Contraception, Pregnancy and Abortion

Women who want to freely have sex but to avoid getting pregnant and then possibly having an abortion may find these two articles interesting:

1. "Got health insurance? Hello, birth control options!"
2. "Access to free birth control reduces abortion rates"

The first article says — with regard to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that was signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2010, sometimes referred to as "Obamacare" — that "if you have health insurance, your preferred birth control method should now be a covered benefit without any out-of-pocket expenses."

There are a couple of exceptions. Certain health insurance plans were "grandfathered in" by the terms of the ACA, such that they are allowed not to cover birth control as long as they didn't cover it before March 2010 and haven't made "significant changes" to the plan since March 2010. If you think your plan is an outdated one that might have been grandfathered in, you should call your insurance company to ask about its contraception coverage.

The other exception is that "there are special rules for employers or schools with religious objections to providing birth control coverage." Click here to find out more about that.

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The second article tells us that in a controlled scientific study, having access to free birth control lowered abortion rates a lot. If your health insurance pays for birth control at all — as it almost certainly does, according to the first article — it has to cover every dollar you spend on birth control, with no copays or deductibles. So, from your point of view, birth control is free.

The second article adds, "when you walk into the pharmacy to pick up a pack of pills, your receipt should say $0. Same deal when you go to a health care provider to get an IUD: $0." (An IUD is an intrauterine device that prevents pregnancy.) Also, "Plans must cover all FDA-approved birth control methods with no out-of-pocket expense. That includes implants, IUDs, the shot, the pill, the patch, the ring, diaphragms, cervical caps, and sterilization procedures."

That's of particular interest because, says the first article, IUDs and contraceptive implants are more reliable ways of preventing pregnancy than the use of birth control pills is — but if you don't have health insurance that covers them, IUDs and implants can cost you more than $800. That was then, this is now: with health insurance that covers all FDA-approved birth control methods, you can now get an IUD or a contraceptive implant at no out-of-pocket cost to you.

White Racism, Past and Present

Colbert I.
King

I for one would love to be able to say we're now living in a "post-racial" America but, alas, it just isn't so. A recent op-ed piece by Washington Post opinion writer Colbert I. King, "I used to think America would age out of racism. What was I thinking?," gives chapter and verse as to how the hope for racial equality remains unfulfilled.

King writes about:

1. The Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education, followed five months later by protest walkouts by white students at several formerly all-white high schools and junior highs in Washington, DC.
2. White students and their families devoting the time remaining before the black students would arrive at their formerly all-white schools to finding a means to flee the city — "white flight," it was called.
3. The ill treatment suffered in 1956 by a young African American woman, Autherine Lucy, who was the first African-American student to attend the University of Alabama. Ms. Lucy was later expelled "under the guise of ensuring her personal safety."
4. The 1957 brouhaha over the admission of black students to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, as Governor Orval Faubus declared that “blood will run in the streets” if black students attempted to enter the schoolhouse.

Back then, King, who was in his late teens, thought that such racism would "age out" over the course of time, as older whites ceded the spotlight to younger, more enlightened ones. But that's not what has happened. Instead (in King's words):

Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who shot and killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., in 2015, including the pastor and a state senator, was 21 at the time.

Holden Matthews, charged with burning three historically black churches in Louisiana a week before Easter, was 21.

John Earnest, accused of a shooting that killed one and injured three at a synagogue in Poway, Calif., a few weeks after launching an arson attack at a San Diego County mosque, was 19.

The man charged with the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh that left 11 dead was no septuagenarian; Robert Bowers was 46.

Then there are the two ninth-grade students at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda who posted an image of themselves in blackface on social media and used the n-word as they described the photo.

In an earlier op-ed, "Why is racism still thriving? Ask the enablers," King wrote about the 1984 Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook page that showed a photo of two young men, one in blackface and the other in Ku Klux Klan garb:

The yearbook page was that of Virginia governor Ralph Northam. Northam has publicly apologized, but he has not identified either of the two men depicted, nor has he resigned from his current post as governor.

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Gbenga Akinnagbe

In today's Sunday edition of the Washington Post, black actor Gbenga Akinnagbe talks, in an opinion piece, "Every night, racists kill me. Then I leave the theater for a world of danger", about his experiences playing the role of Tom Robinson in the current Broadway hit adaptation of Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird. In the 1960 novel, the African American Tom Robinson is accused by Mayella Ewell, a young white woman, of having raped her. The novel's protagonist is a white attorney, Atticus Finch, who undertakes to defend Robinson at his trial. The story is narrated by the younger of the widowed Atticus's two children, nicknamed Scout, who tells the tale retrospectively, as a grown woman.

