Best American Magazine Writing 2013

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  Deuell didn’t give up. The rules of the WHP had been written to exclude providers affiliated with organizations that perform abortions. This was in conflict with federal law, so in 2008, a waiver was granted that allowed Planned Parenthood to participate. In 2010 Deuell asked Attorney General Greg Abbott, who also fervently opposes abortion, to check on the constitutionality of the waiver, and when the Eighty-Second Legislature rolled around, Deuell was prepared with a rider to the budget bill that would reauthorize the WHP while explicitly preventing Planned Parenthood from ever taking part in it. But by May, he had a problem. He could see a disaster looming—the health care of 130,000 women was already at risk because of cuts to the state’s family-planning budget, and now, as a result of the political climate, he saw that he didn’t have the votes in the Senate to get his version of the WHP reauthorized.

  “I guess what took me by the most surprise was an overall opposition to family planning,” Deuell told me. The fact that such programs were statistically proven to save money by the Legislative Budget Board was not enough to change hearts and minds, even in a budget-slashing session. “My feeling is that [‘the program will save money’] is what you hear every time they want to increase the size of government,” said Representative Kelly Hancock, the policy chairman of the Republican caucus. He added that the caucus’s opposition to such programs “had nothing to do with the women’s health issue.”

  With time running out, Deuell found himself in the surreal position of joining forces with ultraliberal Garnet Coleman, who was trying to push a bill to save the Women’s Health Program in the House. (Back in 2001, it was Coleman, the son of a prominent Houston doctor, who first carried legislation to create the WHP, which Governor Perry vetoed.) This did not go over well, especially with the folks at Texas Right to Life. After a particularly nasty budget committee hearing, Elizabeth Graham compared Deuell to Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood.

  Finally, the bill was saved at the end of May by some last-minute politicking—it was attached as an eleventh-hour budget rider. But the victory for women was a hollow one: Planned Parenthood was no longer allowed to participate. It promptly filed suit, as many who had kept their frightened silence in the Legislature had hoped it would. By then, nearly 300,000 Texas women were facing the loss of birth control, wellness checkups, and cancer screenings.

  And Deuell, for his part, was still stinging from Elizabeth Graham’s attack. “For her to compare me to Margaret Sanger,” he told me, “it’s beyond the pale.”

  This past January, one year after the start of the Eighty-Second Legislature, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the sonogram bill was legal and could stand. (The opinion was written by Edith Jones, a female judge from Texas who has never made her opposition to abortion a secret.) Many women in Texas who had perhaps not been closely following the moves of the Legislature were now discovering the fruits of their representatives’ labors. Others were beginning to realize that, because of the cuts to health care, they couldn’t even get in to see a doctor for annual pelvic exams. Clinics were already closing, or cutting hours, or charging fees for services that had previously been covered.

  The session had made it clear that Republican legislators and pro-life groups were intensifying their fight against Planned Parenthood not just in Texas but across the country. If there was anyone who still didn’t get it, the news of January 31 made it impossible to miss. That was the day that the Associated Press reported that Susan G. Komen for the Cure, originator of the pink ribbon, had decided to cancel the $700,000 annual grant it had been contributing to Planned Parenthood since 2005 for breast cancer screenings. (None of Komen’s money ever went to abortion services.)

  The news erupted nationwide, but in Texas it detonated like an atomic bomb. Komen, after all, was based in Dallas and was worshipped there in almost cultlike fashion. What’s more, the organization’s founder, Nancy Brinker, was a role model for many Texas women, a radical reformer who back in the early eighties had, as one of her oldest friends put it, “brought breast cancer out of the closet.” Before she took on the cause, promising her dying sister in 1982 she’d find a cure, most people wouldn’t even say the word “breast,” much less “breast cancer,” in polite conversation. Brinker, a former PR woman originally from Peoria, Illinois, who had married well, to the late Dallas restaurateur Norman Brinker, built Komen into a $1.9 billion philanthropic powerhouse in a relentless, but very feminine, way. She was also a highly visible moderate Republican woman, and a friend of George and Laura’s who was rewarded with an ambassadorship to Hungary in 2001 and a position as White House chief of protocol in 2007.

