Mike Leffert Interviews Joycelyn Elders

Well, you know, the United States has the highest birth rate, abortion rate, and pregnancy rate of any industrialized country. In fact, where twice as high is Canada, well, how are we different? What are we not doing that other countries are doing? We first looked at their sexual activity. We found that there was no difference in sexual activity between adolescents in the United States and adolescents in other countries. One of the great things we found that was different is one, they taught health education from kindergarten through 12th grade. They taught their children responsibility and self-esteem. We, on the other hand, felt that we could legislate morals. The second thing that we noticed is they were very open about sexual activity, and parents

could talk to their children about sex, and they really talked about the use of condoms. They all, like we all promote and support abstinence, but we know that our children are not being abstinent. They admit that they are sexually active, and we continue to bury our heads in the sand and feel that we've done our job when we just tell them to just say no. We've got to admit that our children are sexually active, and we've got to make services and education available for our children. The other thing that they do is they start educating their children very early, which we do not. Our upper income groups have early childhood education, but our poor children, our children that need it the most, do not have early childhood education. Our children in our school, the poor children, three years behind, and the teacher says that

they can't learn or they're slow. They stay behind, and they never catch up, but what the problem is is that these children have not been taught, they've not been, was not started in early childhood education, and they were just allowed to sit there, and we know the children who have young parents, or uneducated parents, are far more likely, their children are far more likely to need early childhood education, and they're the least likely to get it in America, in other countries all of their children get early childhood education. How do you account for that difference? What is it that is unique to the United States that would account in your mind for the resistance to this kind of educational thrust?

Well, one of the things that's different is our religious organizations have felt well that children should be at home with the mother. Well we know the 70% of mothers are in the workforce now, and most of those that are not in the workforce are really mothers who have few skills and can't get a job that pays more than they get on welfare. So just our admitting that children could be cared for by someone other than the mother. We think, well they have to wait till the magic age of six, and that's when they start to school, or that's when we can begin to educate them. The other thing is people feel that when it comes to sexuality education, or we should let the parents do it, we've never taught our parents. So all can the parents teach the children, they don't know how. The other thing I think that we have said is let the church do it, well 52% of our children are unchurched, and the children that are most likely to be unchurched of the children

who need help the most. Going back to that expectation on the part of our society that parents ought to do it, how have you found parents in various groups responding to the suggestion that they really don't know how to do this? I find that parents readily admit that they don't know how, and they've not taught their children anything because they were as afraid that they would teach them wrong. Have you been able to implement in your state in Arkansas a program like this in early education program? We are certainly trying. Our legislator has gave us 15 million, but we need 50 million. We've got a pittance for early childhood education. We are using all of the programs that all states are using, but they really put in 15 million of state funds, but we're going to try this next legislative session to get enough such

that every child can have early childhood education. In our country, medical care, health care is largely a commodity in the marketplace rather than a social good that a society owes toward its individuals. In that sense, the poor lose two times. First, they have not the wealth to avail themselves of this commodity. Secondly, the implication is they're really not worth it because since they do not have the wealth by which we value people, why should we expend funds? How do you work in a context like that? Well, I think what you've said, it's a horrible context, but I think many people feel that everybody basically has a right to health care, but nobody wants to pay for it. They want it for them, pay for it for themselves, but not for anybody else.

One of the things that I think is that's really very tragic is we've not even educated our people on how the things that they can do to improve their own health. Since July 1st, 1990, we have really increased our lifespan, excuse me, 1900, we've increased our lifespan almost 25 years. Most of that has really come from very early pre-native care of we're doing a better job saving our children. But when we began to look at what science has done to improve our lives, actually we can do more to improve our own life than science has done because by not smoking, by not drinking or injuries or many other things.