The trial of Tom Robinson is one of the central features of the story. Atticus Finch is able to demonstrate that Robinson cannot have forced himself upon Mayella, owing to the fact that he as a child lost the use of his right arm in an accident with a cotton gin. It accordingly becomes clear in the courtroom that the lonely Mayella actually was the one who made sexual advances toward Tom. Though Tom is clearly innocent of committing rape, the jury convicts him anyway. Afterward, Atticus is hopeful that he can get the verdict overturned, but the distraught Tom is shot and killed while trying to escape from prison.

A 1962 film starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch tells the same story. In both the novel and the film, Tom Robinson is portrayed as an upright-but-diffident black man. Akinnagbe's portrayal in the Broadway play, on the other hand, is of a man who "has a voice and agency that the Tom of the Harper Lee book and 1962 film did not have."

Akinnagbe loves the role, he says, finding it "often cathartic." Yet he adds that "when the play is over, I am still a black man, in this racist country, still subject to its lethal systems and structures."

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One of the forces driving events in our upcoming 2020 election season is indeed the fact that racist attitudes, these "lethal systems and structures," still redound to the detriment of African Americans today. As a 71-year-old white man, I know that the situation of black people in this country is hugely better today than it was when To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960. But "hugely better" is not the same as — to use the term bandied about when the first African American, Barack Obama, was elected to the presidency in 2008 — "post-racial." Since Obama finished his second (and final) term and Donald Trump was elected to replace him, we have in fact witnessed a racist backlash. White supremacy hasn't disappeared. Indeed, it is still (to borrow Colbert King's word) "thriving."

I have been watching the skirmishing among the 20-plus Democrats who are seeking their party's nomination to run against Trump in 2020. None of them has given me reason to suspect he or she is a racist. Yet none of them seems to have emphatically called forth the enthusiastic African American support that he or she may well need to defeat Trump.

One of the reasons Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in the 2016 election was that she did not do as well with black voters as Barack Obama had done in 2008 and 2012. People of color didn't come out for her in numbers as huge as those they had given to our first black president.

Almost by default, Obama's veep, Joe Biden, leads the other Democratic candidates in polls of voters of color. (The full list of candidates can be seen at "Who’s Running for President in 2020?".) According to "Black voters helped make Joe Biden the Democratic front-runner. Will they keep him there?":

In ... recent polls, Quinnipiac said Biden had 42 percent support among nonwhite Democrats. CNN put his nonwhite support at 50 percent. Biden’s closest competitor among Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters of all races, Sanders, won 14 percent of the nonwhite vote in the CNN poll and 7 percent in Quinnipiac. Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) each earned less than 10 percent of the nonwhite vote in these polls. The Hill/HarrisX and Harvard-Harris both have Biden leading Sanders by over 30 points with African American voters.

Keep in mind that Cory Booker is African American, and one of Kamala Harris's parents, her father, is a Jamaican of African descent. (Her mother is of Tamil Indian descent.) I can't really offer an explanation for why neither of those two candidates polls in the double-digit range among nonwhite voters.

It's not that I think a white Democrat, if elected to the post-2020 Oval Office, wouldn't be able to tamp down white racism at least to where it was before Trump took control. Rather, I worry that a white candidate wouldn't necessarily attract sufficient enthusiasm among people of color to amp up their voting in the November 2020 election — unless he or she makes a serious effort to call forth their support, starting now.

Real Clear Politics 2020 Presidential Polls, No. 1

Hard to believe: we're still 18 months away from Election 2020, but the presidential campaign has already heated up.

On the Democratic side, we've got 21 candidates with their hats already in the ring, and 4 more who might run.

On the Republican side, President Donald Trump is certainly going to run for a second term. Former Massachusetts governor William Weld is openly challenging him. Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland and/or former Ohio governor/congressman John Kasich may also run against Trump. Yet I can't believe Weld or Hogan or Kasich has any real chance to unseat the sitting president as the GOP standard bearer.

The real action is on the Democratic side. So it's time to take a peek at the polls to see which of them has a solid chance of becoming the Democratic nominee. The place to start peeking is at the Real Clear Politics web site.

