MICHIGAN—The latest USA Today/Gallup poll of presidential swing states, released over the weekend, shows President Obama with his first lead in key battlegrounds—a shift fueled by a large rise in female supporters. With Michigan one of the twelve states included in the poll, and women’s health a hot political topic nationally and across this state, The Detroit News covered the survey with a smart package that aimed to localize the national conversation. (The Detroit Free Press, meanwhile, ran a USA Today overview and followed up with another USA Today piece focused on the comparison between the leading Republican candidates.)
Reporter Christine Tierney covered the basics of the poll’s findings for the News, citing Republican, Democratic, and independent pollsters in a piece that explains that Obama’s 18-point lead over Mitt Romney among women exceeds the usual 10-point gender gap between Democrats and Republicans, while cautiously noting that it’s a long seven months until election day. But what makes the package stand out is Marisa Schultz’s take on the current political battles in Michigan over abortion and family planning.
Schultz leads with this week’s opening of the first Planned Parenthood clinic in Oakland County, outside Detroit, which she puts in context of “about 30 bills” targeting reproductive health that are now before the state legislature (with two-thirds of its members opposing abortion). The piece includes plenty of interviews with lawmakers and advocates on both sides of the fight, and it explains well how a period of steady conservative gains set the table for the legislature to prioritize laws that restrict abortion and family planning. From the article:
“We do have a window of opportunity and we need to utilize it,” said state Rep. Thomas Hooker, R-Byron Township, who is pushing legislation to defund Planned Parenthood.
Schultz also weaves in some key national context, noting that “the issue of abortion and women’s health has been the source of heated rhetoric on the GOP presidential campaign trail with pledges by candidates to defund Planned Parenthood” and that “for his part, Obama released a two-minute video this week praising Planned Parenthood and decrying politicians who want to get rid of its funding.” (Tierney skimmed over this context in her piece, noting that Obama’s lead among women has, emphasis mine, “re-emerged since a discussion broke out in January about contraceptives, abortion and insurance.”)
Despite its virtues, there are ways the News’s package could have been better. One quibble: Schultz’s article indicates that for anti-abortion lawmakers, already “there have been some gains. Gov. Rick Snyder signed into law a late-term abortion ban last year.” But Schultz neglects to mention that a federal ban on the procedure has been in place for several years, making the Michigan law redundant. Its passage last fall was, at most, intended to ensure the procedure wouldn’t be permitted in Michigan in the event that the federal ban is ever changed. A more cynical interpretation is that the ban was pure pandering ahead of a key election year. The ban may have amounted to a symbolic victory—it’s true that previous versions of the measure had failed for years under a Democratic governor’s vetoes—but the fact is that the state ban doesn’t have any particular impact on Michigan citizens.
A bigger complaint is what’s missing from the piece: the voices of doctors, nurses, and patients, the people most palpably impacted by the policies debated by politicians and advocates. This is a significant, if not necessarily atypical, hole in an article on the political reverberation of reproductive health policies. With Schultz’s article pinned to the opening of a new Planned Parenthood clinic in a county that has its own Detroit News bureau, it seems like an obvious step to talk to the people who will be working there and potentially using its services—or, for that matter, the clinic’s new neighbors. But in the entire News package, there are two women quoted: Amanda Henneberg, a Romney campaign spokeswoman, and Sarah Scranton, the Planned Parenthood Advocates of Michigan executive director. The absence of the people being talked about—the unaffiliated women who, as Tierney notes, are hardly a unanimous voting bloc—feels glaring.
I have my doubts as to the trustworthiness of the NY Times piece. For example, it stated that Planned Parenthood gives out birth control pills for free and without critical funding from the government, they might have to charge up to $20 a month … but how could this be? After all, if we learned anything from Sandra Fluke’s testimony, its that contraception costs an order of magnitude more than that, $1000 a year to be precise.
#1 Posted by Mike H, CJR on Wed 4 Apr 2012 at 05:04 PM
Mike H, the gap is filled through private donations and through staff working free or below market rate. A cash price of $50 x 12 = $600/yr for pills plus $300 or so for a yearly pelvic exam and lab fees would not be far out of line in an area like DC with a high cost of living, and while I'll grudgingly allow 20% for rounding error, I won't let a factor of 2.5 pass. ;)
#2 Posted by Jonathan, CJR on Wed 4 Apr 2012 at 05:27 PM
Target sells the generic version of Ortho Tri-Cyclen for $9/month… so I guess the real question is Planned Parenthood ripping these women off?
#3 Posted by Mike H, CJR on Wed 4 Apr 2012 at 05:34 PM
Not every one can take generics, Mike. Despite having the same active ingredients, the difference in the inactive ingredients can cause significant reactions in some women.
#4 Posted by Thalia, CJR on Thu 5 Apr 2012 at 05:14 AM
Target's $9 contraceptives, just like the $4 or free antibiotics seen almost everywhere, are likely promotional loss leaders to get your business when you need to come fill the more profitable scripts (and they are profitable). The lowest average wholesale cost of a single cycle of 21-day oral contraception with 7 placebo days is $19.64, according to MediSpan in July 2010 as cited in a benefits management firm's negative evaluation (PDF) of a formulary candidate (see pp. 3-5). The lowest AWP for a triphasic formula equivalent to Tri-Cyclen is a few dollars more. On p. 2 it is suggested that someone somewhere got a $10/mo wholesale deal on some sort of contraceptive cycle at least once, and we can only speculate as to who and where.
#5 Posted by Jonathan, CJR on Thu 5 Apr 2012 at 11:46 AM