Kate Sheppard

Reporter

Kate Sheppard is a staff reporter in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. She was previously the political reporter for Grist and a writing fellow at The American Prospect. She can be reached by email at ksheppard (at) motherjones (dot) com.

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Her work has also been featured in the New York Times' Room for Debate blog, the Guardian's Comment Is Free, Foreign Policy, High Country News, The Center for Public Integrity, the Washington Independent, Washington Spectator, Who Runs Gov, In These Times, and Bitch. She was raised on a vegetable farm in southern New Jersey (yes, they do exist), but has adapted well to life in the nation's capital. She misses trees and having a congressional representative with voting power, but thinks DC is pretty great anyway.

Sex Ed Program Provokes Fight Over Planned Parenthood in North Dakota

—By Kate Sheppard

| Mon Jan. 28, 2013 2:53 PM PST

Last year, a pair of researchers at North Dakota State University won a federal grant to conduct and evaluate a sex education program for at-risk teenagers with Planned Parenthood. But now the school is backing out of the grant, and critics say that political pressure from anti-abortion lawmakers is to blame.

NDSU professors Brandy Randall and Molly Secor-Turner won the three-year, $1.2 million competitive grant from the US Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families. The goal of the program—which NDSU announced in a press release last September—was to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases in teens who are homeless, in foster care, or in the juvenile justice system. The school signed an agreement with Planned Parenthood in November to provide the services, which were expected to reach as many as 430 teens between the ages of 14 and 19. Planned Parenthood's office in Fargo would run the program, and the NDSU professors would evaluate its results. They had already started recruiting participants, and the program was slated to begin at the end of this month.

But in early January, anti-abortion activists in the state started complaining about the grant. "When I see something that says this is Planned Parenthood—they’re not even a part of the state of North Dakota. They don't serve anyone in North Dakota, and they shouldn't be a part of North Dakota. They're not a part of how we do business in this state," said Rep. Bette Grande on a local radio show decrying the partnership: "It is an overt abortion industry that we don't want to be a part of." On Jan. 15, NDSU President Dean Bresciani said on a conservative talk radio show that the school had decided to block the funds, citing a "legal hang-up" that prevents the school from working with Planned Parenthood.

As the local newspaper Forum of Fargo-Moorhead reports, NDSU now says that it is "freezing" the grant while it figures out if it violates a 1979 state law that bars state dollars, or federal dollars coming through the state, from being used "as family planning funds by any person or public or private agency which performs, refers, or encourages abortion." North Dakota Catholic Conference praised NDSU for making "the right decision," and it got glowing reviews in the anti-abortion outlet Life Site News.

The school's claims about legal concerns are specious, at best, say its critics. The 1979 law that the school cites deals with the actual provision of family planning care, like prescribing birth control or other medical services, which this grant is explicitly not designed to provide. It's an educational program. Moreover, Planned Parenthood doesn't even provide abortions or any medical services at all in North Dakota; its only office is in Fargo, and that office has advocacy, outreach, and education programs. Nor does the program have anything to do with what's being taught in public schools, as some anti-choice lawmakers have implied. It's outside of school, it's voluntary, and participating teenagers have to have the consent of their parent or guardian.

The decision to block the grant has also angered professors at NDSU, who see the move as politically-motivated interference with faculty research. Thomas Stone Carlson, president of the Faculty Senate, issued a public response to President Bresciani on Jan. 17:

We are aware that you have received significant pressure from legislators (Betty Grande and Jim Kasper in particular) who have political agendas that oppose the work of Planned Parenthood. The announcement of your decision to freeze this funding on a conservative talk show and the quick response of several conservative groups thanking legislators for this important victory against Planned Parenthood, makes it difficult to see your decision as anything other than bowing to political pressure.

"The university president lacks the courage and willingness to protect and defend academic integrity that he should have as university president," Sarah Stoesz, president of Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, told Mother Jones. "[Bresciani] is caving to some ideologically motivated legislators because he is worried about state funding for the university."

"To turn away the grant on an ideological basis really just defies logic, particularly in North Dakota, where there is so little available to at-risk youth," she continued. "This is really a program that is a wonderful lifeline for kids that don't have other options."

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Roe: The Next 40 Years

What's next for the reproductive rights movement?

—By Kate Sheppard

| Mon Jan. 28, 2013 4:01 AM PST

Last Tuesday marked the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that affirmed a constitutional right to abortion in the United States. As the case heads into middle age, a new survey from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that only 44 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 29 could correctly identify what Roe was even about.

But survey results like that one only tell part of the story. The fact that many young adults can't correctly identify a particular Supreme Court case shouldn't be taken as a sign that millennials—the generational term commonly used for anyone between the ages of 18 and 30—don't care about reproductive rights. (After all, some of our elected officials can't identify any Supreme Court cases.) Millennials' actual beliefs about abortion policy matter more than their ability to identify Roe. On that subject, the poll results are clear: 68 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds believe that women should have a right to access abortion—the highest support in any age bracket other than the baby boomers.

