Roundup: Insurance Lobby Wins Some, But Military Women Can Win Too

Feb 5, 2010, 9:13am

In the field of reproductive rights, you win some, and women lose some. Plus sometimes it seems for every step forward women make, someone wants to start you back at the beginning.

In the field of reproductive rights, you win some battles and you lose some. The struggle does make the victories seem sweet but I wonder why it’s got to be so darned hard all the time? Plus sometimes it seems for every step forward women make, someone wants to make us go back at the beginning. For example we had the happy
late-breaking
news last night that Department of Defense will now stock emergency
contraception "at
all of its hospitals and health clinics around the world." A great move
that took only 8 years since the Pentagon’s Pharmacy and Therapeutics
Committee, an advisory panel, first made such a recommendation.

Meanwhile in Colorado two state legislators had a great idea, let’s craft a bill that would expand insurance coverage of maternity care and contraception
to those who purchase health insurance individually, a mandate that 29 other states have. Great idea, right? Well the insurance
lobby managed to water down the bill.

Health
insurance lobbyists shuffled their papers and gazed at one another as Reps. Jerry Frangas and Beth McCann explained that they would amend the bill to
make it more friendly to the insurance industry in order to make sure it passed
through committee and onto the floor of the House.

"We need to take a step," McCann told the
Colorado Independent. "We can discuss further steps, but we need to get this
going so that women and families can at least have an option. We felt that
after speaking to members of the committee and representatives of the insurance
industry that we would be able to get the ball rolling if we didn’t mandate
[coverage] for every policy,"

The
bill would have required that all individual insurance plans in the state cover
maternity care and contraception, the way group plans do, but the amendment
altered the bill to demand that all insurance companies offer at least one plan
for individual policyholders that includes maternity care. Contraception is not
included in the present version of the bill. The new version passed out of the House Business Affairs
and Labor Committee with all 11 committee
votes.

Meanwhile, while Iowa
is considering a bill that could expand
the availability of free birth control for low-income women, there is a
simultaneous movement to create a state constitutional
amendment redefining "personhood" to begin at conception.

Sixteen
Iowa lawmakers – 15 Republicans and one Democrat – have begun a process that
could result in an amendment of the Iowa Constitution, but the focus isn’t
same-sex marriage. The proposed amendment calls for the state to recognize human
eggs as persons worthy of legal protection, effectively ending any access to
abortion and possibly to contraception.

The language introduced in Iowa
reads as follows:

The right to life is the paramount
and most fundamental right of every person. With respect to the fundamental and
inalienable rights of all persons guaranteed in this Constitution, the word
"person’ applies to all human beings, irrespective of age, health, function,
physical or mental dependency, or method of reproduction, whether in vivo or in
vitro, from the beginning of their biological development, including the
single-cell human embryo.

The statement was introduced as a
joint resolution to amend the Iowa Constitution. In order for the amendment to
become law it would need to be adopted in two separate sessions of the Iowa
legislature before being placed on the ballot for final ratification in a
public vote. The measure was introduced and sent to the House Committee on
State Government, where it was further referred to a subcommittee. There is no
reason to believe, given the current make-up of the Iowa legislature and the
committee reviewing the bill, that this measure will find a path to the chamber
floor – at least not during the current legislative session.

In Other News:
Those living around Atlanta will soon be seeing giant
billboards touting the "Black Genocide."

And the pro-choice groups in Virginia who are seeking at
pro-choice specialty license plate to be created by an act of the General
Assembly hasn’t
encountered any legislative resistance … yet. Although the state’s new
attorney general sure
isn’t a fan.

February 5, 2010

Birth
Control Sabotage and Coercion by Teenage Boys- What I Think EmpowHer

Abortion-rights
supporters want specialty license plate Richmond Times Dispatch

Ignatieff
misleads on abortion Toronto Star

Illegal Abortions Korea Times

Focus on
the Family buys pre-game ad time for Super Bowl USA Today

How Sperm
Swim: A Clue for Male Contraception? TIME

Pro-life
Leaders Respond to Criticism for Backing ‘Pro-Choice’ Brown Lifesite

What
about ManCrunch? New Yorker

Study:
Iowa’s publicly funded family planning is cost-effective Media Newswire

February 4, 2010

Plans to speed
up child adoption BBC News