RCP monitors the entire gamut of political opinion polls. Its "latest polls" page is here. As of Friday, May 3, 2019 — scroll down to find it — this was the situation in head-to-head matchups between Trump and his top Democratic challengers:

Click to enlarge

This comes as a pleasant surprise to me, a Democrat and Never Trumper: all but one of the six Democrats shown in the above image beat the president, at least in the latest CNN poll, Beto O'Rourke by fully 10 points! The candidate I favor most, Joe Biden, is up by 6 points, in a tie with Bernie Sanders. Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg lead Trump by 4 and 3 points, respectively. The only Democrat shown above whom Trump actually beats (albeit by just 1 point) is Elizabeth Warren.

Joe Biden is way ahead of the other hopefuls in pre-primary polls of just Democratic voters:

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Biden leads his nearest rival, Sanders, by an "RCP average" of 23.5 points. Biden's "RCP average" polling figure is 39.0. That of Sanders is 15.5. And that of O'Rourke comes in at a puny 4.3.

True, O'Rourke's 10-point lead over Trump (see first image above) is from just a single poll, that of CNN. Other polls place him ahead of Trump, but by smaller margins:

Click to enlarge

Still, I find it surprising that one of the least-known candidates, O'Rourke, (see that second image above) beats the likes of Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, and several others, many of whom are established national figures, as O'Rourke is not.

Between the leader, Biden, and the upstart O'Rourke (see the second image above) we find:

• Sanders
• Warren
• Harris
• Buttigieg (another upstart, but at least one who currently holds local office: mayor of South Bend, Indiana)

The Female Candidates

Warren and Harris are the leading female candidates. They are basically running neck-and-neck behind Biden and Sanders, both of whom are male. Of those two women, only Harris currently leads Trump in a head-to-head matchup (see first image above). Warren, running slightly behind Trump in head-to-head popularity, is nonetheless drawing a lot of media coverage — as is Kamala Harris.

Klobuchar and Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard barely register, at this juncture, in the second image above. (It's not clear to me why New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand doesn't even show up there.)

So the female candidates all have a steep hill to climb if they expect to outpoll and out-primary Biden and Sanders, thereby to gain the Democratic nomination to run against Trump. My guess is that they cannot achieve it — unless they can convince women voters by the boatload to surge to the primaries and state caucuses to proudly vote for one of their own gender.

But look at this RCP graph — see here:

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It shows that since April 25, the day Biden announced he is running for president, the other female Democratic hopefuls have either lost support or are flatlining at very low levels — all except Elizabeth Warren, that is. Warren (the brown line on the graph) has generally been gaining support recently — albeit that she remains at fairly low levels relative to Biden and (the noticeably plummeting) Sanders.

Accordingly, Warren would seem to be the strongest of the female Democratic candidates, at least for now.

Notice, though, that in the graph above, Pete Buttigieg has risen from 2.3 on April 5 to 6.8 on May 7. (To verify those numbers, go to the source of the graph here and scroll down, if need be, to see the graph. Then move your mouse pointer over the graph from side to side. You'll see an exact date along with candidates' names and their polling numbers. For example:

Click to enlarge

So Buttigieg, until recently largely unknown but currently showing real strength, also has a solid chance to become the ultimate Biden/Sanders-slayer. We ought to keep in mind that Buttigieg is openly gay. Accordingly, he seems to have a palpable chance of becoming the groundbreaking president whose "first lady" is of his own gender!

Still and all, there's a huge amount of time before the first of the state caucuses/primaries (see here for dates of 2020 primaries and caucuses). The very first contest is the Iowa caucus on Monday, Feb. 3. When the Iowa results are in, we can expect certain candidates who have done poorly to drop out. Their supporters would need to switch to other candidates, perhaps boosting one or more of the remaining hopefuls into significantly greater prominence.

Then will come a gamut of later primaries and caucuses, after each of which there are likely to be more dropouts. It's not impossible that after a certain point, only one candidate will remain whose name is not Biden or Sanders. That candidate could be Buttigieg, or it could be a woman. If a woman — probably either Warren or Harris — she is likely to have picked up the support of voters who preferred other women, now out of the race. She would then probably need to outstrip both Biden and Sanders to gain the Democratic nomination.

In other words, there might well develop a scenario wherein a woman or a gay man, Buttigieg, becomes Trump's actual opponent in the general election of November 2020!