{"id":54122,"date":"2012-03-06T17:00:08","date_gmt":"2012-03-06T22:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=54122"},"modified":"2012-03-07T04:18:15","modified_gmt":"2012-03-07T09:18:15","slug":"regarding-sandra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/fe-911-2\/regarding-sandra\/","title":{"rendered":"Regarding Sandra"},"content":{"rendered":"

Given so much media attention this last week on Rush Limbaugh and his savage attack against Sandra Fluke<\/a>, we thought it might be helpful to take a look at who and what Rush was attacking.\u00a0Ms. Fluke is a student at Georgetown University, a private Jesuit-run institution. She was denied the opportunity to testify before a Republican congressional panel on the subject of women’s contraception and health — a panel consisting solely of men.<\/em><\/p>\n

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She instead was brought back to testify on Feb. 23 at a hearing on women\u2019s reproductive health and contraception before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, thus drawing Limbaugh’s fire. The transcript of her testimony follows. — Fe<\/em><\/p>\n

“My name is Sandra Fluke, and I\u2019m a third-year student at Georgetown Law School. I\u2019m also a past-president of Georgetown Law Students for Reproductive Justice or LSRJ. And I\u2019d like to acknowledge my fellow LSRJ members and allies and all of the student activists with us and thank them so much for being here today. We, as Georgetown LSRJ, are here today because we\u2019re so grateful that this regulation implements the non-partisan medical advice of the Institute of Medicine.<\/p>\n

I attend a Jesuit law school that does not provide contraceptive coverage in its student health plan. And just as we students have faced financial, emotional, and medical burdens as a result, employees at religiously-affiliated hospitals and institutions and universities across the country have suffered similar burdens.\u00a0We are all grateful for the new regulation that will meet the critical health care needs of so many women.<\/p>\n

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Simultaneously, the recently announced adjustment addresses any potential conflict with the religious identity of Catholic or Jesuit institutions. When I look around my campus, I see the faces of the women affected by this lack of contraceptive coverage.\u00a0And especially in the last week, I have heard more and more of their stories. On a daily basis, I hear yet from another woman from Georgetown or from another school or who works for a religiously-affiliated employer, and they tell me that they have suffered financially and emotionally and medically because of this lack of coverage.<\/p>\n

And so, I\u2019m here today to share their voices, and I want to thank you for allowing them \u2013 not me \u2013 to be heard.\u00a0Without insurance coverage, contraception, as you know, can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school. For a lot of students who, like me, are on public interest scholarships, that\u2019s practically an entire summer\u2019s salary. Forty percent of the female students at Georgetown Law reported to us that they struggle financially as a result of this policy.<\/p>\n

One told us about how embarrassed and just powerless she felt when she was standing at the pharmacy counter and learned for the first time that contraception was not covered on her insurance and she had to turn and walk away because she couldn\u2019t afford that prescription. Women like her have no choice but to go without contraception.\u00a0Just last week, a married female student told me that she had to stop using contraception because she and her husband just couldn\u2019t fit it into their budget anymore. Women employed in low-wage jobs without contraceptive coverage face the same choice.<\/p>\n

And some might respond that contraception is accessible in lots of other ways. Unfortunately, that\u2019s just not true.\u00a0Women\u2019s health clinics provide a vital medical service, but as the Guttmacher Institute has definitely documented, these clinics are unable to meet the crushing demand for these services. Clinics are closing, and women are being forced to go without the medical care they need.<\/p>\n

How can Congress consider the [Rep. Jeff] Fortenberry (R-Neb.), [Sen. Marco] Rubio (R-Fla.) and [Sen. Roy] Blunt (R-Mo.) legislation to allow even more employers and institutions to refuse contraception coverage and then respond that the non-profit clinics should step up to take care of the resulting medical crisis, particularly when so many legislators are attempting to de-fund those very same clinics? These denials of contraceptive coverage impact real people. In the worst cases, women who need these medications for other medical conditions suffer very dire consequences.<\/p>\n

A friend of mine, for example, has polycystic ovarian syndrome, and she has to take prescription birth control to stop cysts from growing on her ovaries. Her prescription is technically covered by Georgetown\u2019s insurance because it\u2019s not intended to prevent pregnancy.\u00a0Unfortunately, under many religious institutions and insurance plans, it wouldn\u2019t be. There would be no exception for other medical needs. And under Sen. Blunt\u2019s amendment, Sen. Rubio\u2019s bill or Rep. Fortenberry\u2019s bill there\u2019s no requirement that such an exception be made for these medical needs. When this exception does exist, these exceptions don\u2019t accomplish their well-intended goals because when you let university administrators or other employers rather than women and their doctors dictate whose medical needs are legitimate and whose are not, women\u2019s health takes a back seat to a bureaucracy focused on policing her body.<\/p>\n

