Health Care
There will be many competing for the priority position in this nation's domestic policy agenda. Will women, will the poor, will minorities be at the table, or will our needs continue to be neglected and considered secondary? - Faye Wattleton
Editor's Note: Faye Wattleton was national president of Planned Parenthoodf rom 1978 until 1992. What follows is from her Martin Luther King Day speech at U-M's Rackham Auditorium.
It's fitting for us to rededicate ourselves to the ideals that Martin Luther King embodied through his courage and his resistance to bigotry. His was a living legacy for all poor Americans, and for all of us who have reaped the bounties of his good works.
Too many Americans still do not share in the reality of his dream. There is still a large unfinished agenda before we reach the mountain top of Mr. King's dream. Nowhere is this more evident than in the widening disparity between the poor and the affluent. For the poor, disproportionately African-American and other minorities, the issues of racism and discrimination are as challenging as they were to Dr. King's work.
We've come a long way since 1937, when Bessie Smith died as a result of an automobile accident because she couldn't go to a hospital that cared for Blacks. We've come a long way since the Black and White water fountains of my childhood. We've come a long way since Rosa Parks launched the most massive human rights struggle of this century, when she refused to give up her seat on the bus that day in Montgomery, Alabama.
But despite these great strides toward equality, the health of African-Americans, the health of women, the health of children, the health of the poor is still very precarious. So today let us rededicate ourselves to a society with decent health care for all - health care that respects the dignity of each individual who needs it, regardless of that person's station in life or the color of that person's skin, his or her creed, or religious belief.
It is indecent that on this day that we celebrate the great works of a great man, one third of all African-Americans and nearly half of all African-American children still live in poverty. It is indecent that the infant mortality rate for Blacks in this country is süll 1 7 per 1 ,000 live births, more than double that for White infants in this country. It is indecent, most indecent, that many of these deaths are preventable. We know the answers. We know the causes. And yet we still do not have the will to address them in a very concrete and purposeful way.
It is indecent that AIDS and homicide are the leading causes of death among African-American young men. And if they're not dead, they're in jall. Fifty percent of all women with AIDS and 55% of all children with AIDS are African-Americans.
These are cold, hard statistics. But they represent burning desperation and human tragedies for too many human beings. These are people who are denied a very basic hope for life, a very basic hope for a decent existence. Often they are denied basic health care as a consequence of not just race alone, but also as a consequence of class.
We must not forget what we have learned about the struggles of women. Women have come through a very dark era of the past 12 years. We have fought and endured unprecedented aggression against us, reversals and repression advanced by none other than the federal government. Many of the gains for our rights and our health care have been eroded or lost. Many of the gains that we should have made were never addressed because we were fighting to hold the ground that we already occupied.
African-Americans were most disproportionately affected by these battles. While the intensity of the focus was on women, those women who have the fewest resources suffered the most. Today, African-American women are twice as likely to have unintended pregnancies and to seek abortions than White women. We are twice as likely to have low birthweight babies. The rate of pregnancy, abortion, and childbirth among Black teenagers is double that of White teenagers.
There are those that have the image of Black people just going around having sex and having babies. "Why don't they just stop doing it?" Well, that's not the answer. The answer is that we still live in a society in which racism is deeply embedded.
The impact of disease in women, unless it's about our reproductive organs, continues to be given short shrift, dismissed or ignored. If it is
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about our reproductive organs, it Is most likely to be debated and discussed not in medical institutions, but in the halls of Congress and in state legislatures.
How inappropriate and perverse that women are still mostly identified with our reproductive function. Within that spectrum of attention, those things that directly affect the quality of our lives are often ignored as not being significant, not worthy of a commitment of resources.
A 1991 study noted that AIDS is expected to become one of the five leading causes of death among women ages 15 to 44. Why do we see so little concern, over a decade now after this terrible epidemic was identified? We're only now gettlng around to classifying certaln conditions among women that have been long known as being associated with those women who are lnfected with HIV. In 1988 the rate of AIDS among women of reproductive age was almost nine times as high among Black women as among White women.
I could give you a litany of evidence about why the needs of women and the poor and minorities are so often overlooked. But these are indicators of the larger problem that our society must now get around to the business of addressing. That point is illustrated by a story that comes from a folk hero of my adopted home town, New York City, the former Yankee manager Yogi Berra. One day, Yogi Berra carne home from Yankee Stadium and told his wife about an incident that occurred that day. This is back in the years when some of you weren't born yet, but streaking was the fad in the 60s. He told his wife about two people that jumped out of the stands and had gone all around the three bases and had rounded home plate. That may not have been unusual, but they were naked, so that was a little out of the usual, even for Yankee stadium.
His wife thought he hadn't given her the full story. She asked him whether they were boys or they were girls, and he said "I don't know, they had bags over their heads." I think that Yogi Berra missed the bigger picture. I urge you to understand the array of forces in the bigger picture.
This picture has been clouded by regressive politics of the Reagan and Bush years. The Clinton Administration does offer us a change, a chance. But it will only come about if we the people are true to our obligation to assure that change really does take place.
Change can only come about if you and I are vigilant, if we understand that going about our daily work is not enough. We can only bring about change if we continue to press for the advancement of a better condition for all Americans.
Women's health will have a chance of moving up on a higher level of priority , if we make it a priority. There will be many competing for the priority position in this nation's domestic policy agenda. Will women, will the poor, will minorities be at the table, or will our needs continue to be neglected and considered secondary?
Let us not forget that we have just seen a government that was willing to use the purse strings to censor speech. There are real and present dangers that continue to lurk, and we must be vigilant that they do not continue to erode Americans' fundamental rights.
Now is the time that you have to get involved - if you have not already been involved in the political process. I wish that I could say that there was something else that could be done, but unless you see the political dimension to social problems, you don't see the bigger picture.
Work for real reform in health care, not just for Blue Cross and Blue Shield to get a break on its premiums demands. Make sure that women and children are at the top of the list.