Maternal & Child Health… a Dialogue with Rep. Powers Hannley (video)

Posted on by Pamela Powers

What is the state of maternal and child health in the state of Arizona? Well, it certainly could be better.

Arizona ranks in the 40s (out of 50 states) in many areas related to the health of Moms and their babies.

Too many Moms and babies are dying preventable deaths after childbirth. Too many babies are born prematurely, with low birth weight or with birth defects. Not surprisingly, access to first trimester prenatal care has decreased, while beginning prenatal care late or not having prenatal care has increased.

Although the Arizona Department of Health Services recently received a CDC grant to study maternal mortality, there is more work to be done to improve the lives of Moms and babies.

Arizona should be doing more to prevent premature and low brithweight babies, increase access to prenatal and post-partum care for women, and increase post secondary educational opportunities (particularly for young girls).

I will talk about the State of Maternal and Child Health in Arizona and lead a discussion about challenges and solutions at the Salt of the Earth Labor College on Saturday, September 21, 2019, beginning at 2 p.m. (Facebook event here. Blog for Arizona event here.) The College is located at 1902 E. Irene Vista, Tucson.

Continue reading Maternal & Child Health… a Dialogue with Rep. Powers Hannley (video)

Maternal & Child Health: a Public Health Model for Social Justice (video)

Posted on by Pamela Powers
NICU

A few weeks ago, I gave the guest reflection at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Tucson on maternal and child health in Arizona. Below is the text of my talk or you can listen to the podcast here. I have been talking with people for months about this topic, and many of you have expressed an interest in working on solutions to improve maternal and child health. My plan is to hold stakeholder meetings on the state of Maternal and Child Health in Arizona, with the goal of crafting bills for the 2020 session. Stay tuned on the PowersForThePeople.net blog and on my Facebook page. I will be giving another talk on this topic at the Salt of the Earth Labor College on September 21, 2019.

Prevention: A Public Health Model for Social Justice (reflection text)

As the Public Health Parable in the Message for All Ages previewed, today, we are going to talk about prevention not only a public health strategy but also a social justice strategy.

Like the industrious carpenter in the video, we are going to assess the current problems, walk upstream to examine the root causes, and brainstorm long-term solutions to tackle those root causes.

Rather than focus solely on putting out fires today—as our government often does—the Public Health Parable teaches us to not only put out the current fire but also to devote significant effort to preventing those fires in the future.

My original idea for today was to discuss three unfolding public health crises: migration, housing security, and maternal and child health, but when I started to pull everything together, I realized we would be here all day if we tackled upstream solutions for those three, highly complex issues.

These three seem like disparate topics– migration, housing security, and maternal and child health—but they have commonalities.

Can you name some?  

[Pause for audience to shout out ideas.]

Poverty is a big factor in all of these, right?

But many of the “isms” are also involved: racism, sexism, classism, capitalism. And let’s not forget capitalism’s destructive cousins: war, austerity and bad policy.

How we tackle the unfolding crises of migration, housing security, and maternal and child health could have wide-ranging, positive OR negative repercussions on children, families, communities, future generations, and the climate.

Now we’re talking interconnectedness of all life, right?

Today, I want to focus on the area that has received the least amount of attention: maternal and child health. We hear a lot in the news about migration and housing, but there is a statewide and nationwide crisis in maternal and child health that is being ignored.

Continue reading Maternal & Child Health: a Public Health Model for Social Justice (video)

Run Like a Girl: Reflections on Gym Class, Title IX, & the US Women’s Soccer World Cup Victory (video)

Posted on by Pamela Powers
Soccer 1970s

The recent World Cup victory by the US women’s national soccer team collided in my brain today with my upcoming 50th high school reunion to conjure up a mixed bag of memories from gym class and women’s sports before Title IX made sex discrimination in educational programs illegal.

Throughout my school years, I was told that I was “not athletic”. When I couldn’t do things– like swim across the pool in swim class– the reason given was that I was “not athletic. You see, my Mom was telling me what she was told when she was a girl.  Mom didn’t know how to ride a bike or swim, and she offered these examples as evidence that she was “not athletic.” In reality, there were access and affordability issues, since Mom was a child of the Great Depression.

Gym Class Cemented My Loathing for Sports

Fast forward from the Great Depression to my childhood in the 1960s, Mom made sure we had bikes and learned to swim, but there were other physical education doors that were open to my brother and not to me. Discriminatory funding practices across physical education and sports offerings created an unlevel playing field for students from kindergarten through the university. Growing up, I was taught not to want activities like sports teams, weightlifting, or a variety of sports instruction in gym class because I was “not athletic.”

Continue reading Run Like a Girl: Reflections on Gym Class, Title IX, & the US Women’s Soccer World Cup Victory (video)

#StopTheBans Pro-Choice Rallies Draw 100s in #AZ (video)

Posted on by Pamela Powers

Across the nation today, men and women were protesting stringent anti-abortion bills that have passed in at least eight states recently. There was an impressive rally with close to 200 people at the Capitol today in Phoenix and even more in Tucson.

Alabama’s bill is the most recent and the most stringent. It is essentially an all out ban on abortion because it does not exclude women who have been raped or who have been the victims of incest. It also criminalizes doctors. They can be charged with a felony for conducting an abortion.

Six states including Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, Mississippi, and Ohio have passed heartbeat bills. This means that an abortion cannot be conducted after a heartbeat has been detected. This can be as early as 6 to 8 weeks. Often women don’t even know they’re pregnant by then. Utah and Arkansas ban abortions after the middle of the second trimester.

Some states, like Arizona, still have abortion bans that pre-date Roe v Wade on the books. If one of these 2019 right-wing bills gets to the Supreme Court and results in over-turning Roe, it is unclear what will happen, but Arizona’s law could go into effect.

I was in college at Ohio State, when Roe v Wade passed the Supreme Court. I remember what life was like for young women in the time before abortion was legal and when access to contraception was limited. Everybody was on the “Rhythm Method”, and everybody in the dorm knew if somebody was “late.” I knew at least a half a dozen women in the dorm who were driven to New York for abortions. I knew a guy who got three women pregnant and drove them all to New York City. (You’d think he could figure out that he was part of the problem!) When abortions became legalized in Detroit, my boyfriend and I gave his younger sister a ride to Detroit.

To get birth control pills, I had to take a 1.5 hour bus ride from campus to the Planned Parenthood Clinic in ghetto on the near East Side. The clinic was in a dingy storefront. The waiting room was filled primarily with African-American women and children who lived in the neighborhood nearby plus a handful of white college girls like me.

Continue reading #StopTheBans Pro-Choice Rallies Draw 100s in #AZ (video)