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. The committee invited just one witness, Sandra Fluke, the third year Georgetown Law student, who House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) dismissed as an “energized” “college student” who was not “appropriate and qualified” to testify before his committee. Democrats received over 300,000 requests for women to testify on the issue, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said during today’s hearing, and the GOP’s male-only contraception hearing was widely spoofed in the press and on late-night comedy shows. Watch it: WA Republican Says Maria Cantwell Is Unqualified to Talk About Birth Control Because She's an Unmarried Woman.
What year is this again? Oh, and what decade? An opponent, state Sen. Michael Baumgartner, denounced her for signing a Senate letter arguing that the so-called "morning after" birth control pill should be available over the counter at pharmacies. Baumgartner said that Cantwell was not qualified to talk on the issue because she isn't married. On Tuesday, I wrote about how Republicans would have a fighting chance at this contraception debate if they stayed on the message that it was only about religious liberty, but because their visceral need to slut-shame is so great that they just can't do it. The very next night, during the latest GOP Cavalcade of Clowns, the point was illustrated perfectly. But Santorum couldn't do it -- he launched into a long diatribe about how perverse our culture had become depraved and bizarrely implied that birth control leads to more children being born out of wed-lock.
They just can't help themselves. 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.
Wade. Republican women, in their defense, argue that these and other legislative initiatives don’t constitute a war on women, so much as a difference in philosophy, or as 14 Republican Congresswomen put it yesterday in Politico: “We don’t see our lives as a product of government handouts. Follow But it’s not just VAWA. Why Does Rush Limbaugh Get Away With Calling a Young Woman a 'Slut'? - Conor Friedersdorf - Politics. Many conservatives ignore or excuse in the talk-radio host behavior that they'd be horrified to engage in themselves. If the conservative movement's least charitable critic invented a talk-radio host to embody every stereotype of a contemptible right-wing blowhard, the result might well be a thrice-divorced 61-year-old man taking to the airwaves to call a young female law student a "prostitute" and a "slut. " It would be too much -- too unrealistic -- if the same man was once detained after a guys weekend in the Dominican Republic with a bottle of Viagra, and if he went on to compare the female law student to a Nazi and suggest that she post a sex tape online.
And yet, Rush Limbaugh labeled as a "slut" and "prostitute" this young woman: He really said that she should post a sex tape online. I wish I could show you a picture of her father and mother. It hardly matters whether you agree with Sandra Fluke, or if you think she is advocating on behalf of suboptimal policy, as I do. 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.
How can he possibly claim that he didn’t mean to attack Fluke personally after hammering away at her for three days, even crazily suggesting that women who use birth control should post sex tapes online “so we can all watch.” The women of SlutWalks, of course, reject all of this. 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. He’s the author of Bearing Right. Follow That’s what Limbaugh told Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown University law student who recently argued that health insurers should be required to cover contraception. Limbaugh has no idea how often Fluke has sex, and none of us knows what went through her mind as she thought about the cost of birth control. The evidence comes from a research paper issued last May by the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research.
Did students buy fewer pills? Michele Bachmann thinks birth-control rule will lead to a one-child policy. Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images Just as the discussion about Rush Limbaugh’s attack on Sandra Fluke was beginning to get stale, along comes Michele Bachmann with a comment that is sure to keep the birth-control conversation in the headlines. L.V. Anderson is a Slate assistant editor. She edits Slate's food and drink sections and writes Brow Beat's recipe column, You're Doing It Wrong. Follow her on Twitter. Follow Bachmann has a long, rich history of making claims with absolutely no basis in reality, and on Wednesday, she said on Glenn Beck’s online show Real News From the Blaze that the Obama administration’s requirement that insurance companies cover contraception could start the government down the path to a one-child policy.
It’s easy to dismiss Bachmann as a wing-nut who intentionally says provocative things to stay in the limelight, just as it’s easy to dismiss Limbaugh on those same terms. 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. What the Republican front-runners seem to be saying is this: We are like the biblical patriarchs. As conservative religious believers, we take seriously the biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply. To which I say this: We’ve come a long way from the days of the Bible, baby, and I don’t want to go back there. 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. There was a foreign antibody in my blood stream that shouldn’t have been there. Rather than turning to my local politician for prenatal advice, I followed the guidance of my obstetrician, who sent me to a perinatologist, who recommended I have an amniocentesis.
That day, he stuck an alarmingly long needle directly into my growing belly to sample the amniotic fluid around my baby. So, while Mr. 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. Nearly two years old, he is already blind, paralyzed, and increasingly nonresponsive. I expect his death to happen this year, and this week's seizure only highlighted the fact that it could happen at any moment—while I'm at work, at the hair salon, at the grocery store.
That it is possible to hold this paradox as part of my daily reality points to the reductive and narrow-minded nature of Rick Santorum's assertions that prenatal testing increases the number of abortions (a this equals that equation), and for this reason, the moral viability or inherent value of these tests should be questioned. 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, But it’s also possible the gender gap could get worse for the GOP. Greg Sargent flagged an interesting possibility today involving Wisconsin Gov. 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. Mostly, she knew of him — as the lone abortion provider in a city of nearly 400,000, as a symbol of the country's abortion wars. After his killing on May 31, 2009, the decision to step into his place did not come as an epiphany but rather over time, with sad reluctance. In the past, if her patients with unwanted pregnancies asked where to get an abortion, she sent them to Tiller. "I didn't have an answer," she said.
Kansas is a land of great distances. If not her, Means thought, who? The pressure on Means was unrelenting. 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. A victory would eliminate not just abortion in Oklahoma but popular forms of birth control and in vitro fertilization. And this week, Oklahoma could be the site of the movement’s first major success. Colorado-based Personhood USA generally prefers to push its platform at the ballot box with constitutional amendments. But some state legislators, including in Virginia, have taken up similar language on their own, mostly unsuccessfully. “Like any effort in the pro-life movement, we don’t ever intend to stop until abortion is ended,” Dan Skerbitz, the Tulsa CPA who heads the local Personhood movement, told me.
Meanwhile, now that the ballot language has been published, opponents have 10 days to protest it. 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. Rep. Henry Hyde, the Republican from Illinois who had co-sponsored the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, proclaimed her testimony to be “one of the high spots of my life. The “abortion survivor” has become a powerful symbol in right-wing politics. But though fetuses have been known, in very rare circumstances, to survive intended terminations, those are roughly the odds, so far as they can be determined from the medical literature.
But for the antiabortion movement, the definition of an “abortion survivor” is so broad that these statistics are irrelevant. I was 12 years old when I found out my aunt had tried to abort my cousin, Sean, who is now 5 years old. Such stories have been a part of the political conversation since around the time when Jessen spoke to Congress, in the 1990s. 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.
Since both pills were marketed in the U.S. around the same time, even some pro-choicers have gotten confused. But Colorado happens to be the epicenter of people confusing them on purpose. There are a host of ironies here. “It seems to me that what we’re going through is a rerun of what happened before,” Korman remarked, referring to politics trumping the recommendations of medical professionals. Recent research shows women getting abortions know what they're doing and don't need lectures. Doctors caught in the abortion wars. Lauren Collins: Beyond Plan B. Pharmacies Mislead Teens on Morning-After Pill. Can 11-year-olds use Plan B safely? 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. 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? | Sex & Relationships. 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’ | Wendy Kaminer. 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 | Gender. 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.