Withheld services could range from treatment of HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases, birth control, abortion and end-of-life issues.
Michiganders: Find your state Senator and contact them here!
Arkansas just passed a law banning all abortions after 20 weeks
Despite the fact that it is clearly unconstitutional, and despite the fact that Governor Beebe vetoed the bill. The House and Senate both voted to override the veto, and now Arkansas has one of the strictest abortion laws in the United States.
More here
"Choices made between limited, undesirable or negative alternatives hardly amount to choices at all. For example, one needs to question what choice means in reproductive decision-making in a society which puts a high priority on motherhood, which is seen as central to women’s definition, and where options are limited by women’s class, ‘race’, age, marital status, sexual preferences, religion, culture and disability. Notions of ‘normal’ parenthood and the ‘fit’ mother, which tend to exclude women who are single, lesbian, disabled, or older, are seen to provide a powerful constraint on ‘freedom of choice.’"
— Alan Peterson and Robin Bunton, The New Genetics and the Public’s Health
From Talking Point Memo:
Indiana Republicans are advancing legislation that would require women to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound prior to an abortion, the latest in a string of efforts by state GOP lawmakers to actively discourage women from terminating their pregnancies.
Birth Control and Kick-Ass Women from History
Did you know that “not a single government dollar helped develop the Pill”? The government didn’t become involved until the 1960s, well into the research process.
So who did fund the development of the Pill? Katharine McCormick, who was also a suffragette, millionaire, co-founder of the League of Women Voters and one of the first women to earn a degree in science from MIT (and occasionally a smuggler who brought then-illegal diaphragms into the US). After her husband’s death McCormick donated the equivalent of $23 million of her personal fortune to Gregory Pincus’s research team, which developed the first contraceptive pill. As if that weren’t enough, she moved from California to Boston to monitor the research:
“befitting her MIT training, McCormick tracked Pincus’s progress, offering criticisms and commentary, asking a litany of questions. “Little old woman she was not,” Pincus later recalled. “She was a soldier.”
McCormick wasn’t the only donor, philanthropic organizations, private citizens, industry and organizations (including Planned Parenthood) were also early funders. McCormick wasn’t alone, but her contributions - both financial and intellectual - were absolutely pivotal to the successful development of the Pill.
For more check out Andrea Tone’s Devices and Desires
Click on the link and tell the department of Health and Human Services why access to birth control with no co-pay is important to you.
Proposed NM bill would require rape-induced pregnancies to be brought to term as “evidence”
This week New Mexico state representative Cathrynn Brown (R) introduced House Bill 206, that would require victims of rape to carry resulting pregnancies to term because the fetus would be considered evidence in the rape case. Passage of the bill would mean that women seeking abortions to terminate rape-induced pregnancies would be charged with a third-degree felony–carrying a sentence of up to three years in prison–for “tampering with evidence”.
Official language of the bill:
Tampering with evidence shall include procuring or facilitating an abortion, or compelling or coercing another to obtain an abortion, of a fetus that is the result of criminal sexual penetration or incest with the intent to destroy evidence of the crime.
Roe v Wade Anniversary Round Up
Salon has 5 things you may not know about Roe
Samara Azam-Yu at colorlines shares the 5 things she learned about abortion by checking her assumptions at the door.
An NBC/WSJ poll finds that a majority of Americans do not want Roe v Wade overturned
The Wall Street Journal Wonkblog provides a brief history of abortion activism since Roe V. Wade, and talks with activists who have spent their entire careers fighting for abortion rights. According to one, “it’s never been this frightening before.”
The Guardian provides a history of the Democratic and Republican party responses to Roe and after reviewing 40 years of party platforms finds that “the GOP has padded their pro-life credentials more than ever in 2012, following a pronounced trajectory towards the right.”
Jill Filipovic editorializes,
“Outlawing abortion doesn’t lead to a lower abortion rate, and some of the countries with the highest abortion rates on the planet are places where it’s illegal. So if outlawing abortion doesn’t mean fewer abortions, what purpose does it serve? Punishing women and making their lives miserable, apparently – illegal abortion doesn’t mean fewer abortions, it means more dangerous procedures and higher maternal mortality rates. Thirteen per cent of maternal deaths around the world result from unsafe illegal abortions.”
