Mitt Romney moves to the right on reproductive rights. New research indicates we may be over-testing for prostate cancer. And is Hollywood making the problem of eating disorders worse?

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Women, War, and Peace

Romney supports a personhood amendment

Rachel Maddow on Romney and the pill

Should men get frequent prostate exams?

On this episode of Reality Cast, an examination of how Hollywood can have an impact on the surge in eating disorders. Mitt Romney is moving to the right on reproductive rights, and new research indicates that we may be over-testing for prostate cancer.

PBS is doing an in-depth series about war and women, titled “Women, War, and Peace”, which I think says it all. Here’s a snippet from the trailer:

• war *

Friends of the podcast Feministing are partnering with Abigail Disney to bring this five-part series to PBS.

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Mitt Romney is feeling the heat in the Republican primaries, and so he’s moving towards a more pro-theocracy point of view, hoping he can pick up enough fundamentalist votes to win the primary. Which means, you guessed it, a lot of him on TV talking with other white dudes about how awful and evil it is that women have the right to say no to their almighty seed after it’s been launched in the vicinity of the Fallopian tubes. Romney is running so hard to the right on women’s rights that he’s passed where John McCain was last election, which may I remind you included denying outright that some abortions are performed for reasons of medical necessity. Romney went on Mike Huckabee’s show and let Huckabee, who is positively obsessed with controlling every uterus in America, push him into saying really outrageous things. The context for this discussion is a universal health care bill that Romney passed while governor of Massachusetts.

• Romney 1 *

What’s interesting here is he completely dispenses with pretending that courts are supposed to be impartial interpreters of the law, and instead makes it clear that if he had a choice, he would have appointed ideologues who would have put hatred for women and gay people ahead of the law. By the way, the other decision he’s referring to is the court forcing the state to legalize gay marriage. By referencing that, it becomes clear what’s going on; this has nothing to do with “life”, no matter how much Huckabee drops the misleading term “pro-life”. It has everything to do with sex and patriarchy, and using the law to punish anyone whose sexual choices fall even a little bit out of the strict rules of Christian fundamentalism.

What’s also interesting here is that these men readily agree that while all women should be forced to bear children against their will, that poorer women should be double-forced to do it. I suspect they think sex is especially naughty if you’re poor, so you should be facing extra punishment for having it.

But this disdain for the courts and for the humanity of women living in poverty was, believe it or not, not even the most shocking part of the interview. This was:

• Romney 2 *

Oh yeah, that’s the personhood amendment, a law that is so bad for women’s rights that even some anti-choice organizations don’t support it because they fear doing so will expose their anti-contraception agenda to a larger audience. That’s right; anti-contraception. Proponents of personhood bills erroneously claim that the pill works by killing fertilized eggs before they implant. In reality, the pill works primarily by preventing ovulation. But personhood amendment pushers know that bad science can get written into law all the time, and all they need to do is convince a few right wing judges to buy their unscientific arguments and bam! Birth control pill banned.

Rachel Maddow discussed the fact that Romney was on the record basically supporting a law intended to ban the birth control pill, along with in-vitro fertilization and to generally restrict the rights of women on the grounds that they may have a fertilized egg in them.

• Romney 3 *

The problem with anti-sex sentiment is it’s basically mindless. People who are opposed to sexual rights tend to belly up every time the ante is raised, all without thinking about how they’re going to cause problems for themselves and everyone else they know. For instance, I had a reader recently tell me about going onto anti-choice blogs and confronting people who want birth control banned. What she found was that most of them use birth control, and they’ve created elaborate rationalizations for why they “deserve” an exception. Well, if they have their way and birth control is banned, however, the law isn’t going to recognize their elaborate rationalizations and give them a special free pass to use the pill; banned is banned. But the problem is this refusal to think things through is endemic to the conservative movement, and politicians like Romney basically have to pander to just overt stupidity.

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Insert interview

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One of the most interesting medical trends as of late is the push towards less testing and certainly less frequent testing. For instance, research has frequently shown that we don’t really need to be doing an annual Pap test on all women, but that healthy women who have clear tests should be able to go three years in between tests. There’s also been research calling into question if mammograms are really that effective, and Newsweek had a great cover story about the overly high rates of testing and interventions that may do more harm than good.  And now, men’s reproductive health care is being looked at. 

• prostate 1 *

NPR went on to interview one of the doctors who worked on the committee making this determination. This committee, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, sets standards that are then used by providers, government agencies, and insurance companies to determine what’s recommended and what will be covered. Which means this is a big deal. A lot of people believe more testing is better, but he makes a compelling argument for why that may not be the case.

• prostate 2 *

A significant number of men die from prostate surgery every year according to this report. Many suffer complications. Even if you go through the surgery with no direct complications, prostate surgery can often have major quality of life issues that go with it. Many men who get it are rendered impotent, and often to a degree that drugs like Viagra can’t help them. There are also bowel and continence problems that you can develop from the surgery. Additionally, the disease is far more common amongst elderly men, and when you’re talking about elderly people, frequent interventions can often shorten their lives. Not only that, but they have a less pleasant go of it in their later days because they’re constantly under the scalpel.  

Unfortunately, this isn’t a topic where people can simply look at the evidence and make  a determination of risks vs. rewards. Especially in light of the health care reform debate, costs of health care are on everyone’s minds and there’s concerns that this push to test less is driven by people with some kind of financial agenda. But in reality, a lot of over-testing is due to the profit motive in medicine, since both the tests and the excessive response to slow-growing tumors generate money for a lot of people. The doctor went on to explain why the knee-jerk assumption that more tests are better is just wrong.

• prostate 3 *

I think Americans struggle to understand that sometimes you have a win/win situation. We assume that spending less on health care inventions means being less healthy overall. And that’s not necessarily the case. Often, by spending less on unnecessary interventions, we prevent unnecessary death and suffering, which means cost savings and health savings. Additionally, the more that resources are freed up from unnecessary testing and interventions, the more resources we have to expand necessary health care to more people. I realize that this gets spun as “socialism” in right wing hands, but it’s really not. It’s a situation where everyone gets a cookie: older men get less invasive treatments and less side effects, people paying into the system can pay less, and people who have less access to health care can better afford to get basic health care. Win-win-win.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, get your sense of humor calibrated edition. And I’m saying that to Rush Limbaugh, who clearly has a poor sense of humor, if you take this as evidence. Limbaugh was defending Scott Brown saying that he thanks God that Elizabeth Warren never took her clothes off, as he did to pose in Cosmo.

• Limbaugh *

Really, a tired joke suggesting that pretty much any woman that you disagree with is a hideous hag is “good comedy”? What’s funny about this is that Warren is a conventionally attractive woman, and was especially so as a young woman. Which goes to show that calling a woman “ugly” has nothing to do with truth, no matter how much Limbaugh protests otherwise. You could be Miss Universe, and someone will cut you down with the word “ugly” if you dare to be female with an opinion they don’t like.