  What happened, in brief, was this: anti-abortion groups had been harassing Komen (and the Girl Scouts of America and Walmart) for years over its support of Planned Parenthood. A very vocal if small faction was alarming affiliates with threats to disrupt the footraces that have long been Komen’s major source of funds. John Hammarley, Komen’s senior communications adviser, found himself fielding more and more phone and e-mail inquiries about the relationship between the two organizations. “It took up a sizable amount of my time,” he told me.

  A few years earlier, Brinker, who is sixty-five, began to step away from running the organization. She brought in a new president, who in turn brought in former Georgia secretary of state Karen Handel. Handel, who is strongly opposed to abortion, was hired as chief lobbyist and asked to work on the problem of the protestors. Along with Hammarley, she came up with several options that included everything from doing nothing to defunding Planned Parenthood in perpetuity. Hammarley warned Komen that doing the latter would cause severe problems, so the board elected to cancel funding for one year and then reevaluate.

  Komen notified Planned Parenthood, who issued a press release decrying the decision. Immediately, social media exploded with anti-Komen messages—1.3 million on Twitter alone—that ranged from irreverent to near homicidal. Komen seemed utterly gobsmacked by the response. A campaign called “Komen Kan Kiss My Mammogram” sprang up, designed to raise $1 million for Planned Parenthood to replace (and then some) what Komen had withdrawn. Someone hacked a Komen online ad and changed a fund-raising request to say “Help us run over poor women on our way to the bank.” What may have been worse were all the blog posts and mainstream media reports that exhumed negative stories about Komen’s business practices—how much it spent to aggressively protect its For the Cure trademark, how much of its money actually went to research, whether the organization was supporting the right kind of scientific research, whether its pink nail polish might contain carcinogens, and so on.

  There was something very retro about Komen’s response—as if they didn’t know how to fight like modern women. First, they hid, shutting down all interview requests. Then they tried to cover their tracks, issuing a press release that claimed their decision regarding Planned Parenthood was part of their new “more stringent eligibility and performance criteria” that eliminated any group that was the focus of a congressional investigation. (At the time, Planned Parenthood was the only Komen beneficiary to have such a problem; it had been the focus of a trumped-up investigation, spearheaded by anti-abortion forces, that had come to nothing.) On February 2, a glamorous if somewhat stressed-out Brinker appeared in a video posted on YouTube. Even though stories of internal discord and resignations were already leaking to the press, she reiterated that her decision to end the funding for breast cancer screenings for Planned Parenthood was not political but simply a way of maintaining their standards. “We will never bow to political pressure,” she insisted. “We will never turn our backs on the women who need us the most.”

  In this particular fight, however, another Texas woman, Cecile Richards, would get the upper hand. As the head of an organization under constant attack, Richards was adept at keeping her emotions in check. At every press conference, she was the picture of empathy and calm. “Until really recently, the Komen Foundation had been praising our breast health programs as
essential,” Richards told the New York Times. “This abrupt about-face was very surprising. I think that the Komen Foundation has been bullied by right-wing groups.” Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood was churning out fund-raising e-mails, eventually raising $3 million, far more than it usually got from Komen.

  Just four days after it all began, Komen reversed itself, and Brinker, looking even more drawn, appeared before the cameras again, this time to apologize and say that the funding to Planned Parenthood would be reinstated. Handel subsequently resigned, berating Planned Parenthood for its “betrayal” in making public Komen’s decision to remove their funding. Both organizations now say they are very happy to be working together again.

  Other battles have not turned out the same way. In February the Texas Health and Human Services commissioner—who works at the behest of the governor—signed a rule banning from the Women’s Health Program any organizations that provided abortions themselves or through affiliates. Perry declared that if the federal government didn’t like it, he would find the spare $30 million for poor women elsewhere, regardless of the state’s budget shortfall. In March Kathleen Sebelius, U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services, stood among Houston’s poor at Ben Taub General Hospital and announced that unless Texas relented, the WHP would not be renewed. Federal law required that women have the right to choose their own providers.

