California & New York Allow Nurses & Health Officials To Administer Birth Control in Schools & Communities
/French Roast News
Anne is reading about birth control in big cities …
California governor Jerry Brown signed legislation this weekend that allows registered nurses to dispense hormonal contraceptives to women under a standardized procedure.
The law “also allows RNs to dispense drugs and devices upon an order by a certified nurse-midwife, a nurse practitioner, or a physician assistant while functioning within specified clinic settings,” according to a news release from Brown’s office.
The new law, signed by Governor Brown at Planned Parenthood’s Los Angeles headquarters in South Los Angeles, will take effect on Jan. 1.via LA Times
Think Progress writes that due to a shortage of physicians in California, women are often unable to schedule timely appointments to obtain the birth control prescriptions they need.
Birth Control in City Schools
New York City is expanding its pilot program that will distribute morning-after pills and other contraceptives to high school students, reports the New York Times.
“In New York City, over 7,000 young women become pregnant by age 17 — 90 percent of which are unplanned,” Alexandra Waldhorn, a health department spokeswoman, said. “We are committed to trying new approaches, like this pilot program in place since January 2011, to improve a situation that can have lifelong consequences.”
The program called Catch or Connecting Adolescents to Comprehensive Healthcare program began with 5 schools in January 2011 and is now operating in 13 schools.
New York is among 21 states and the District of Columbia that allow all minors access to contraceptive services, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group in Washington that supports rights. But because of a court decision in the early 1990s, some form of parental notification and the right to opt out is required at school.
Related: IUDs, Implants Urged for Teen Girls’ Birth Control Huffington Post
American Feminism: History of Right to Choice
The march to contraception and abortion access in America is analyzed in a new book ‘All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy’ Since the 1962. Salon publishes an excerpt.
In the late ’60s and ’70s, women’s advocates cast the female body as a site of political struggle, the place where the intimate and personal became the legal and public and where the personal became the political. In doing so, they put forward reproductive rights as a bedrock of female citizenship. Abortion and forced sterilization emerged as the key issues. Across the country in the early 1960s, state laws prohibited virtually any form of abortion, turning hundreds of thousands of ordinary women each year into criminals, and dozens of states coerced women into sterilization procedures.
