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November 12, 2009

Letters to the Editor: Nov. 13, 2009

Access to health care
TO THE EDITOR: On a recent Sunday, anti-choice picketers lined the streets in Plattsburgh and Saranac Lake for their annual Life Chains. These picketers, like those who gather outside the Planned Parenthood health center in Plattsburgh each day, want to restrict access to health care.

For years, we've fought anti-choice efforts, on the streets in front of our health centers, in the courts and in the halls of the legislature and Congress. But this fall, another battlefield has emerged. Anti-choice zealots are using the important work of health-care reform to try to restrict access to abortion and reproductive health-care services.

As a health-care provider, Planned Parenthood knows firsthand how critical it is to expand access to health-care coverage, including reproductive health care. Our health centers are a critical entry point into the health-care system for many of our patients. More than six in 10 patients who receive care at a women's health center like Planned Parenthood consider it their primary, and often only, source of health care.

The vast majority of care, more than 95 percent, offered by Northern Adirondack Planned Parenthood is primary and preventive. This includes birth control, routine exams, breast- and cervical-cancer screening, STI/HIV testing, blood pressure testing, smoking cessation services and health promotion counseling.

Women of childbearing age spend 68 percent more in out-of-pocket health-care costs than men, in part because of reproductive health-related needs. The number of women in need of publicly funded family-planning services (currently 17.5 million) increased by more than one million (7 percent) between 2000 and 2006. Women's health must not lose rights to reproductive health care they currently have and any health-care reform plan must include a full range of reproductive health care.

Kathie Wunderlich

Northern Adirondack Planned Parenthood

CEO

Plattsburgh

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