Female Witness Hits Back at Issa: "I'm a Woman Who Uses Contraception, That Makes Me Qualified" to Testify. Democrats on the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee held a special hearing Thursday morning in response to the GOP’s decision to prevent women from testifying in support of an Obama administration rule requiring employers to provide birth control without additional cost sharing.
WA Republican Says Maria Cantwell Is Unqualified to Talk About Birth Control Because She's an Unmarried Woman. The Republican Party believes that women are trying to defraud the government. Joyce NALTCHAYAN/AFP/Getty Images.
Like many women who are also human beings, I’ve been following the twists and turns of the “War on Women” meme for weeks now, wondering what the heck it is we’re all meant to be fighting about. It seems that some women are worried that a President Mitt Romney and Republican Congress would—as they have promised—move against fair pay for equal work, toss between 14 and 27 million people off Medicaid (of whom about two-thirds are women), cut child care, health care, and food assistance for about 20 million children, defund Planned Parenthood, do away with Title X, and maybe seat a Supreme Court willing to reverse Roe v.
Why Does Rush Limbaugh Get Away With Calling a Young Woman a 'Slut'? - Conor Friedersdorf - Politics. Rush Limbaugh calls Sandra Fluke a slut: How sex positivity has recharged the feminist movement. Alex Wong/Getty Images Sandra Fluke has pointed out that Rush Limbaugh tried to silence her when he called her a slut and a prostitute last week.
But the oldest, hoariest trick for shutting women up didn’t work this time. Bolstered by her experience as an activist and a pitch-perfect call of support from President Obama, Fluke soldiered on in her efforts to persuade Georgetown University to include contraception in its package of health care coverage. She’s 30, not 14, and in her sober and smart TV appearances, Fluke is doing more than most of us ever will to take the sting out of slut shaming.
Her forceful presence is the reason for Limbaugh’s apology over the weekend, utterly lame and inadequate as it was. Reclaiming the word slut is also the aim of the SlutWalks, the protest movement that started last spring in Canada and spread to more than 70 cities worldwide. The social conservative subterranean fantasy world is exposed, and it's frightening. Rush Limbaugh, Sandra Fluke, and college sex: Does contraceptive insurance change sexual behavior? (Win McNamee/Getty Images) Rush Limbaugh has a solution for women who have trouble affording contraception: Have less sex.
Instead of asking your employer or college to provide insurance that covers birth control, pay for your birth control yourself. Or get your boyfriend to pay for it. Or just keep your knees together so you won’t have to worry about getting pregnant. Will Saletan writes about politics, science, technology, and other stuff for Slate. Michele Bachmann thinks birth-control rule will lead to a one-child policy. Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images.
Romney, Santorum and archaic ideas on fertility. Between them, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have as many children — 12 — as there were tribes of Israel.
Ron Paul has five of his own, and in an early debate, perhaps unwilling to be outdone by Michele Bachmann’s fostering of dozens, Paul boasted that when he worked as a physician he delivered “4,000 babies.” There’s nothing wrong with big families, of course. But the smug fecundity of the Republican field this primary season has me worried. Their family photos, with members of their respective broods spilling out to the margins, seem to convey a subliminal message that goes far beyond a father’s pride in being able to field his own basketball team. Why Rick Santorum would have killed my daughter - Sarah Fister Gale. Next month, my daughter Ella will turn 11-years-old.
She’s a beautiful girl, with blond hair and green eyes. She’s an amazing artist, a brilliant writer, and she can do the splits without even warming up. And if I hadn’t had an amniocentesis, she would have died the day she was born. Just over 11 years ago, I received a call from my obstetrician’s assistant to let me know that there was an anomaly in my recent blood test. “It’s probably just a testing error,” she assured me.
But when I returned the following week to have the blood test redone, the anomaly showed up again. Rick Santorum and prenatal testing: I would have saved my son from his suffering. Photo courtesy of Emily Rapp.
This week my son turned blue, and for 30 terrifying seconds, stopped breathing. Called an "apnea seizure," this is one stage in the progression of Tay-Sachs, the genetic disease Ronan was born with and will die of, but not before he suffers from these and other kinds of seizures and is finally plunged into a completely vegetative state. How to make the gender gap worse. There’s been much discussion this week of the gender gap in the presidential race, which has exploded since Republicans decided in February to pick a fight with President Obama over contraception.
A survey of voters in 12 swing states released at the start of the week showed Obama’s lead over Mitt Romney among women surging to 18 points, compared to just 1 with men. Among independent women in those states, Obama is now ahead by 14 points – a complete turnaround from late last year, when he trailed Romney by 5 with the same group. The sizable overall leads that Obama now enjoys are largely the result of this movement of women. But as National Journal’s Ron Brownstein showed, the shift is coming from a very specific subset of the female population: college-educated white women. As Brownstein explained, Doctor struggles to fill role of slain Kansas abortion provider - latimes.com.
