NYC Mayor Eric Adams Channels Gloria Steinem From 1972: Vagina Vagina Vagina, Also Abortions!

New York City’s four sexual health clinics will be offering free abortion pills, starting as early as today, as part of a “New York City Women’s Health Agenda” announced Tuesday by Mayor Eric Adams. In addition, the city will revive a lapsed sex education task force and launch a campaign to educate healthcare providers on maternal health, as well as other measures.

In a speech announcing the initiative, Adams channeled Gloria Steinem’s old joke about how “if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament” — as well as her 1978 Ms. essay “If Men Could Menstruate” — and called attention to disparities in healthcare for men and women:

For too long, health and healthcare has been centered around men. If men had periods, pap smears, and menopause, they would get a paid vacation, and if men could get pregnant, we wouldn’t see Congress trying to pass laws restricting abortion. Women are the majority of the healthcare consumers. Many suffer from preventable health conditions, yet face more constraints and discrimination than men when it comes to getting care. They are diagnosed on average four years later than men across more than 700 diseases, and sometimes must wait up to 10 years or more for the right diagnosis. Think about that for a minute. A decade for the right diagnosis. Vaginal discomfort is one of the top reasons women go to the doctor, yet they are misdiagnosed more often than they are correctly diagnosed. To be clear, that is worse than a coin flip. We would have a lot more research and care option for women’s health if we weren’t so afraid of saying the word vagina.

Nice to see a male politician not being a dick about healthcare equity. At this time, however, the mayor has no plans to distribute bicycles to fish.

Adams also reminded his audience of another slogan from third-wave feminism: The personal is political. He said he’d seen the American health system “betray my mother and sisters,” noting that his younger sister sought medical help for painful menstruation time and again, “but she wasn’t taken seriously.” Doctors told her it was “all in her head,” or that she was “hysterical,” and we doubt they caught the irony of that. One doctor went so far as to suggest she needed a psychiatrist, not medical help. Adams also recounted his mother’s struggles with menopause, which again were largely ignored by her doctor and her employer: “It was like no one had even heard or had been through menopause before.”

Adams noted several other disparities in healthcare for men and women, including that until 1993 women didn’t even have to be included in medical research (and indeed were often excluded from clinical trials because their alien physiology complicated everything). And of course there’s the travesty of last summer’s Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, and the ongoing crisis of Black maternal mortality.

Adams pledged to make New York “the healthiest city for women and girls in the nation,” pointing out that the city has mandated that all municipal buildings have lactation rooms, and that it has expanded programs to provide doulas and to support new parents. He also touted the city’s commitment to making sure LGBTQ+ people know where to get healthcare, including gender-affirming treatment.

And then there’s the new abortionplexes! As Gothamist explainers, the city already provides free abortion medications at its 11 city-owned hospitals, but the hospitals “typically seek to bill Medicaid or insurance companies.” Patients seeking services at the four health clinics won’t even be asked for insurance information, because unlike the hospitals, the clinics are operated directly by the city health department. The expanded abortion services are part of a $1.2 million package that will also upgrade other health services at public clinics citywide.

All told, health officials anticipate the four clinics may provide as many as 10,000 abortion pills annually once the program is fully rolled out over 2023. (It’s a two-pill treatment, so we guess that means 5,000 patients?) The pills will be available starting this week at a clinic in the Bronx, and the other three clinics will add the service as their providers get federally required training for dispensing abortion medications.

Why yes, rightwingers in the New York Post are already warning that this program, rather than expanding healthcare to low-income women, really amounts to “abortion tourism,” because they are assholes. If women who can’t get an abortion in other states come to New York, that will be a return to how things were before Roe, and thank Crom the services are there. The Murdoch Post also notes with horror that Gov. Kathy Hochul has directed that student health clinics in the SUNY and CUNY systems make medication abortions available too, and good for her too, goddamnit.

Adams returned to the theme that we all need to be get over “taboos” around women’s bodies if we’re ever to have genuine healthcare equity, arguing that

At the heart of this conversation is our failure to just want to engage in the conversation. […] No one wants to talk about it. I think that moms tell their daughters not to talk about it. We keep it a secret. I’ll never forget when I was talking about a menopause-friendly environment in Brooklyn Borough Hall, and all the women came to me and said, please don’t mention that. Don’t talk about it. I mean, we can talk about erectile dysfunction but not clitoris stimulation. Something is wrong. Something is just wrong. And we just have to stop doing that.

He closed by saying that it was fine with him if some people squirm when they hear talk about lady-innards, because if some people need to be made uncomfortable by the words, at least the discussion may result in “comfort for the woman who has had discomfort throughout their lives.”

You know, that’s also a pretty good reply to all the Moms for Censorship who are still upset about sex ed books that include tiny cartoon genitals.

[Gothamist / NYC Mayor’s office / NYC Mayor / NYP / Photo: ‘Krystalb97,’ Creative Commons License 4.0]

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