Finally, EMILY’s List President Stephanie Schriock suggests that the recent unprecedented electoral success of pro-choice Democratic women is cause for some optimism.
via the always amazing Guttmacher Institute:
Against the backdrop of a contentious presidential campaign in which abortion and even contraception were front-burner issues —to a degree unprecedented in recent memory—supporters of reproductive health and rights were able to block high-profile attacks on access to abortion in states as diverse as Alabama, Idaho, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Similarly, the number of attacks on state family planning funding was down sharply, and only two states disqualified family planning providers from funding in 2012, compared with seven in 2011. That said, no laws were enacted this year to facilitate or improve access to abortion, family planning or comprehensive sex education.
Senate Democratic Leader Gretchen Whitmer speaking out against extremist anti-women legislation being pushed through the legislature during lame duck session.
When Pro-Life Kills
Katha Pollitt weighs in for The Nation:
Remember when Joe Walsh, the Republican congressman from Illinois, claimed a ban on abortion needs no exception to save the life of the woman? “With modern science and technology, you can’t find one instance,” he said, in which a woman’s life could have been saved by abortion. Well, how about this instance: In Ireland, where abortion is strictly forbidden, doctors allowed 32-year-old Savita Halapannavar to die of septicemia after days of horrendous suffering, because her 17-week-old fetus, which she was in the process of miscarrying, still had a heartbeat. Never mind that there was no way this fetus could have survived. Never mind that technically, Ireland’s abortion ban permits an exception when there is a “real and substantial risk to the life of the mother.” The doctors let Savita die, as she and her husband pleaded for them to end the pregnancy. “This is a Catholic country,” one doctor explained. The always cogent and knowledgeable Jodi Jacobson explains it all here and here.
If you think it couldn’t happen in the United States, you haven’t been paying attention…With conscience clauses expanding to cover not just individual doctors but whole hospitals, a pregnant woman may find her care is being dictated not by standard health protocols but by a religion she doesn’t even follow. Savita was a Hindu, after all. What about her conscience?
Who is more valuable, a living woman or a dying fetus? The Catholic Church has given its answer, and Savita Halapannavar is dead. If this was Islam, we’d never hear the end of it.
(Source: thenation.com)
“And if I have to listen to one more grey-faced man with a $2 haircut explain to me what rape is, I’m going to lose my mind.” — Tina Fey speaking at the Center for Reproductive Rights Inaugural Gala.
(Source: thatcablenewsblog, via bossypants)
Amy Poehler and Meryl Streep Are Pissed About Attacks on Reproductive Rights
The past year of escalating attacks on reproductive health care—you may remember hits such as the “forced transvaginal ultrasound” and calling a woman a “slut” because she believes insurance companies should cover contraception—have really proved a bridge too far for the anti-choice movement. The various outrages have caused ordinary people who usually tune out of these sorts of things to actually tune in, forcing Mitt and Ann Romney to go on their “I love women” tour. And now the anti-choicers have really done it, provoking a group that can pretty much get anyone’s attention: celebrities.
Today, the Center for Reproductive Rights is releasing a new, star-studded campaign featuring Kevin Bacon, Sarah Silverman, Amy Poehler, Audra McDonald, Bill Crudup, Martha Plimpton and Meryl Streep, all getting irate at the dismissive, misogynist language that’s been pissing a lot of us off for years. The Georgia lawmaker that they mention, who compared women to farm animals, is likely Terry England, who defended forcing women to complete pregnancies, even when the fetus has defects incompatible with life, by saying, “I’ve had the experience of delivering calves, dead and alive—delivering pigs, dead and alive.”
Romney’s trickery: rather than acknowledging his clear anti-choice stance, Romney skirts the issue by saying that there is no current abortion bill in front of Congress that he knows of that’s part of his agenda. Of course this doesn’t mean he wouldn’t approve of or advocate for or sign a bill limiting or banning reproductive rights after being elected - if Romney’s own words are any indication, he certainly would.
(Source: girl-non-grata, via feminishblog)
