypass that! [Laughs.] So we’re doing a huge voter registration to make sure every woman is registered, then we’re getting them to pledge to vote. There are people who are eligible to vote and just don’t make it to the polls. That’s appalling that 60 percent of the population could decide how policy affects what you have a right to do and how you live your life. So we like to see that changed. We like to get people to pledge. So we’re really trying to get women to vote. Not to negate the men, because this isn’t solely a women’s rights issue, but for heterosexual couples, women generally have access to the best methods of birth controls, so if they can’t access it, it affects the whole couple and impacts the whole family.

What else do you think people should know?

I just want to talk about why it’s important. A lot of people are misinformed about what the Affordable Care Act will actually provide. It’s referred to as Obamacare, and Obama will tell you that he does care, and from a health care perspective, for women, it’s a significant advancement for women’s health. They will be able to get an annual exam without co-pay. We know that about 50 percent of women are delaying their health care because of cost. When you’re not getting that clinical breast exam, women are going undiagnosed, and then they show up at the hospital for treatment. That costs us all a lot more, because hospital care is the most expensive kind of care there is. Thirty-two percent of women are giving up basic necessities to afford health care, so they’re not eating, or they’re not paying a power bill or having a phone bill paid so they can get health care. That is way too many people in our population. There will be no copay for contraceptives. This is the kind of thing that has a greater impact. If we aren’t healthy, then we aren’t contributing to the economy, we can’t find good jobs or sustain them because we can’t take care of ourselves. We get on the mommy track because we’re having too many kids because of our fertility then we’re not able to have economic parity. This is all related and hits all four of the top of the head issues. The foundation of it is women’s rights.