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As Abortion Rights Shrink, What’s the Best Language to Use to Protect Women’s Options?

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As leaders like Planned Parenthood are dropping “pro-choice” language, is there a smart alternative—and should there be one?

By Alyssa Figueroa / AlterNet

Planned_Parenthood_HCR
Across America, reproductive freedom is shrinking. Even with Alabama’s recent court victory protecting abortion rights in that deep red state, the overwhelming trend is very discouraging.

Red-state Republicans have shut down clinics in states like Texas. The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld protesters’ right to harass women going to clinics. State legislatures haveenacted 21 new abortion restrictions so far this year. Worse yet, recent research has found that while many young women support the substance of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark Supreme Court ruling that affirmed the right to end pregnancies, they are still apt to label themselves pro-life.

What’s going wrong? There’s no one answer. But a striking development is that the reproductive health movement is backing away from its longtime “pro-choice” label. Planned Parenthood has recently decided to drop it in favor of newer messaging that seeks to connect abortion with a wide range of women’s issues.   [Read more…]

Sorry, Pantene, You’re Holding Women Back Too

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The shampoo company could do a lot more to further feminine empowerment.

By Jill Richardson / OtherWords

A Pantene commercial that tells women to stop apologizing and “#ShineStrong” has gone viral. It contrasts scenes of women saying things like “Sorry, can I ask a stupid question?” with snippets of them behaving in an assertive way.

Pantene’s commercial makes a good point, but there are bigger problems holding women back — including the role that beauty products play in our culture.

For me, author Laura Kipnis explains it best. “Femininity, at least in its current incarnation, hinges on sustaining an underlying sense of female inadequacy,” she says in her book The Female Thing: Dirt, Envy, Sex, and Vulnerability.   [Read more…]

Left Behind

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How LGBT Young People Are Excluded from Economic Prosperity

By Zenen Jaimes Pérez / Center for American Progress

The Millennial generation—the cohort of young people born in the early 1980s through the early 2000s—reflects the greatest level of generational diversity in U.S. history. More than at any other time, America’s young people are redefining the role of the workplace as a space in which workers from all types of diverse backgrounds come together.

This is particularly true of this generation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, or LGBT, people. While their experiences may vary based on where in the country they live, LGBT Millennials have an especially unique workplace experience relative to older generations of LGBT people, given that they are, on the whole, coming out earlier and expressing their gender identities and sexual orientations in all facets of their lives, including on the job.   [Read more…]

Lady Parts Justice Launches in 50 States

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National movement using humor and outrage to remove bodily autonomy-hating local politicians from office

By ladypartsjustice

Lady Parts Justice is the first not safe for work, rapid response reproductive rights messaging hub that uses comedy, culture and digital media to get people off their asses and reclaim their rights.

5 Reasons to Join Lady Parts Justice

Because neanderthal politicians are spending all their time making laws that put YOUR body squarely into THEIR hands.

  [Read more…]

Hilarious DIY Birth Control Solutions for Hobby Lobby Female Employees

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In the wake of the recent Supreme Court ruling, here are some homemade solutions for female Hobby Lobby workers to prevent pregnancy.

By Jill Richardson / AlterNet

With the recent Supreme Court decision, allowing closely held corporations like Hobby Lobby to refuse to cover certain forms of birth control in their employee insurance plans, female employees might wonder how they will keep from getting pregnant. Not a problem! They can use their employee discounts to purchase low-cost items at any Hobby Lobby to make any number of DIY craft birth control projects.   [Read more…]

To Hell with Hobby Lobby

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By Lauree Benton

“Corporations are people, my friend.”

Women? Well… the jury is still out on that. Whether you are a person or not may depend on the religious views of your boss.

Makes sense I guess. The Constitution does say that all men are created equal.

I’m sure the ALL MALE majority who made this stirring decision is just looking out for us lady types. You know, we can’t be trusted.

Never mind that NONE of these men have ever dealt with the realities of human reproduction. Losing complete control over your body once a month. Uterine lining that decides it has better places to be. Cysts. Fibroids. Organ prolapse. Unexpected, complicated, and even dangerous pregnancies. All for the honor of ripping up your nether regions to push a basketball out of a hole the size of a dime.   [Read more…]

How About Sidewalk-Counseling the Conservative Movement?

