October 30, 2008 | Read Time: 5 minutes
Set on the Wisconsin River, Wausau is clean, bright, and friendly, a town of 38,000 souls whose downtown is dotted with bookshops, a florist, an organic grocery store, and a restaurant called the Way Back Cafe. A park sits where the old courthouse used to be. Located about 100 miles from the city of Green Bay, 150 miles from Madison, and nearly 200 from Milwaukee, Wausau, settled in the mid-19th century, is surrounded by farms and dairies.
It is a place enmeshed in Midwestern tradition. It is also, thanks to a local health charity, a place where birth control is available at a drive-through window.
For low-income women anywhere, gaining access to health care — especially reproductive care — can be a challenge, but for those in rural parts of the country, the obstacles can seem almost insurmountable. Rural women are more likely to lack insurance than their urban counterparts, and they face geographical isolation, higher rates of poverty, a lack of public transportation, and a shortage of medical providers, especially obstetrics services, according to the Rural Assistance Center, in Grand Forks, N.D., a clearinghouse for health data.
But Family Planning Health Services, with headquarters here in Wausau, has for 35 years found creative ways to serve women who need reproductive health care in its rural region, in spite of the circumstances posed by geographic distance, criticism from social conservatives, and traditional local mores.
And, say the organization’s staff members, there is a crying need for such services in their region. “Most of the young women who come in here have already been sexually active, and usually they are scared to death,” says Jenny Smith, a nurse practitioner for the charity who works in its clinic in Medford — population about 4,300.
Drive-Through Window
In addition to providing uninsured patients such services as Pap tests, mammograms, and prenatal care on a sliding-fee scale at its clinics, the charity, which serves more than 12,000 patients a year, goes out of its way to make it easy for Wisconsin women to gain access to contraception.
Women who need emergency birth control — two pills that prevent ovulation and fertilization — can call the charity’s toll-free hotline number to learn the location of the nearest place for help, which might be a pharmacy, a family-planning clinic, or one of Family Planning Health Services’ lockboxes, which are located at each of its seven clinics. Callers are given the combination to the nearest lockbox, which contains the pills.
Such convenient accessibility to health care, the charity says, is key to its mission.
“Any of our patients can order birth-control pills, for example, online,” says Ellen Butts, the charity’s director of nursing and clinical services. “Or they can call in their order and pick it up during normal business hours at our drive-through window” at the headquarters in Wausau.
However, the organization’s critics say it goes too far in making contraception easy to acquire.
“[The] new birth control window has made love a commodity as cheap as a cheeseburger,” Peggy Hamill, director of Pro-Life Wisconsin, told the Wausau Daily Herald in 2006. “Will girls be asking, ‘Can I get fries with that patch?’”
Lon Newman, executive director of Family Planning Health Services for the past 20 years, is credited by the charity’s supporters for its creative approach. In 2004, Mr. Newman was named a Community Health Leader by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, in Princeton, N.J., a designation that honors innovations in improving health care to needy people.
Mr. Newman’s ability to make the most of the resources provided by federal and state programs (his organization runs on an annual budget of $4.15-million) has earned plaudits from supporters.
“Lon is one of the best and broadest minds on reproductive-health policy on all levels,” says Susan Laine, a health-care communications consultant in Washington who has worked with him.
She adds, “He leverages federal and state programs and private funding to give more women access to the reproductive health-care services without them having to jump through hoops or travel hundreds of miles to get what they are entitled to. Unfortunately, this can be the exception and not the rule when it comes to family-planning services, especially in rural areas.”
Indeed, resistance to a woman’s reproductive freedom can surface in unexpected ways. Some pharmacists across the country are refusing to sell contraception, citing religious objections. (In June, Wisconsin’s Supreme Court rejected an effort by one of them, Neil T. Noesen, to get a court hearing to nullify disciplinary action taken against him by the state’s Pharmacy Examining Board. Six years ago, Mr. Noesen, who was working at a Kmart in Menomonie, Wis., refused to fill a customer’s prescription for birth-control pills.)
“In general, family planning, whether government-funded or otherwise, is a multimillion-dollar industry that profits from selling sex to teenagers,” says Matt Sande, director of legislation at Pro-Life Wisconsin and a critic of Mr. Newman’s organization. “At FPHS, free, taxpayer-funded birth control is available to underage girls without their parents’ knowledge or consent.
“We feel government-funded birth control fuels teen sexual activity, and that leads to a host of social pathologies, including skyrocketing STD’s, underage pregnancies, and increased chemical and surgical abortions,” Mr. Sande says.
Mr. Newman says opponents of his charity are numerous, but that the battles he fights with them often help bring news-media attention to the work the group does.
“The zealous opponents of women’s reproductive rights are like billboards along the freeway,” he says. “They are highly visible and usually annoying, but sometimes they even add a humorous dimension.”
Visibility of a more positive sort is key for Family Planning Health Services and other charities that provide reproductive care, he says.
“We have to make sure that we are seen as very mainstream and that we not trying to fly under the radar of those who would seek to make our services unavailable to women,” he says. “We are, and always will be, very proud of the work that we do.”
