Blogs

Guest Post by Jennifer Ferris

This Wednesday, Dec. 6, Planned Parenthood of Central North Carolina is participating in a national historic effort to prevent unintended pregnancy.

Every visitor to Planned Parenthood's Chapel Hill or Durham clinics will be offered a free pack of Plan B, the emergency contraceptive recently approved by the FDA to be sold without a prescription.

While the significance of this promotion is probably clear to almost any man or woman of childbearing age who has ever relied on a forgettable method of birth control (condoms, the pill, a diaphragm, etc.) to prevent pregnancy, I understand some of you reading might need a little more convincing.

Emergency Contraception (EC) is essential: It prevents pregnancy when used up to five days after unprotected sex. It is currently in use in many emergency rooms and urgent care clinics to help rape victims avoid carrying their predators' children.

On Will Raymond's blog post Chapel Hill Downtown Development Initiative: The Debate, there are links to TWENTY ONE separate videos of twenty one different people speaking at a November 20th public hearing on downtown development. To make it real easy to choose which one to watch there are screen shots from the video of the people who spoke with their names captioned at the bottom. (I've copied them below.)

I wasn't planning to blog this, but I just attended the Chapel Hill Downtown Partnership's Annual Meeting and Public Forum and there are a few things continuing to nag at me.

DP chair Tom Tucker started the meeting by discussing their three "clients": UNC, the Town of Chapel Hill, and downtown businesses. These are the same constituencies represented on the DP's board. For all their talking about importance of residential development downtown, no-one is working to include the voices of those who currently live downtown (or would like to). If they did, I think they would hear a very different set of priorities and concerns.

For example, many families who want to live in urban settings also want to be able to walk to work, the grocery store, and the playground. We have to get out of our suburban single-family-home mindset to understand the needs and desires of our potential downtown dwellers.