[Read the full article]

Sierra Club Turns to Civil Disobedience to Stop Keystone Pipeline

—By Kate Sheppard

| Fri Jan. 25, 2013 4:11 AM PST

Earlier this week, the Sierra Club announced that it is lifting its long-standing institutional prohibition on civil disobedience so that it can protest the development of the tar sands. The club's board of directors approved the change, which executive director Michael Brune made public on Tuesday. While staff and board members have previously participated in acts of civil disobedience in a personal capacity, this is the first time that the organization will take part.

The group has been mum on exactly what sort of civil disobedience it is planning. It is cosponsoring an anti-Keystone XL rally on the National Mall on February 17 with 350.org and the Hip-Hop Caucus, but says that the civil disobedience will be a separate event.

I caught up with Brune on Thursday to talk about what this means for the 120-year-old environmental organization.

Mother Jones: So is this only allowing civil disobedience related to the tar sands, or does it open it up the possibility to use it for other issues as well?

Michael Brune: Right now the board has authorized us to do this singular action on tar sands and climate. It will have a broad frame of wanting the president to be as muscular in his approach to fighting climate change as he can, with a particular focus on the tar sands pipeline.

MJ: What was it about this issue in particular that forced the change?

MB: Look at what's happened in just the last year. Record-breaking wildfires, unusual heat waves in Chicago last February, a full degree warmer in the lower 48 than we've ever seen, droughts, Hurricane Sandy, the derecho, bizarre storms happening all across the country. It's clear that our climate is already destabilizing, and it's also clear that there's a lot that the president can do to solve the problem. So we need to provide as much urgency and focus to ensure that the president's commitment is an enduring one and that his ambition meets the scale of the challenge.

MJ: Has the Club ever officially done civil disobedience?

MB: The Club has never officially done civil disobedience in our 120-year-history. There was a standing rule, an explicit prohibition on civil disobedience that the board has lifted. I don't know exactly when it was put in place, but it's been in place for decades. When it's used rarely, in extraordinary conditions, American history shows that it has done a great deal in helping to address injustices. We think that given the time we're in right now, with the threats we face from climate change, and the opportunities we face from a clean energy transition, that we need the strongest possible leadership from the president. And civil disobedience can help to provide that.

[Read more in the Blue Marble blog]

New Mexico GOP Rep. Wins Prize for Abortion Trolling

—By Kate Sheppard

| Thu Jan. 24, 2013 10:42 AM PST

You might think the 2012 election taught Republicans that talking about rape and abortion is just a bad idea. But apparently Cathrynn Brown, a GOP state representative in New Mexico, didn't get that message, because on Wednesday she introduced a new law that would bar raped women from getting abortions because doing so would be "tampering with evidence."

Brown's bill, HB206, would make obtaining an abortion after a rape a felony punishable by up to three years in prison. Here's what the bill says:

Tampering with evidence consists of destroying, changing, hiding, placing or fabricating any physical evidence with intent to prevent the apprehension, prosecution or conviction of any person or to throw suspicion of the commission of a crime upon another.

Tampering with evidence shall include procuring or facilitating an abortion, or compelling or coercing another to obtain an abortion, of a fetus that is the result of criminal sexual penetration or incest with the intent to destroy evidence of the crime.

As Huffington Post notes, the bill isn't likely to pass: Democrats control both chambers of the legislature. But it is some world-class trolling that this is even being introduced.

UPDATE: After the bill got national attention, Brown issued a statement saying that her bill had been misinterpreted, the Albuquerque Journal reports. "House Bill 206 was never intended to punish or criminalize rape victims," Brown said. "Its intent is solely to deter rape and cases of incest. The rapist—not the victim—would be charged with tampering of evidence."

Can Two Dedicated Congressmen Make Their Colleagues Care About Climate?

—By Kate Sheppard

| Thu Jan. 24, 2013 9:37 AM PST

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) announced on Thursday that they are forming a joint House-Senate Climate Change Task Force. The effort will be "dedicated to focusing Congressional and public attention on climate change and developing effective policy responses." Any member of Congress interested in the issue can join.

The group intends to release reports, memoranda, and correspondence "to advance the group's goal of increasing awareness and developing policy responses to climate change."

The task force's first action is a letter sent today to President Obama asking him to outline specific steps that federal agencies will take to get the country to the administration's previously stated goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent by 2020. They also asked him to scale up investment in clean technology and develop a strategy for dealing with climate impacts across the US. Obama gave climate change significant space in his inaugural address earlier this week, but hasn't yet outlined plans to deal with it in his second term.

"The window to deal effectively with a warming planet and to mitigate long-term risks is quickly closing," they wrote in the letter, which was also signed by Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.). "Our best hope to change course is to forge together a national consensus that insists on addressing climate change. And our best hope for forging that consensus is the presidential leadership we know you can give to this issue."

The letter pretty much acknowledged that Congress isn't likely to do much in terms of meaningful action, which puts the onus on Obama to take executive action. "We in Congress need your leadership most of all. Virtually all Republicans in Congress opposed comprehensive climate legislation in the 111th Congress, and they voted to strip EPA of regulatory authority in the last one. Progress is Congress may be so difficult or protracted that you should not hesitate to act."