  The Perry administration was still determined to stop women from being treated by abortion providers, however, so the Health and Human Services Commission distributed a flyer to clients in the WHP, saying they might have to find new places to go—even though there was an injunction in place at the time allowing Planned Parenthood to continue as a provider while the organization’s case against the state made its way through the courts.*

  In May district judge Lee Yeakel blocked Texas from keeping Planned Parenthood out of any women’s health program receiving federal funds. “The record demonstrates that plaintiffs currently provide a critical component of Texas’s family planning services to low-income women,” he noted in his twenty-five-page opinion. “The court is unconvinced that Texas will be able to find substitute providers for these women in the immediate future, despite its stated intention to do so.” The state is currently appealing.

  In June I went to a Planned Parenthood clinic in the Gulfton section of southwest Houston. Like most of the organization’s ten local affiliates, the Gulfton Planned Parenthood is a modest place. It sits in a strip shopping center near a ninety-nine-cent store, a pawn shop, and an appropriately bicultural restaurant offering “Sushi Latino.” Which is to say, it’s about as far removed from the clubby halls of the Legislature or the plush headquarters of the Komen Foundation as possible.

  For more than a year, Planned Parenthood, and women’s health generally, had been the subject of withering attacks and intense controversies, but the scene inside the clinic was mundane. A television on a wall of the sun-streaked waiting room played some kind of Judge Judy variation. By eleven in the morning, the place was filled with people of all backgrounds—African, Guatemalan, Vietnamese, browns, blacks, and whites—as well as both sexes and multiple generations, not only mothers and their teenage daughters with toddlers, but mothers and their teenage sons. Almost everyone was wearing T-shirts and jeans and staring at their smart phones.

  With its encouraging posters depicting happy couples and happy families, the clinic is supposed to be a cheerful place, but the atmosphere was like any doctor’s office where bad news might have to be delivered about an HIV test, breast exam, or pregnancy test. And lately, the information that clinic director Maria Naranjo has to share with her patients includes the fact that, because of the drastic cuts to the family-planning budget, the clinic has had to raise its fees. The tab for a wellness checkup, formerly covered by state and federal funds, now costs $133—a prohibitive amount for someone having to choose between paying that or an electric bill. She explained to me that most people think the family-planning funds have just run out until the next fiscal year, something they are accustomed to. Most do not understand they are gone for the foreseeable future.

  Naranjo, who has worked for Planned Parenthood and other family planning agencies for twenty-seven years, is a bustling, efficient woman with soulful eyes and a lined face. She is the child of migrant workers and was a mother at seventeen. “This is where I can do the best service,” she told me. “I know where they are coming from, and I know how difficult it is.”

  Naranjo has established, on her own, a pay-as-you-go program to keep the clients from staying away entirely. But some do anyway. Those are the ones who keep her up at night—the young immigrant who wanted to get birth control for the first time after having her third child, and another, not yet thirty, who couldn’t afford to see a doctor about the growing cancer in her breast. “She doesn’t have anyone,” Naranjo said of the woman, who is also an immigrant. (Every patient has to present proof of legal status.) Naranjo found a private organization willing to provide treatment, but she doesn’t know for how long—or how many more she can continue to impose on their goodwill.

  And, of course, there are all the teenagers who no longer have access to free birth control: they now have to come up with $94 for an initial visit and a month’s supply of pills. “That’s where we are seeing a higher incidence of pregnancy,” Naranjo said. She tries to work her sliding scale. She offers condoms, which are cheaper than pills, and then, she said, “you cross your fingers that their partners use them. You know they are going to be sexually active, no matter what you say.”

  The cycle Naranjo predicts is this: the state government prevents poor women from getting affordable health care and birth control, so there will be more abortions, more Medicaid births, more expensive complications, and more illnesses caught too late. This doesn’t seem like a good outcome for anyone, much less fiscal conservatives or those who oppose abortion.

  “We are going backward instead of forward,” Naranjo said with a pained shrug. And then, like generations of Texas women before her, she got back to work.