Well, one health educator is probably equivalent to two doctors in terms of improving lifespan and improving wellness. I have heard recently what you might term a new level of resistance to this kind of education, being that our economy today is suffering greatly because we are known to be non-competitive in the world and the argument goes, what we need to be putting our resources into is teaching people to be good corporate citizens, to be producers, to be able to follow instructions and make things. We should not be spending money on those aspects of education that lead to a better life either existentially or in the health realm. How do you feel about that?

Well, I feel that first of all that you can't educate people if they aren't healthy and you can't keep them healthy if they aren't educated. So how I feel about that is that I feel that we must start early. I think that we've lost too many of our children before they even start school and because of that what we've done is really supported what's been termed the mental retardation of poverty. Children that are poor are four times more likely to be mentally retarded but we know that we do the things that we need to do. We can correct two-thirds of that but yet we don't. We wait until they get in school and then we start, oh, well, we've got special education and oh, we've got this special class and we've got that special class when we could really prevent all of that by doing the things we need to do early. We do too little, too late.

What are those things? Well, what I mentioned is early childhood education starting children, you know, begin to educate them at two, three, four years of age. It has been said that children a half-as-tall is they'll ever be by the time they're three and they'll know half as much as they will ever know by the time they're four. Hope, well, and drive has been determined by the time they're five and we don't even start school until after they're five. The casual observer would notice that you have what we could term a pretty progressive viewpoint in a state that may be accurately characterized as conservative. How do you get along? How's life? Well, you know, I think it's really been very tough but I've spent a lot of time educating our grassroots, involving churches, involving our elderly, involving our rotary, our civic

organizations, our beauticians, everybody involved in trying to make happen what need to happen for children. And I think that it's been a hard, busy road, but I think people have began to realize that if we don't invest in our children, what's going to happen to us? Relief childhood education is one thing. Later education is another. I understand you have been active in seeking to put health clinics into the high schools for the purpose of educating those people who are at risk also of becoming pregnant and thereby jeopardizing their futures. Tell us about that.

We have 18 school-based clinics, we have 23 schools that are on the waiting list to have a comprehensive school-based health service. We had to fight all the things that everybody has to fight. We have the very religious, non-Christian right who felt that what we were going to do is we would be doing abortions in school. Well, of course, they knew better than that, they didn't even think that. Well what they were doing was using the backs of our children to keep the abortion issue before the public. We had to fight through that kind of thing and make people aware that the most important thing that they'll ever have is their children. If they don't invest in their education and prevent them from pregnancies, drugs, alcohol, homicide, suicide, that they might as well bury them alive because in this society, if

they're uneducated, they're dead. Are you able actually to move people to a new point of view? I imagine you go around talking to these... I've spent four years at it. How do you do it? Do people change? Do people change in attitudes? I think the atmosphere and the attitudes in Arkansas has definitely changed from when I started. I think when you're talking to business people, they're always polite. I would just say that business people were not polite. That's not true. They were always very polite, but they unfanked me. From now, I think they're very committed, they're realizing that they're spending 23 billion dollars a year in this country paying for teenagers and their babies. In Arkansas, we spend 100 million dollars a year on teenagers and their families keeping them poor, keeping them ignorant and keeping them forever enslaved.

The businesses are beginning to realize that when a low-birthweight baby is born to a teen or very, you know, and it costs them $250,000 to get that baby out of the nursery, the fat reflects their bottom line, that their insurance premiums have gone up from $1,000 per employee to $2,500 per employee. They began to understand that. I mean, when you're talking millions of dollars, business understands that. And they know that for the 21st century, that they've got to have better educated employees if they hope to be competitive. Your governor, Bill Clinton, is not only the fellow who appointed you, he's also a democratic candidate for president. Is it fair to say that what we are hearing from you is a viewpoint and set of attitudes that he shares?

I very much feel that the governor shares the viewpoint and attitudes that I'm talking about. This is what I've been saying for four years. This is what we've been supporting and trying to accomplish, you know, since I've been there and I feel that the governor has been very, very supportive. I think he supports children being educated. He supports, he feels it's a right for everybody to have health care. He feels one mechanism of improvement access to children and to their health care is at school. And he recognizes that people will use any vehicle they can to keep things stirred up and recognizes that our right to life and our religious coalitions are really just using children to keep their issue in front of the public. Along with the innovations in school-based clinics, comes the possibility and probability for abortion and abortion counseling.

