The results are in;
Girls born in 2009 will have shorter lives than their mothers in hundreds of U.S. counties
April 20, 2012 By William Heisel and Jill Oviatt in
Phys.org Health
This research shows very large disparities from county to county within and among states, focusing on preventable risk factors and mitigation strategies. Notably absent from the abstract is any analysis correlating these grim statistics with access (or lack thereof) to preventative services, specifically women's health clinics such as Planned Parenthood.
In 661 counties, life expectancy stopped dead or went backwards for women since 1999. By comparison, life expectancy for men stopped or reversed in 166 counties. This troubling trend is occurring in 84 percent of counties in Oklahoma, 58 percent of Tennessee counties, and 33 percent of Georgia counties.
No single factor can fully account for this demographic phenomenon, but
Planned Parenthood and other publicly funded reproductive health services are often poor womens' sole contact with the health care system outside the emergency room.
• Of the 36 million women in need of contraceptive care in 2008, 17.4 million were in need of publicly funded services and supplies because they either had an income below 250% of the federal poverty level or were younger than 20.
• The number of women in need of publicly funded services increased by more than one million (6%) between 2000 and 2008.
• Among the 17.4 million women in need of publicly funded contraceptive care, 71% (12.4 million) were poor or low-income adults, and 29% (5 million) were younger than 20. Four in 10 poor women of reproductive age have no insurance coverage whatsoever.
Guttmacher Institute
Whichever side of the Great Divide you occupy, IMO these results provide an objective demonstration, in real time and space of the consequences of the protracted project of incrementally implementing policies cloaked in morality whose true work in the world is manifest in these results.
And here are their works, lest anyone doubt them. Per Ezra Klien's WaPo WonkenBlog and the Guttmacher Institute
Note that the uptick in '97 begins the elevated trend up to 2010, coincident with the scope of the study. I don't have the statistical chops or data to prove a correlation between geographically distinct decreasing female life expectancy and implementation of restrictions on women's health care in those areas relative to others but I propose that there is one, and it would seem the authors have that correlation in their statistical gunsights. Emphasis mine.
“Life expectancy by county is just one of the many factors we’re going to be able to map and track with the tools we have developed for GBD,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, IHME Director. “We will be able to go into countries and examine at the very local level why some people are so much healthier than others.”
If there is such a correlation what would be the consequences of extending the asymptotic trend in restrictive legislation since 2010? Ultimately, the point here is not to preach to the choir, but to provide some text for bringing the unconverted into the fold. Matthew 7:16;
By their fruits ye shall know them. Do men gather a bunch of grapes from thorns, or from thistles figs?
These are mothers, sisters and daughters, cousins and aunties living the consequences of policies implemented almost exclusively by men, policies that seem to be shortening the lives of millions of women,
their women if you will, and voting men need to be helped to understand that the effects are real, measurable and fall on the bodies and lives of their own flesh and blood. This is not an abstract issue for me, male though I be, four of my own wimminfolk live in Oklahoma which is not OK, and I can gauran-damn-tee there's gonna' be a few menfolk there who will become familiar with these facts in the near future.
If you know a voting son of a mother, brother of a sister, father or grandfather of women, you might ask them "what would your Mama (wife, sister, daughter) say if you voted to shorten their lives?", or, as my father so frequently would ask me,"did your mother have any children who lived?"
There is a long slog to November coming, we're going to need every last vote, and women are the key not only in and of themselves, but by virtue of the fact that they constitute a fifth column in the homes and the minds and trousers of the most resistant voting block; anxious, mostly older and mostly white men, some of whom are not altogether retrograde but just need some 'splainin'. Remember how Lysystrata explained things gently to the men? Could the War On Women die at the hands of a War Of By For and With Women? Pandora's gift springs eternal.