Lynda Waddington is a New Journalist Fellow with the Center for Independent Media. She and her husband live in eastern Iowa with their three children, two cats and dog. She worked for a decade as a print journalist before beginning her own communications consulting business. When writing annual reports and building web sites failed to placate the printer's ink still pumping through her veins, she and two friends launched Essential Estrogen, a blog that focuses on women in politics with a special emphasis on Iowa women. As a New Journalist Fellow, Lynda is a regular contributor to Iowa Independent.
Stupak-Pitts is a slippery slope: For example, every health insurance company in America could now lose some of its tax benefits. And you could just say that anybody that got a federal loan for housing could not get an abortion.
Expanding insurance coverage is important, experts say, but only half the battle. For many Americans, particularly in rural areas, access to high quality health care could remain elusive.
Two religious organizations have called on the Family Research Council to shut down a television ad and Web site that contain “massive misinformation” related to the national discussion on health care reform.
The case of an Iowa man sentenced to the maximum allowed by state law for failing to disclose to a one-time intimate partner that he was HIV-positive has been cited as evidence of the need to reevaluate state criminal transmission laws.
The current state of health care delivery in America is so grim that U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin no longer uses the word “care” in reference to reform.
In 1985, over 87 percent of hospitals in remote areas provided obstetric services. Seventeen years later, less than half of existing hospitals offered obstetric services to their communities.
Women living in rural Iowa who need reproductive health care — from contraception to diagnostic tests to abortion — are too often left without access to the services they need.
Shortages of nurses continue to cause concern among elected officials and health care analysts in Iowa, increasing pressure for solutions.
Driving across a rural Iowa highway, anti-abortion signs are almost as common a sight as farmers spraying crops. Now there is a growing body of evidence linking the substances sprayed on fields to human reproductive health issues, including unintended abortions.
Despite the fact that Iowa’s defense of marriage act was passed with the help of Democrats, Republicans throughout the state are connecting the dots between the recent court opinion legalizing same-sex marriage and elections in 2010.
