Members of the New Jersey Senate and the Assembly: These may be your wives, mothers or daughters whose lives have been upended because of cuts to family planning funding.
To: Members of New Jersey's Legislature, who will vote Thursday on whether to override Gov. Chris Christie's veto and restore funding for family planning in the state.
From: The Trenton woman seeking HIV/AIDS testing, the Princeton man worried that he's contracted a sexually-transmitted disease, the young woman from Hamilton who needs her first mammogram - and the other 100,000 of your constituents who turn to Planned Parenthood services every year.
We need you to do the right thing. We need you to look beyond partisan politics and make room in New Jersey's state budget for the vital, lifesaving work Planned Parenthood has carried out for more than a century.
Access to annual exams, breast and cervical cancer screenings and affordable birth control should not depend on the whim of lawmakers trying to score points with their bases. These are real people's lives you're playing with here.
Gov. Christie first went on the attack against women's health programming back in 2010, slashing $7.4 million in funding his first year in office.
Most voters support Planned Parenthood, birth control
In the immediate aftermath of his ill-conceived action, half a dozen women's clinics in the state closed, the number of cases of bacterially sexually transmitted disease soared up to 50 percent in some sections of the state, and the number of clinical breast exams performed by family-planning providers dropped 31-percent.
Members of the Senate and the Assembly: These may be your wives, mothers or daughters whose lives have been upended. They are certainly someone's loved ones, and they desperately need your support - and yes, your compassion - as you get ready to cast your vote on Thursday.
The consequences of Christie's political opportunism fall disproportionately on minority communities.
"Due to the intersection of racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, and other systemic barriers, people of color in the United States are often less able to access and benefit from quality health care," former Gov. James J. Florio wrote in an op-ed earlier this year. "People denied access to competent, affordable, accessible and humane health care see poorer health outcomes."
Sadly, we see that happening as women of color suffer from breast and cervical cancers at a rate far outstripping their Caucasian counterparts.
While rates for these cancers rose .3-percent for New Jersey's women between 2009 and 2013, the increase reached 6.6-percent for black women and 25.1-percent for Latinas.
Yes, you read that right, dear lawmakers. A 25 percent increase among one of the largest segments of your neighbors. Your voters. Maybe yourselves.
With one vote, you have the ability to turn that around. Please, this time, make that vote the right one.
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