Pro-Choice Friday News Rundown

  • New Jersey’s new governor, Phil Murphy, undid the damage of his awful predecessor by restoring funding to Planned Parenthood. Yay!  (The Hill)

  • Democrats in the U.S. Senate are pressuring Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar to reverse a strategy coordinated with a prominent hate group to undermine family-planning access for people with low incomes. (Rewire)
  • The Department of Justice is appealing a California judge’s decision to temporarily block new Trump administration rules allowing more employers to opt out of providing no-cost birth control in their insurance plans. (ABC News)
  • South Carolina is trying to ban ALL abortions by granting legal rights to fertilized eggs from the moment of conception. Literally the worst idea ever. Eggs are not sentient beings. Period. (Salon)
  • Hmm … What to think of those who call themselves “pro-life” but sit quietly and idly by while gun violence steals the lives of innocent bystanders? (WaPo)
  • The abhorrent goons in the Trump administration are quietly helping states defund Planned Parenthood. (Vox)
  • This is unbelievable! Some states — including Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas — directly divert public funds allocated to feed hungry children to fake women’s health centers. (Rewire)
  • Get a load of this bull: The Trump administration created a new HHS office just to discriminate against people — and they housed it under the Office of Civil Rights. (The Hill)
  • A man crashed a stolen bakery truck into a Planned Parenthood clinic on Valentine’s Day in East Orange, New Jersey, injuring three people, including two staff members and a pregnant woman. Thankfully none of the injuries were life-threatening. (Southern Poverty Law Center)
  • Hey, North Carolina, maybe strapping female inmates to beds during childbirth isn’t the most compassionate protocol? (News & Observer)

Pro-Choice Friday News Rundown

  • Carl Djerassi with his assistant, Arelina Gonzalez, 1951A man to whom we owe tremendous gratitude, Carl Djerassi, one of the creators of THE birth control pill, passed away last week. (NYT)
  • Missouri wants to pass legislation forcing women about to undergo an abortion to watch a video warning them of alleged “abortion risks,” “including, but not limited to, infection, hemorrhage, cervical tear or uterine perforation, harm to subsequent pregnancies or the ability to carry a subsequent child to term, and possible adverse psychological effects.” Hmm, know what else carries those same risks annnnnd a higher risk of death? Carrying a pregnancy to term and delivering a baby. I’m guessing the video won’t promote that science, though! (Think Progress)
  • With the majority of pregnancies in the state being unintended (58 percent), the second-highest poverty rate in the United States, and one of the highest STD rates in the country, Louisiana needs Planned Parenthood. However, anti-abortion zealots in the state are fighting the opening of a new Planned Parenthood health center instead of starting a grassroots campaign to cure the issues causing the need. #Logic (Cosmopolitan)
  • Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan has come over from the Dark Side and is now pro-choice. So nice to have you — now please help effect change in your rabidly anti-abortion state, sir. (USA Today)
  • Michigan Rep. Brandon Dillon is on our side too now. Is there something in the water out there in the Midwest, and can we import it to Arizona, like, yesterday? (MLive)
  • Sugary drinks, obesity, and family distress are all cited as reasons for early puberty in young girls. (NYT)
  • The House (Republicans, of coooooourse) voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act again. ’Cause, ya know, the 56th time’s the charm. (NPR)
  • Grab your surgical and/or gas masks, fellow Arizonans. Hundreds of schools in our state are skirting the vaccination mandates at great peril to us all. (AZ Central)
  • Anti-abortion creeps and anti-vaccination creeps: birds of a stupid feather. (RH Reality Check)
  • AARP & Astroglide: The over-70 set is still actively sexing each other up! Good for them! (HuffPo)
  • From crisis pregnancy centers to clinic protesters, we’re quite used to abortion foes telling filthy lies to justify their agendas. Which is why it’s hard to be surprised that Texas got faux “experts” to lie and use discredited science to close half of the abortion clinics in the state. (Slate)

Pro-Choice Friday News Rundown

  • clintonHillary will not be backing down to anti-choice imbeciles. (Upworthy)
  • It’s not looking good for abortion clinics in Ohio. (USA Today)
  • And Michigan clinics are being affected as a result. (RH Reality Check)
  • Anti-choice ignoramus Lindsey Graham is absolutely positive that prohibiting abortion after 20 weeks is going to result in great things! (HuffPo)
  • Instead of taking their asses somewhere to help babies who’ve been born already, a bunch of #$%&^@# in New Mexico are tooling around in a van with graphic, gory (and probably fake) images of “late-term” fetuses who’ve supposedly been aborted. (Think Progress)
  • Just because you sign my paycheck doesn’t mean you get to dictate what I do with my uterus. When will that register with these people?!?!? (NYT)
  • OK, girls, let’s have a chat — if you don’t want to get pregnant, please use contraception. Don’t assume you have special uterine powers that will automatically repel an embryo from showing up at your uterus’ door. (Jezebel)
  • Politicos who try to interfere with women’s use of birth control are in for a rude awakening come election time. #StartPackingYourBags (PolicyMic)
  • Get a load of this tripe: The buffoon known as Rush Limbaugh thinks women have no agency in their reproductive choices and are being “turned into abortion machines” by Democrats. (MSNBC)
  • Interesting Slate piece on how the victims of the Hitler regime are affecting the abortion debate. (Slate)