You've already made clear that that's not what these are about, but in so far as work in these clinics touches on that, how has it handled? Well, yet first of all, our school-based clinics and what we try and do is prevent pregnancy. So the best way, the very best way to prevent abortions is to prevent unplanned unwanted pregnancies. The people that run around with this marked infatuation for the fetus. There are guest welfare, there are guest Medicaid, there are guest health education, there are guests all of the things that would develop an independent human being. They're even for the death penalty and it just amazes me how they love little babies so much as long as they are in somebody else's uterus. Along with that litany of things there against, they're also against the dispensing of

breast control devices. How do you deal with that, how do you get around it? Well, what we do is the school board passes a resolution to have a clinic and then the parent signs a form as to whether they want their child to use the clinic at all or the services that they want their child to have in the clinic and with the big problem that's going on now, with AIDS, when we push the againers out, that is the groups that when we just use the parents that had children in schools, 87% of the parents that had children in the school wanted the school-based clinics and they also, 67% of them wanted to distribute contraceptives. That's an interesting number, it's not one that we hear frequently, what we do hear frequently

is that there is a majority against. But if you, you know, you, just the parents that have children in schools, those would be the only, what we had is people loading on buses and driving from one school area to another. So, you know, we had to put it on, they, you know, they got a piece of legislation that they had to know 30 days in advance, you had to advertise it and that you were going to talk about school-based clinics and this is so they could plan to be there and all of these people would be there and none of them would be the parents of the children that went to that school. As a very early on, we were able to, we found out who they were and we got their names and well, and so after we got to know them, well then we just felt, well, the only people that could vote on clinics, whether the school board, whether they could have a clinic or not, or be there in influence of school board were parents that had children in school. So that, in a way, was a kind of a very innovative strategy on your part.

You were able first to identify who were most concerned, it was the parents, and then to provide that it would be their decision. That's right. And when you do that, 80% of the parents want to see these things. Yes, they do. No, the people that are against it are the same people. They just go from community to community. You know, it's telling people that, oh, they're going to be doing abortions and they're going to be referring for abortions and they're just doing this so they can make money and, you know, all those kinds of lies and they know their lies and people that will use the backs of children in that way cannot be Christians. Brings up the question of why they do it. What's your understanding of why this campaign has reached the proportions it has? You know, I really do not understand that.

I think it's probably grounded and related in many ways to perhaps people wanting to gain control in one way of gaining control if you keep people poor ignorant and enslaved or barefoot pregnant in the kitchen, they can never have any power. So in so far as this is a racial and a class problem, how do you expect that this will be dealt with on the national level? Is there a possibility for any improvement over what we have now? We've got to improve. We can't get much worse than we are. So we're spending $27,500 a year for each prisoner we warehouse and we have more people in prison than any other country in the world, even more than South Africa.

And we are constantly having people in the streets doing drugs, alcohol, homicides, suicides, 20% of our young women have thought or attempted suicide. With the rising influence of AIDS, you see, there won't be anybody around to take care of people when they get 85, but we don't change. Because we will have totally destroyed our society as we know it. One of the things that can't get much worse but is getting worse is in the area of prevention of unwanted pregnancy. One of the major issues these days is the question of, are you 486? The French drug that both prevents pregnancy and also initiates abortion.

