On Tuesday, Texas Governor Rick Perry stopped by to lend a little good-old-boy masculinity to the opening of a branch of Houston’s The Source For Women, a crisis pregnancy center that Perry touted as the future of Texas’ new Women’s Health Program–a program explicitly designed and intended to serve women who are not, and don’t want to be, pregnant.
Weekly global roundup: The latest with the delayed RH Bill in the Philippines; HIV/AIDS stigma impedes maternal care in Kenya; Maternal deaths rise due to fighting in Yemen’s south; and the sex work industry booms in Madagascar.
Women’s private and public spheres converged in the bathroom of a bar in Mankato, MN with the recent installation of a pregnancy test vending machine.
Yesterday in a packed auditorium at the Texas Department of State Health Services, legislators, doctors and other supporters of Planned Parenthood gathered to speak out–sometimes through tears–against proposed rules that would bar Planned Parenthood from participating in the state’s Women’s Health Program.
According to the NIH, research indicates that the number of babies born with birth defects in places where Atrazine is sprayed is consistently higher in the months following its use. And the danger of Atrazine extends beyond physical imperfections in newborns.
Forced pregnancy testing in schools is a gross violation of young women’s fundamental human rights. It is a shock to see a practice I’ve come to associate with schools in the developing world being replicated in the United States.
A recent piece by Sierra published by RH Reality Check argued for the morality of aborting a disabled fetus. This is a response to that argument.
The GOP platform committee did not amend language from the 2004 and 2008 GOP platforms, which “assert the sanctity of human life,” and provide no exceptions to abortion in any case whatsoever. The committee add language opposing drugs such as mifepristone, but members agreed that this platform amendment did not apply to EC.
What we need to constantly keep in mind is how we are deciding who is most in need of help, and reevaluating how that fits in with our values. Are we ok with only helping certain kinds of people who need abortions? Can we strategize for a future in which we don’t have to make these tough decisions? How can we get there?
The real question that needs to be addressed is not whether rape can cause pregnancy. The question is: will measures that ban women who have been impregnated by rape from having abortions be enacted, enabling rapists, with state support, even greater power to deprive women of their dignity and personhood?
