Join Louisville Atheists and Freethinkers

You'll get invited to our Meetups as soon as they're scheduled!

Louisville Atheists and Freethinkers January Meetup

Jan 20

Tue 8:00 PM

Location: This location is shown only to members

Estimated attendance: 22 people attended.
4.506
Who organized?
Joe Mays, John Armstrong, and Mikel

Our guest for the January 20th meetup will be Taylor Ewing, the Director of Education and Community Outreach for Planned Parenthood of Kentucky. She'll be talking about initiatives pushed through by the Bush Administration to restrict women's access to birth control, even to the point of allowing receptionists to refuse services to women without a doctor ever talking to them.

From naral.org --

The new Bush administration regulation purports to encourage enforcement of, and education about, the existing laws described above. If that were so, the regulation would not be groundbreaking, necessarily. But in fact, the regulation pushes the bounds of current law and introduces several very serious problems:

It jeopardizes women's access to birth control by leaving open the possibility that providers will be able to define contraception as abortion; allowing them to do so could thereby expand the conscience protections pertaining to abortion to apply to birth control as well.
It expands the universe of individuals and institutions that are explicitly afforded refusal rights. It offers broad rights to employees who are only tangentially involved in providing the services at issue (for example, receptionists scheduling appointments), and it may grant entire health-care corporations (hospitals, HMOs, insurance companies) the same "conscience" rights as those offered to individuals.
It allows individuals to refuse to give referrals and information about a broad range of services. Current law allows individuals the right to refuse to refer or counsel patients for abortion services, but the regulation may allow individuals to refuse to provide referrals and information about any health-care services. This could affect reproductive-health services and many other health-care services beyond.
It fails to take into consideration laws that protect patients' rights to services and information, potentially limiting patients' abilities to make informed decisions about their own health-care needs and to access legal health-care services.

The push to expand anti-choice initiatives to include restricting access to birth control is purely religiously motivated. Ms. Ewing will be talking about the initiatives, the impact on Planned Parenthood and other women's health services programs, what they hope to see happen, and what help they could use from the community. In addition she will be open to questions about her organization and the issues in which they are involved.