Reporting from Wichita, Kan. — Out near the city's edge, where fast-food joints and subdivisions seem to spring from farmland overnight, the casualties of an unfinished war sit untouched in a doctor's basement.
Dr. Mila Means, a 55-year-old solo family practitioner with neon red hair and neo-hippie style, doesn't remember how or when she heard that Dr. George Tiller had been gunned down in his church. She knew him only slightly as their paths crossed in medical circles. Personhood, the undead movement, marches on. It’s back. A resounding rejection by Mississippi voters last year and two other defeats by Coloradans have not killed the Personhood movement. It’s still creeping from state to state, trying to pass constitutional amendments granting fertilized eggs full rights as people. Keith Mason: the man behind the personhood movement.
The abortion survivor myth. “I am the person that she aborted. I lived instead of died.” It was 1996, and Gianna Jessen was telling Congress about how she had been born despite her mother having a saline abortion at 30 weeks. The myth of the "morning-after abortion pill" - Abortion. It started around February, when Republicans were still eager to talk about contraception. The Obama administration, or so Mitt Romney charged in Colorado, was forcing religious institutions to provide “morning-after pills –in other words abortive pills — and the like, at no cost.” It was, of course, a lie. Romney was conflating two different pills: emergency contraception, known as the morning-after pill, which prevents a pregnancy; and chemical abortion, or mifepristone, which ends a pregnancy of up to seven weeks’ gestation and isn’t covered under the new guidelines. Recent research shows women getting abortions know what they're doing and don't need lectures.
Photo by MLADEN ANTONOV/AFP/Getty Images. Doctors caught in the abortion wars. Lauren Collins: Beyond Plan B. Over at Daily Comment, my colleague Michael Specter criticizes the Obama Administration for its decision not to make Plan B, the emergency contraceptive pill, available over the counter to girls under the age of seventeen. Specter makes a dispassionate argument: the Food and Drug Administration has found that Plan B is safe and effective for adolescent girls, so adolescent girls should be able to use Plan B without obstruction. Pharmacies Mislead Teens on Morning-After Pill. Women who live in low-income neighborhoods are more likely than their wealthier counterparts to get misinformation about emergency contraception from their local pharmacies, a new study finds. The results suggest that young women in areas where teen pregnancy rates are highest may struggle most in trying to get the morning-after pill, which can prevent ovulation — and thus pregnancy — after unprotected sex.
Can 11-year-olds use Plan B safely? Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images. Can a Better Vibrator Inspire an Age of Great American Sex? - Andy Isaacson. Sex and the Single Girl: Why American culture is still so scared by single people. Helen Gurley Brown author of the classic here in 2006 Peter Kramer/Getty Images. Teen moms: How poverty and inequality cause teens to have babies, not the other way around. Why Are American Teens So Ignorant About Sex and Birth Control? Judgmental, Christian-y abstinence-only education is still going on in Colorado public schools. Americans Support Same-Sex Unions, Birth Control Coverage. The Losing Argument for the Defense of Marriage Act - Andrew Cohen - National. Gay marriage doesn't harm children, but the facts don't seem to matter. Mark Regnerus’s Gay Parenting Study Starts a Political War. Does gay marriage affect marriage or divorce rates?
BREAKING: GOP Judges Declare DOMA Unconstitutional. Roy Speckhardt: The Equal Rights Amendment Finally Arrives. Obama, gay marriage, and the law: what his support means. Obama Says Bring It On With Gay Marriage Endorsement - Steve Clemons - Politics. Jonathan Rauch: "We are a sideshow no longer" - Gay Marriage. Obama on gay marriage: President speaks with ABC News' Robin Roberts. Yes, Brendan O’Neill, Anti-Gay Voters Are ‘Ill-Informed,’ And So Are You. ‘I’ve never seen people smiling so broadly’ Why gay marriage divides the world - opinion - 22 May 2012. Tracy Thorne-Begland and the Virginia House of Delegates: The state Legislature rejects the judicial nomination of a prosecutor—just because he’s gay.
Americans Heart Marriage, Divide on Abortion, Hate Labels. Abortion polls, gay marriage polls: Why are we becoming liberal on some issues but not others? The War on Women’s Pay: Rep. Jackie Speier Marks ‘Equal Pay Day’ With a Call to Arms. Abortions made public - Reproductive Rights. Presidential election season: Conservatives are manufacturing the war on women for political gain. Fight Birth-Control Battle Over the Counter: Virginia Postrel. Birth control: The right’s still winning. Could women really be discriminated against for taking birth control? If a crazy Arizona bill passes, yes. Abstinence isn’t working. Tackling Sex Abuse in Indian Country. Conference focuses on sex trafficking.