  Rolling Stone

  FINALIST—PUBLIC INTEREST

  Never call it a music magazine. Since it was founded nearly half a century ago, Rolling Stone has prided itself on its long-form journalism. The magazine received its first National Magazine Award in 1971 for a prison interview with Charles Manson. In the ensuing years the magazine has earned more than sixty nominations and has won four awards for Reporting and two for Features (including one story by and one story about David Foster Wallace). But Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s “School of Hate” is only the third Rolling Stone story to be nominated in the Public Interest category. The publication of this story forced the Anoka-Hennepin, Minnesota, School board to reverse homophobic policies that had led to the suicides of as many as nine children.

  Sabrina Rubin Erdely

  School of Hate

  Every morning, Brittany Geldert stepped off the bus and bolted through the double doors of Fred Moore Middle School, her nerves already on high alert, bracing for the inevitable.

  “Dyke.”

  Pretending not to hear, Brittany would walk briskly to her

  locker, past the sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders who loitered in menacing packs.

  “Whore.”

  Like many thirteen-year-olds, Brittany knew seventh grade was a living hell. But what she didn’t know was that she was caught in the crossfire of a culture war being waged by local evangelicals inspired by their high-profile congressional representative, Michele Bachmann, who graduated from Anoka High School and, until recently, was a member of one of the most conservative churches in the area. When Christian activists who considered gays an abomination forced a measure through the school board forbidding the discussion of homosexuality in the district’s public schools, kids like Brittany were unknowingly thrust into the heart of a clash that was about to become intertwined with tragedy.

  Brittany didn’t look like most girls in blue-collar Anoka, Minnesota, a former logging
town on the Rum River, a conventional place that takes pride in its annual Halloween parade—it bills itself the “Halloween Capital of the World.” Brittany was a low-voiced, stocky girl who dressed in baggy jeans and her dad’s Marine Corps sweatshirts. By age thirteen, she’d been taunted as a “cunt” and “cock muncher” long before such words had made much sense. When she told administrators about the abuse, they were strangely unresponsive, even though bullying was a subject often discussed in school-board meetings. The district maintained a comprehensive five-page anti-bullying policy, and held diversity trainings on racial and gender sensitivity. Yet when it came to Brittany’s harassment, school officials usually told her to ignore it, always glossing over the sexually charged insults. Like the time Brittany had complained about being called a “fat dyke”: The school’s principal, looking pained, had suggested Brittany prepare herself for the next round of teasing with snappy comebacks—“I can lose the weight, but you’re stuck with your ugly face”—never acknowledging she had been called a “dyke.” As though that part was OK. As though the fact that Brittany was bisexual made her fair game.

  So maybe she was a fat dyke, Brittany thought morosely; maybe she deserved the teasing. She would have been shocked to know the truth behind the adults’ inaction: No one would come to her aid for fear of violating the districtwide policy requiring school personnel to stay “neutral” on issues of homosexuality. All Brittany knew was that she was on her own, vulnerable and ashamed, and needed to find her best friend, Samantha, fast.

  Like Brittany, eighth-grader Samantha Johnson was a husky tomboy, too, outgoing with a big smile and a silly streak to match Brittany’s own. Sam was also bullied for her look—short hair, dark clothing, lack of girly affect—but she merrily shrugged off the abuse. When Sam’s volleyball teammates’ taunting got rough—barring her from the girls’ locker room, yelling, “You’re a guy!”—she simply stopped going to practice. After school, Sam would encourage Brittany to join her in privately mocking their tormentors, and the girls would parade around Brittany’s house speaking in Valley Girl squeals, wearing bras over their shirts, collapsing in laughter. They’d become as close as sisters in the year since Sam had moved from North Dakota following her parents’ divorce, and Sam had quickly become Brittany’s beacon. Sam was even helping to start a Gay Straight Alliance club, as a safe haven for misfits like them, although the club’s progress was stalled by the school district that, among other things, was queasy about the club’s flagrant use of the word “gay.” Religious conservatives have called GSAs “sex clubs,” and sure enough, the local religious right loudly objected to them. “This is an assault on moral standards,” read one recent letter to the community paper. “Let’s stop this dangerous nonsense before it’s too late and more young boys and girls are encouraged to ‘come out’ and practice their ‘gayness’ right in their own school’s homosexual club.”