Planned Parenthood
kkrisberg | July 15, 2017In 2011, Texas legislators slashed the state’s family planning budget by 67 percent. The justification? To reduce abortions by defunding clinics associated with an abortion provider (read: Planned Parenthood). Now, it turns out Texas legislators actually accomplished the opposite: narrowing access to family planning services only led to more unplanned pregnancies and more abortions.
In a study that will soon be published in the Journal of Health Economics, researcher Analisa Packham found that in the years following the 2011 funding cuts, Texas’ teen birth rate went up by 3.4 percent, which…
kkrisberg | May 26, 2017To the surprise of literally no one, President Trump’s 2018 budget proposed stripping all federal funds, including Medicaid dollars, from Planned Parenthood. Proponents of this argue that if Planned Parenthood clinics end up shuttered, women can simply access care elsewhere. But growing research shows that’s the opposite of what actually happens.
We got even more evidence of this with a report on the capacity of federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) to fill the gaps left when a Planned Parenthood clinic is forced to close its doors. In a policy paper from the Guttmacher Institute…
kkrisberg | November 1, 2016Celeste Monforton and I are currently in Denver at the American Public Health Association's (APHA) 2016 Annual Meeting and Exposition — the year’s largest gathering of public health professionals. The meeting is packed with hundreds of scientific sessions, leading public health researchers and new findings on just about any public health topic you can imagine. Below are some highlights of the past few days, courtesy the APHA Annual Meeting Blog.
Trees don’t just make neighborhoods pretty. They can also save lives: With flowers in the spring, lush green leaves in the summer and changing colors…
kkrisberg | October 28, 2016While health policy hasn’t been at the forefront of this year’s presidential election, the next person to sit in the White House could have a transformative effect on health care access, affordability and inequity. Of course, with so many variables in play, it’s hard to predict what either candidate could realistically accomplish on the health care front. However, a new report might provide some insightful clues.
Published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, the report complied results from 14 national public opinion polls from various sources and conducted as recently as…
lborkowski | March 22, 2016A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Charles Ornstein, Ryann Grochowski Jones and Mike Tigas at ProPublica: Now There’s Proof: Docs Who Get Company Cash Tend to Prescribe More Brand-Name Meds
Anna North in the New York Times: What Planned Parenthood Really Does
Alison Young and Mark Nichols in USA TODAY: Beyond Flint: Excessive lead levels found in almost 2,000 water systems across all 50 states
David Roberts at Vox: How your taxes ended up enriching coal executives who are betraying their workers
Rick Jacobus at Shelterforce: Why We Must Build (“We can’t build our way out of the housing…
lborkowski | September 14, 2015A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Sara Rosenbaum at the Health Affairs Blog: Planned Parenthood, Community Health Centers, And Women’s Health: Getting The Facts Right
Laura Ungar at USA Today: Study: Needle exchange policy prevented HIV
Maryn McKenna at Phenomena: Germination: Tickborne Diseases: Widespread, Serious, and Taking us by Surprise
Elissa Strauss at Longreads: The Lost Summer
Oliver Sacks's opinion piece "My Periodic Table" appeared in the New York Times in July, just weeks before he died of cancer. Since then, past writing by and about him has gained attention. I enjoyed…
tsmith | April 10, 2011There has been a lot of commentary this week about the GOP-led proposal to de-fund Planned Parenthood. Commentators such as Ezra Klein note the irrationality of this stance, since Planned Parenthood itself estimates it prevents more than 620,000 unintended pregnancies each year, and 220,000 abortions. Why wouldn't the anti-abortion crowd support this increase in contraception, and subsequent prevention of abortions?
What's missing in this rationale is that many on the far right perceive most forms of contraception *as being equivalent to abortion.* So by their logic, Planned Parenthood isn't…