Accept others as they are

She didn't let go of her dreams even though things weren't working out as she planned. Later accepted to Harvard Law School and elected to the Texas State Senate, she credits her success to hard work and optimism. Instead, she reframed her divorce as a great business opportunity to create the wildly successful Huffington Post. She could have taken her hefty divorce settlement and moved to Turks and Caicos but chose to follow her passion for journalism and do what she loves, all the while enjoying the spotlight. In 1969, Republican President, Richard Nixon famously said, No American woman should be denied access to family planning assistance because of her economic condition. Just a year later, in 1970, the U. This act established federally funded family planning centers to assist poorer women with contraception and family planning. It also provided noncontraceptive health-related services, including care for pregnant women, cancer screenings, and sexually transmitted infections testing. Today, Title X helps four million women a year access reproductive health care, and the clinics funded under Title X prevent approximately one million unintended pregnancies each year. Administered by the U. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Population Affairs, Title X remains the only federally funded assistance program focused on birth control today. As we discuss later in this article, however, in the past few years, Title X has come under attack. Particularly significant in terms of the laws and regulations on birth control was the ACA, implemented under the presidency of Barack Obama in 2012, which we discuss in detail in the next section. The ACA mandated that health insurance plans offer cost-free contraception to women, increasing access for millions of American women. If you, personally, lower your cholesterol by just a few points, or your blood pressure by one or two, it is unlikely to affect your health in any way you can recognize. But if the entire population does the same, rates of heart attack and stroke certainly WILL change appreciably. That, too, is a principle of statistics: at a large enough scale, even very tiny causes can have huge effects. Still, the issue of sample size is always an important consideration in our efforts to avoid the common lies of statistics, and select out only the reliable truths. If I say to you that a randomized controlled trial shows that Diet X fixes Condition Y, can you trust it, and believe it? Moreover, you can't possibly know if the result is important.

I will explain . There is a saying that all diets work, but no diet works - and that saying has lots of science behind it. Just about any means of reducing choices, and thus imposing any kind of discipline on dietary intake, is apt to produce weight loss in the short term. Most of those means, however, are difficult to maintain - and many of them would be a bad idea if you could, such as eating nothing but grapefruit, or bacon, or Twinkies. Write down the bare-bones facts of your divorce, not your opinions, including who left whom and what that has meant for you emotionally and financially. Write down the story you currently tell others. Is it positive? How does it make you feel? Is it going to make the person you're speaking with want to jump out a window to get away from you? Act like your own PR spin doctor to retell your story accentuating the positive, especially how you have grown from the experience and the opportunities you have as a result. Think it's pretty good? Test-drive your reframed divorce story on a friend and get some feedback. There are countless ways to tell the same story. As any PR guru knows, you choose which facts you lead with and want to highlight in your story. State laws and regulations on birth control vary widely across the United States. While some states in recent years have attempted to legislate to decrease access to contraception, others have pursued a different tactic. According to the Guttmacher Institute (2016), 28 states currently require their state health insurance plans to cover hormonal contraceptives. More specifically, As of 2019, the following states have policies that provide free birth control to women: Overall, however, it is impossible to generalize about state laws and policies on contraception;

How does the Affordable Care Act impact access to birth control? One of the most significant developments in increasing access to birth control in the United States was the ACA, also known as Obamacare. Passed in 2010 under the Obama administration and implemented in 2012, the ACA included a Women's Health Amendment designed to ensure that women would have access to essential services, including preventive care (cancer screenings, prenatal care, mammograms, etc) at no cost to themselves. The ACA also required most health insurance plans in the United States to cover all methods of birth control approved by the U. Most of us know this. Producers at morning shows and editors at major newspapers and magazines know this, and must know that we know this. We, if we thought about it, would know that they know that we know. Yet everybody, over and over, tends to act as if we don't know. Diet studies are reported every week if not every day. Many of them are randomized controlled trials. When the intervention of interest outperforms whatever served as the control group - some other diet, or standard care - we tend to be told that: Diet X fixed Condition Y, according to a new randomized trial. But what aren't we told in that headline or bit of click bait? We aren't told right away how long the study ran. Usually that answer is: not very long. They have a daughter named Bailey. Bill had an affair and left. He lost interest and fell in love with someone else. He cheated on me and ruined my life. He broke up our marriage and destroyed our family. Carlotta also believed her story wholeheartedly and saw it as proof that she was undesirable and unlovable.

Carlotta used the Reframe/Reclaim Technique to retell her story in a positive way. These days, she no longer clings to Bill's rejection like a life raft. When she thinks about her divorce, or tells the story, it's not a tale of betrayal. She notes she was married for seventeen years, has a beautiful daughter, and has been able to rekindle her love of gardening since the split. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Known as the contraceptive mandate, this part of the ACA required companies and businesses with at least 50 employees to offer health insurance plans that would provide cost-free birth control to women. This mandate received enthusiastic support from some legislators. As Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said during the Senate debates on the ACA, This fundamental inequity in the current system is dangerous and discriminatory and we must act. The prevention section of the bill before us must be amended so coverage of preventive services takes into account the unique health care needs of women throughout their lifespan. The ACA requires that employers' health insurance plans cover 18 FDA-approved methods of contraception free of cost, without charging copays or deductibles (Guttmacher Institute, 2016). The birth control methods covered under the ACA are The effects of the ACA have been profound. Because of it, out-of-pocket birth control costs in the United States declined significantly (Snyder, Weisman, Liu, Leslie, & Chuang, 2018). Most of the dietary intervention studies in the literature span weeks or a few months; We aren't told right away who was enrolled. This is obviously important for many reasons, not the least of which being relevance; This study characteristic - pertinence to other people - is called external validity, or generalizability. It is important, and routinely neglected. Imagine, for instance, a study comparing a vegan diet to a Paleo diet for weight loss and health improvement over, say, 6 months.

Now imagine that the study is run by pro-vegan researchers, who recruit pro-vegan study participants. Everyone assigned to the vegan diet is happy and adheres; The sampling obviously matters in this case. The same would be true if Paleo researchers did the same in reverse, enrolling meat-loving study participants who dropped out as soon as they were assigned to a vegan diet. I've been embracing living on my own and doing whatever I want, she says. I paint the front door a new color every spring; The facts of her divorce haven't changed, but her attitude and the way she talks about it certainly have. Carlotta isn't our only friend who needed some help viewing her divorce in a more positive light. I'm such an idiot, Gina moaned when she was trimming Carlotta's hair one day. Who would believe that a man who never misses an episode of Real Housewives of Atlanta and asks you to give him highlights was actually straight? How did I miss the signs? What's wrong with me? As Gina styled Carlotta's hair, Carlotta told her about how she had reframed her own story and felt better as a result. Gina gave it a try. With cost issues alleviated for many, more women used birth control, mostly hormonal methods. Significantly, the use of LARC methods increased in the wake of the contraceptive mandate. One study found a substantial increase in IUD use from 2011 to 2013 (Snyder et al. In 2013, the ACA helped women save an estimated $1. Between October 2013 and March 2014, over four million women received health insurance coverage through the ACA. In the next section, we discuss opposition to the ACA and attempts to roll back the contraceptive mandate.