What's your position on the use of that treatment which is really just a pill rather than a surgical procedure? I feel that when we began to let politics decide medicine, we've already created a major disaster as far as I'm concerned. I think the nor plant, where we can implant the contraceptives under the arm and at last for five years is a major advancement. You see, we have the know how to prevent unwanted pregnancies. We have the resources to prevent unwanted pregnancies, but we refuse to make the commitment to do anything about it. If this was a drug that was used, you know, men got pregnant and this was a drug to prevent

implantation of pregnancy, there would never be this kind of fight. And I feel we've got to save the most valuable resource we'll ever have. We've got to save our children. Let me tell you, the president of the United States would never in his life say that I have all of this defense budget to say that we're going to go out and fight wars and kill people. What they say as we have all of these defense weapons to protect the country, well I want you to know that I would never pass out condoms or give out contraceptives for sexual pleasures. We have contraceptives to prevent pregnancies and to prevent AIDS and the most valuable resource we've got.

You continue to come back to characterizing children as the most valuable resource we have and one would have to agree. But you're also characterizing these assaults upon their persons as if it were kind of evenly spread out. In fact, I'm not sure that a white middle class child has as much trouble gaining the services you're talking about as has a black or other minority poor person. You're correct. You know, whatever it is regardless of what it is, it disproportionately affects the young, the poor and the uneducated. It just happens that one half of all the black children in America are poor, one in five of the white children are poor.

So it disproportionately affects the black and Hispanic or Native American population primarily because they're poor. And so the question comes up, how then do we introduce into the national political dialogue, these questions of race, sex and class, when we are admonished by those people who win elections, that we should not do that, that it's divisive, that it destroys the fabric of American unity and so forth. Well listen, nothing destroys a family anymore than unplanned unwanted pregnancy. And I think that if we make sure that every child has a right to a quality education, every child has a right to good health care, that we would make a tremendous difference.

We would even the play in field, now they don't have the same opportunities. Dr. Jocelyn Elders, thank you. Thank you. Today with Dr. Jocelyn Elders, who is Director of the Arkansas Health Department, Dr. Elders, what brings you to New Mexico? Well, I was invited here initially by the United Methodist Religious Youth Ministry group. They're having a major regional conference here. And so since I was coming, the Rio Grande Planned Parenthood also asked if I would speak with them tonight. And specifically, what issues are you planning to address?

Good afternoon, I'm Chris Martín, this is Women's Focus for Saturday, August 31st. I guess this afternoon are Jill Keifer and Michelle Miller, who are two of three editors of a book called The Spirit That Wants Me, a New Mexico Anthology. And I just want to say good afternoon, hi Michelle. Hi. Hi Jill. Hi, how are you? How are you this afternoon? Good. Glad to see you here. Tell me, would you please, what gave you the idea to do a book like this? Well, it actually began when I met Jill, who moved here about four years ago. And she showed me an essay she had written about her inner journey from Manhattan to New Mexico and what that symbolized to her. And when I read it, I realized that it was just ringing all kinds of bells from when I moved here in 1979 from Chicago. And we began talking and with Diane Duff, who's also a writer and our other editor, about all the stories we heard from people who moved here.

I mean, you go to a party, you're usually going to hear at least one story in Albuquerque about people whose car broke down and they never left or people who had a dream in the middle of Idaho that they should come here and real, fascinating, compelling feeling about coming out here. So we thought somebody ought to do a book. And then we decided that we would somebody, somebody, and just a book about why people came to New Mexico and why they came and what the effects were on them. We wanted to focus on people who came for non-practical based reasons, not someone who moved here because their job transferred them here, but people who felt emotionally or spiritually or whatever you want to use, whatever words you want to use, felt a need to be here. Yeah, so that would account then for the somewhat religious, almost religious, I don't know if that's the right word. It came out of my mouth. A somewhat heartfelt spiritual tone to all these things, I would say religious, I would say spiritual.

Yeah, right, exactly. Because basically, I mean, one of the things that is very clear and that became very clear is people really don't move here for economic reasons. If anything, they find it hard on that level to be here. But they are nevertheless drawn and it becomes like a child and a mother to them at the same time. So, and of course that was all revealed to us. We had no idea what we would get, actually. But we wanted to know, and that's how it started. So how did you get the word out about this kind of thing? How did you get some, you had what, some 400 contributors? I think.