Pro-Choice Friday News Rundown

  • Better late than never: Pregnant women in the military who were victims of rape will now have access to abortion. (HuffPo)
  • A new condom, which delivers an anti-HIV drug and dissolves after use, is being developed! (i09)
  • Ireland is finally going to legalize life-saving abortions after their complicity in the death of a 31-year-old woman. (ABC News)
  • The Washington Post is dropping knowledge on how Planned Parenthood rocked the 2012 elections. (WaPo)
  • What happens to women who are denied abortions? Nothing good. (i09)
  • Deaths related to unsafe abortions and abortion bans around the world are wildly underestimated. (Salon)
  • Further proving they could give a damn about post-born children, Michigan lawmakers eliminate tax credit for children, prefer tax credit for fetuses. (Jezebel)
  • Pediatrics Group Calls for Easier Access to Emergency Contraception (ABC News)
  • Mississippi’s sole abortion clinic lives to fight another day. (CRR)
  • Another day, another moron talking out of his keister about rape — this time it’s a California judge who says that a woman’s body can shut down to prevent itself from being raped. (Guardian)
  • Our beloved home, Arizona, has launched a manipulative government website to shame women out of getting abortions. (Jezebel)
  • A new study shows women who waited 15 years after their first period to have children had 60 percent less chance of developing an aggressive form of breast cancer. (The Atlantic)
  • Dear guy who founded Domino’s: Your religious beliefs should have no impact on the reproductive health of your female employees. Oh, and another thing — your pizza sucks. (The Daily Meal)
  • Petty, imbecilic Karen Handel, formerly of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, wants the world to know that Planned Parenthood hijacked the color pink from them. They owned the color, after all. (Feministe)

Becoming a Woman

Vagina. It is a fairly innocuous word, don’t you think? But in today’s America, it has become more than a correct clinical term for female genitalia; it has become a naughty word. Suddenly, in a presidential election year notable for its lack of substance and abundance of acrimony, the vagina has taken center stage. The rules, however, for its inclusion seem to be muddy. Countless state legislatures have passed increasingly draconian laws that relate directly to the vagina. Ironically, the majority of people who have been most vocal in anti-vagina activities do not have one. In Michigan, at least, it has even become a word whose use can get you banned from speaking on the legislative floor. Love, lust, empowerment: These are all words that describe feelings different people have about vaginas. But what about envy?


The closer I am to getting a vagina, the more I understand that I don’t actually need one to be the woman I am.


A few days ago, I received a private Facebook message from a dear friend. It began, “I got to see my vagina today. For the very first time, my vagina. I know you know how significant that is and I only wish the same for you and soon. It will change your life.”

My friend, Natasha, sent this from her hospital room in Montreal, where she is recuperating from the most significant surgery anyone like us can ever undergo: gender affirmation surgery. We are transgender, which, for those few of you who might not know, is the phenomenon where the gender identity that is programmed into the brain of a fetus does not coincide with the physical sex into which that fetus develops. To make a million long stories short, it is unarguably one of the most painful conditions imaginable, largely because the person suffering from it has to fight tooth and nail to make people understand that it’s real. Continue reading

Pro-Choice Friday News Rundown

  • Unwelcome news for anti-choicers: Remember how the FDA and everyone else thought the “morning after pill” (aka Plan B) might prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in a uterus? Well, turns out that’s totally and completely wrong. Emergency contraception simply makes it harder for sperm to reach the egg by stalling an egg’s release until sperm can no longer fertilize it. What it doesn’t do is stop a pregnancy from occurring if the egg has already been fertilized. (NYT)
  • Bad news for all you sex-havers: Gonorrhea is growing resistant to drugs and could soon be untreatable. (ABC News)
  • Despite Lila Rose’s latest anti-choice “sting” here in Arizona, the facts remain unchanged on the rarity of sex-selective abortion. Nice try, though. (Media Matters)
  • More on Lila’s foolery and how much she and Live Action suck. (RH Reality Check)
  • Sperm cell genes may be the key to male birth control. (MSNBC)
  • Think about this for a sec: If you believe sex is sinful, the policies that increase teen pregnancy and STD rates are a success. Makes sense to me! (Double X)
  • Michigan’s trying to best Arizona in the anti-choice state championships. (Jezebel)
  • Montana’s trying their hand at a personhood initiative — despite the fact that similar measures in other states have failed spectacularly. (Ms. Magazine)
  • If you or anyone you know is taking the birth control pill Introvale, beware — it’s been recalled! (CBS News)