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By Dante Atkins / Daily Kos

This past Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in the case of McCullen v. Coakley. The decision came down in favor of the plaintiff, an anti-abortion grandmother who challenged a Massachusetts law requiring a 35-foot protest-free buffer zone around abortion-providing medical facilities. The plaintiff successfully contended that such a buffer zone violated her free speech rights as they applied to the concept of peaceful “sidewalk counseling”—a somewhat Orwellian turn of phrase for the often-abusive methods anti-abortion activists use in their attempts to dissuade women from seeking the medical care to which they have a legal right.

Lawyers for the commonwealth argued unsuccessfully that the buffer zone law was necessary to protect patients and staff from violence and intimidation, while plaintiffs argued (and the court agreed) that there were already laws in place to deal with the more aggressive forms of “counseling” that these protesters might offer. And in an ideal world, one in which every act of intimidation and violence was prosecuted to its fullest extent, the court’s unanimous decision might be the correct one.   [Read more…]

Reactions to Supreme Court Hobby Lobby Decision Range From Real Disappointment to Really Dumb

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By Doug Porter

The Supreme Court saved its most controversial decisions for last for this session, announcing twin 5-4 votes yesterday in cases limiting public sector unions and extending the concept of corporations as persons to include the right to opt out of contraceptive coverage based on the religious beliefs of the owners.

While the rulings were narrower than they could have been, they triggered reactions filled with hyperbole and misinformation. For purposes of today’s column, we’ll take a look at responses to Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the ruling holding closely held corporations (90% of all companies) are “persons” as defined by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993.

Make no mistake about it, the creeping person-hood of corporations combined with a ruling favorable to the theocracy set is serious business. But the headlines at places like the Huffington Post were beyond the pale.   [Read more…]

Court Rulings: Corporations Are People; Women Not So Much

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By Doug Porter

Today was another day for bad news out of Washington. I knew there was trouble brewing when the announcement was made this morning that Supreme Court Justice Justice Samuel Alito would be reading the majority opinions for the high courts final decisions of this session.

First came the ruling (Harris v. Quinn) that home health care workers constituted a new class of “partial public employees” who cannot be required to contribute union bargaining fees. The ruling was narrower in scope than many unions feared a negative opinion might be, but significantly impacts one of fastest growing areas of labor organizing.

Then, in keeping with the current flair for the dramatic by Chief Justice Roberts (who decides when rulings will be announced), the Supreme Court (Burwell v. Hobby Lobby) held that closely held corporations (90% of all companies) are “persons” as defined by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, and can hold religious beliefs exempting them from the ObamaCare mandate on contraceptive coverage.

Again, the scope of this final ruling was not as broad as some analysts had feared. But if you happen to be a woman, its implications are huge.   [Read more…]

Respect Has No Gender – Why Chivalry Should Die If it Hasn’t Already

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By Lauree Benton

Men, stop opening her door.

Or, open the door for her. And the guy in front of her. And the guy behind her.

Open the door for everyone. Because it’s polite. Because you respect them as people. Because manners and civility are lovely things.

But under no circumstances should you open the door for a woman because she is a woman. That is not respect, it is benevolent sexism. And its time has passed.   [Read more…]

Increase In C-Sections Matches Rise In Fetal Protection Efforts, Reproductive Legislation

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Think you always have a choice over how to give birth? Think again.

By Michele Goodwin / AlterNet

When most women become pregnant, understandably they believe the choice of how they give birth will remain theirs; whether to deliver vaginally or through cesarean surgery or where to give birth, at home or at a hospital. Decades ago, those decisions were well within the domain of pregnant patients whose reproductive liberty and autonomy interests gained constitutional recognition in the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade.

After all, whose body is it anyway? But what may have seemed clear-cut decades ago, is now put to the test by doctors and lower courts.

Decades ago, refusing to undergo cesarean surgery was not a crime. That’s another matter now in the wake of recent “fetal protection” enactments that make it a crime for a pregnant woman to engage in any conduct that might threaten harm to a fetus. Some doctors believe this applies to how a woman gives birth.   [Read more…]

Obama to Issue Executive Order Against LGBTQ Discrimination

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Campaigners say White House move ‘will begin to undo one of the last vestiges of legally sanctioned discrimination.’

By Lauren McCauley / Common Dreams

In what is being hailed as a major victory for LGBTQ rights, the White House confirmed on Monday that President Obama is going to issue an executive order banning federal contractors from discriminating against people based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

“Barring discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity with taxpayer funds by all federal contractors will begin to undo one of the last vestiges of legally sanctioned discrimination,” said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, who called the news “historic.”   [Read more…]

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