In 65% of the cases at our school, our female students were interrogated by insurance representatives and university medical staff about why they needed prescriptions and whether they were lying about their symptoms.\u00a0For my friend and 20% of the women in her situation, she never got the insurance company to cover her prescription. Despite verifications of her illness from her doctor, her claim was denied repeatedly on the assumption that she really wanted birth control to prevent pregnancy. She\u2019s gay. So clearly polycystic ovarian syndrome was a much more urgent concern than accidental pregnancy for her. After months paying over $100 out-of-pocket, she just couldn\u2019t afford her medication anymore, and she had to stop taking it.<\/p>\n

I learned about all of this when I walked out of a test and got a message from her that in the middle of the night in her final exam period she\u2019d been in the emergency room. She\u2019d been there all night in just terrible, excruciating pain. She wrote to me, \u2018It was so painful I\u2019d woke up thinking I\u2019ve been shot.\u2019<\/p>\n

Without her taking the birth control, a massive cyst the size of a tennis ball had grown on her ovary. She had to have surgery to remove her entire ovary as a result. On the morning I was originally scheduled to give this testimony, she was sitting in a doctor\u2019s office, trying to cope with the consequences of this medical catastrophe.<\/p>\n

Since last year\u2019s surgery, she\u2019s been experiencing night sweats and weight gain and other symptoms of early menopause as a result of the removal of her ovary. She\u2019s 32 years old. As she put it, \u2018If my body indeed does enter early menopause, no fertility specialist in the world will be able to help me have my own children. I will have no choice at giving my mother her desperately desired grand babies simply because the insurance policy that I paid for, totally unsubsidized by my school,\u00a0wouldn’t\u00a0cover my prescription for birth control when I needed it.\u2019<\/p>\n

Now, in addition to potentially facing the health complications that come with having menopause at such an early age \u2013 increased risk of cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis \u2013 she may never be able to conceive a child.<\/p>\n

Some may say that my friend\u2019s tragic story is rare. It\u2019s not. I wish it were. One woman told us doctors believe she has endometriosis, but that can\u2019t be proven without surgery. So the insurance has not been willing to cover her medication \u2013 the contraception she needs to treat her endometriosis. Recently, another woman told me that she also has polycystic ovarian syndrome and she\u2019s struggling to pay for her medication and is terrified to not have access to it. Due to the barriers erected by Georgetown\u2019s policy, she hasn\u2019t been reimbursed for her medications since last August.<\/p>\n

I sincerely pray that we don\u2019t have to wait until she loses an ovary or is diagnosed with cancer before her needs and the needs of all of these women are taken seriously. Because this is the message that not requiring coverage of contraception sends: A woman\u2019s reproductive health care isn\u2019t a necessity, isn\u2019t a priority.<\/p>\n

One woman told us that she knew birth control wasn’t covered on the insurance and she assumed that that\u2019s how Georgetown\u2019s insurance handles all of women\u2019s reproductive and sexual health care. So when she was raped, she didn’t go to the doctor, even to be examined or tested for sexually transmitted infections, because she thought insurance wasn\u2019t going to cover something like that \u2013 something that was related to a woman\u2019s reproductive health.<\/p>\n

As one other student put it: \u2018This policy communicates to female students that our school doesn\u2019t understand our needs.\u2019 These are not feelings that male fellow students experience and they\u2019re not burdens that male students must shoulder. In the media lately, some conservative Catholic organizations have been asking what did we expect when we enroll in a Catholic school? We can only answer that we expected women to be treated equally, to not have our school create untenable burdens that impede our academic success. We expected that our schools would live up to the Jesuit creed of \u2018cura personalis\u2018 \u2013 to care for the whole person \u2013 by meeting all of our medical needs. We expected that when we told our universities of the problem this policy created for us as students, they would help us.<\/p>\n

We expected that when 94% of students oppose the policy the university would respect our choices regarding insurance students pay for \u2013 completely unsubsidized by the university. We did not expect that women would be told in the national media that we should have gone to school elsewhere.\u00a0And even if that meant going to a less prestigious university, we refuse to pick between a quality education and our health.<\/p>\n

And we resent that in the 21st century, anyone thinks it\u2019s acceptable to ask us to make this choice simply because we are women. Many of the women whose stories I\u2019ve shared today are Catholic women. So ours is not a war against the church. It is a struggle for the access to the health care we need.<\/p>\n

The President of the Association of Jesuit Colleges has shared that Jesuit colleges and the universities appreciate the modifications to the rule announced recently. Religious concerns are addressed and women get the health care they need. And I sincerely hope that that is something we can all agree upon.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“When you let university administrators or other employers rather than women and their doctors dictate whose medical needs are legitimate and whose are not, women\u2019s health takes a back seat to a bureaucracy focused on policing her body.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1740],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54122"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54122\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}