State Rep. LaMahieu’s attack on students’ access to emergency contraception is an outrage (“Law targets UHS role in birth control”). He is trying to trample our right to basic reproductive health care, with no consideration for facts about the service that UHS provides.
First of all, emergency contraception, commonly called the morning-after pill, is merely a higher dosage of ordinary birth-control pills. If taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex, it drastically reduces the chance of unintended pregnancy.
If student health centers within the UW System are prohibited from providing this basic form of birth control, thousands of students across the state will be left with no access to back-up birth-control methods. On many of the smaller UW campuses, UHS is the only place for students to get emergency contraception, even if they are the victims of rape.
Furthermore, Rep. LaMahieu didn’t even bother to check the facts first. He complains state taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for this service, when, in reality, the funding comes entirely from student segregated fees.
Emergency contraception is available without a prescription in Canada, Britain, France and other industrialized nations — yet some in the Wisconsin Legislature want to prevent college students from having any access to these pills at all. Why doesn’t Rep. LaMahieu trust us with our own bodies?
Melissa Sands
It appears Sarah Howard is a fan of “The Wizard of Oz” and, as such, writes a fictional tale regarding ethanol.
Ms. Howard makes several points without backing up her statements with references. I would like to refute her statements. Ms. Howard states that ethanol is less efficient than gasoline and that it takes just as much or more energy to produce ethanol than it will yield as fuel. A USDA study in 2002 (Agricultural Economic Report No. 813) found that for every Btu of energy dedicated to producing ethanol there is a 34 percent energy gain. In addition, the USDA study found for every 1 Btu of liquid fuel used to produce ethanol, there is a 6.34 Btu gain. A recent Michigan State University study found that ethanol produced from corn was found to provide 56 percent more energy than is consumed during production.
Obviously, ethanol production is very energy efficient. As far as Ms. Howard’s comments about ethanol permeating through plastic and rubber linings, that is the first time I have heard of that and, according to various industry sources, is absolutely not true. If it was true, there would be leaks all around in an ethanol plant and that does not happen. As far as her decreased mileage claim, various studies have shown that an E10 blend (10 percent ethanol) may decrease mileage by 2 percent, such that a car averaging 30 mpg may average 29.4 mpg with an E10 blend.
I am willing to bet that most people have more than a 2 percent variance from fill-up to fill-up based on weather and driving conditions. Flexible Fuel Vehicles experience a 5 to 15 percent drop in fuel economy when using E85 (85 percent ethanol) simply because the FFV’s are not optimized to E85.
Ms. Howard goes on to state that ethanol has environmental drawbacks. Carbon monoxide (CO) is a major ozone precursor (Gary Whitten, Ph.D.). According to Argonne National Laboratory, ethanol blended fuels reduces greenhouse gas emission by 12 to 19 percent, reduces tailpipe CO emissions by 30 percent, reduces exhaust VOC emissions by 12 percent and reduces toxic emissions by 30 percent. In addition, the American Lung Association of Metropolitan Chicago credits ethanol-blended reformulated gasoline with reducing smog-forming emissions by 25 percent since 1990.
In conclusion, Ms. Howard has misinformed readers of the Badger Herald by not doing her homework and doing enough research on the topic she is writing about. Hopefully, she will learn from this so that she can become a more complete and competent journalist.
George Drewry
Badger State Ethanol
