“…To go far, go together.”

Recently I stood listening to Al Gore speak to Harvard students about global warming and climate control. He began his speech by saying that overpopulation had contributed to the problems we are now experiencing. The solution, he said, started with educating girls, empowering women, giving them the chance to control their own fertility and giving them opportunity. When women have opportunity, they limit the number of children they have. On a day focused on “green” issues, it was good to hear the vice president reference the empowerment of women.

Later he said something else I think speaks to the coalition we are building in Iowa as we reduce the number of unintended pregnancies among 18-30 year olds and create a model for states and the federal government.

The vice president quoted an African proverb which says “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

For me personally, the Iowa Initiative has been gratifying work. My most productive professional work has happened as a result of grassroots coalition building.

With a new president-elect, we are at a turning point in our country’s future. A change in leadership at the national level will influence our ability to create a positive climate in Iowa.

I’m excited to see how, here in Iowa, just how far we can go, together!

Ads Help Make Family Planning Mainstream

I remember seeing the first ads for feminine hygiene products on television and wincing. “Is there nothing private any longer,” I wondered. We now have ads for Viagra and “happy periods.” For someone like me who grew up in a family where we didn’t talk about any body parts we can’t see, this was unsettling. But the more I think about it, the more I think it’s a good thing, because advertising is helping us get over our sexual taboos.

In my job with the Iowa Initiative, I am working with family planning clinics which are starting to advertise their services and the new long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARC), which not too many women yet know exist. As a result, I think these ads will help us get used to the fact that family planning clinics are as Main Street as the local doctor’s office or the local pharmacy.


In Cedar Rapids, for instance, at all the local theaters, viewers see the Coke and popcorn ads, but they also see the ad for a local family planning clinic. In Ottumwa, the local clinic advertises on billboards and park benches at busy intersections. In Harlan, there’s a banner on the local hospital. In Des Moines, you can learn about long-acting reversible contraceptives on local buses.

At a clinic in Council Bluffs, the phone at the clinic starts ringing right after the staff hears the popular Planned Parenthood “bunny” ad airing on local TV.


These ads are part of a public conversation we need to be having about health care options which includes preventing unintended pregnancies among adult women.

Narrowing My Focus

For ten years I’ve been up close and personal with big-picture issues: renewable fuels, peace in the Middle East, No Child Left Behind, health care for children. Bigger than life people: Madeline Albright, Jon Bon Jovi, Hillary Clinton, Lance Armstrong. Big changes for Iowa: transforming the economy with wind energy, universal preschool, Vision Iowa recreation and tourism grants, economic opportunities in India and China. Big events: the Kentucky Derby, national political conventions, the Super Bowl, White House galas. Big restaurants in every major city with big civic and political donors. Big disasters: Iowa tornadoes and flooding, terrorist attacks, the aftermath of Katrina. Big decisions: endorsing John Kerry, vice-presidential vetting, my husband’s decision to run for President. Treasured memories all.

My tenure as Iowa’s First Lady is behind me, and I have charted a new course for the next part of my life. Tom and I have new jobs in Des Moines, which means we can’t return to the small-town life we led for twenty years while we raised our children, while Tom worked as a small town lawyer and mayor, and I worked as a teacher and reporter. I could not be more proud of the work we did as parents, community leaders, as policy leaders for our state and as representatives of our Party on the national stage.

For now, however, I’ve turned my lens from wide-angle to close-up and I’m focusing more deeply on one issue, an issue born of my life-long commitment to teen and young adult women and most recently my work to elect a woman president, a politician who provided a role model for women world-wide and who had the experience to tackle health policy issues generally and women’s health issues specifically.

At the Iowa Initiative to Reduce Unintended Pregnancies I am part of a collaboration of people committed to offering quality reproductive health services to every Iowa woman. We are working together to build a national model to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies among adult women. This will require networking, educating, finding a common message, providing women access to long-acting reversible contraceptives, researching, and reporting our discoveries. As I travel around the state and the country encouraging community conversations about issues connected to our mission, I’ll use this blog as a place to reflect. Putting this larger issue into perspective requires that I also turn my attention to small-world experiences in my family, my neighborhood, and my community.

So expect to find here the real-life stories of community conversations and unintended pregnancy I collect as I travel the state, the global perspective of a trip to Africa to visit family planning clinics and discuss mother-to-child transmission of HIV-AIDS, as well as reflections on our decision to spay our six year-old Labrador, Rosie.