• Steve Barton, who was shot in Aurora while on a trip with a buddy, gave up his plans for a Fullbright scholarship teaching English in Russia and now works for Mayors Against Illegal Guns. Steve spoke about the need for each of us to work to see that events like this never happen to anyone else. He urged us to demand that the legislators pass the three bills before Congress - assault weapons ban, background checks and gun trafficking.
• Colin Goddard, of the Brady Campaign, was sitting in a classroom at Virginia Tech conjugating verbs when he was shot. He lay there thinking that he would not make it and witnessed many in his classroom not survive. Colin mentioned that he had been in ROTC and knew about guns but could not understand the need for military assault weapons for the general public. He spoke passionately about the struggle ahead and how we must make calls, send emails, write letters and visit our lawmakers. He said that our voices have to be loud, louder than the shrill cry from the otherside.
• Representative Ron Barber (D-AZ) left the Hill and a vote to speak with us. He poignantly spoke of seeing first Congresswoman Giffords shot, then the Judge next to him, and then realizing he was wounded. He spoke of the mere 19.5 seconds it took to take 6 lives and wound 12 others. Seconds. Without large magazine capacity clips many of the lives that were lost or shattered could not have happened. He spoke about being a gun owner and the need to know the difference between sport and massacre. He also addressed the mental health issues. Rep. Barber sits on the Democratic Congressional Gun Violence Prevention Task Force and he discussed some of the 15 solutions/actions that the task force has identified.
• Cynthia Hogan, Deputy Asst to the President and Vice President, is a legal expert who worked on VAWA in 1994 and currently is involved in the Gun Violence Prevention. She explained the bills that were pending. She explained that in Holder the right to bear arms was established so do not believe the myths that guns will be confiscated. She also said that that ruling did set limits on the types of weapons that can be in the general public.
• Karen Volker, who was formerly with the State Department, is now the DC executive director Cure Violence. She spoke of violence as an epidemic. Cure goes into places where violence is increasing and trains members of the community in how to help work with those that are troubled. Based on the premise that violence is an epidemic and cannot be treated and monitored much like any other epidemic, it goes to the root of the issue. How do we stop the behavior before there is an eruption.
• Representative Jackie Speier (D-CA) also a member of the Democratic Congressional Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, left votes to come speak before us. She was responsible for some of the strict gun safety laws in CA. She spoke of confronting a fellow legislator who asked her if she had ever fired an assault weapon. She paused and said no, but she had been shot 5 times by one in Guyana and still had 2 of the bullets lodged in her body. Needless to say the legislation passed that day and now she is a strong, loud voice for protections on a federal level. We know her as a champion for women and now we see her as a stalwart supporter of establishing federal laws that protect us all.
• Nancy Robinson, Executive Eirector of Citizens for Safety, gave a visual illustration of the importance of understanding where people get guns. She believes that knowing the source is vital to stop gun trafficking. She said that just penalizing straw buyers is not enough. In fact many straw buyers are women who are coerced into buying and carrying these guns. She thinks we must educate these buyers.  She also spoke about national polls vs state polls and knowing how to use these when we urge our legislators to act.

Call, email, write letters, visit. WE NEED TO HEAR YOU. We need you to drown out the other voices.

 

Over the holiday recess, go to Town Hall meetings and speak up. Be part of it. Don’t wait for another tragedy - in your own backyard or that of a fellow American.

This week Arkansas became the 10th state to outlaw abortion after 20 weeks by overturning the governor's veto on this law - a limit which violates the Supreme Court's legal threshold.

Arkansas adopted new abortion limits Thursday, outlawing most abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, even as its State Senate approved a more restrictive bill that would ban abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy.

Gov. Mike Beebe, a Democrat, had vetoed the 20-week limit on Tuesday, saying it was likely to be found unconstitutional, but the newly Republican-controlled Senate voted to override Mr. Beebe’s veto on Thursday; the House had already done so Wednesday. The measure is set to take effect immediately.

 

Arkansas is the 10th state to outlaw abortions after 20 weeks, in part based on the theory that fetuses can feel pain at that stage, a notion disputed by mainstream medical associations.

 

The 20-week limit also violates the legal threshold set by the Supreme Court, which has held that states cannot ban abortions before the fetus becomes viable. Such a limit has not yet been tested by the courts.

Read more at New York Times

Women spilled across the broad expanse of Fifth Avenue, the streets of Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Main Street America.  Thousands of women, men, and children heard the call for a mass demonstration to strike for women's equality on August 26, 1970.  This marked the 50th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote.  This rally underscored that the modern feminist movement was a player in American politics and society. The mass demonstration and the brave women of the modern feminist movement, starting with Betty Friedan, author of "The Feminine Mystique," were the subject of the documentary "Makers" on PBS this month.  The film celebrates the many women whose vision organized and made possible the impossible for women long restricted by laws and society.

For many of us, it was a reliving of an "Aha" moment in our lives.  We were more than the "little woman" and we could do more than dream of a life outside the home.  It brought back the days before legal abortions and the right to make one's personal decisions legally about childbearing. It brought back the sisterhood of women as we fought to be regarded as equal.

For many, it was a lesson in how women have progressed and how the rights that many women assume were always there were fought for by their mothers, aunts, and grandmothers.  The film explores younger women who are trying to understand the feminist movement. Some are angry that their mothers taught them there were no limitations and now they must be superwomen.  They question if they can "have it all." Should they try?  What does the feminist movement mean in their lives?

To those who struggle with question of equality, the facts are hard.  Women who work and have a fifty-fifty husband/partner still feel maternal guilt and do more for the children.  But because of the movement, they can choose to work full-time, part-time, now, later, or not at all.  The operative word is "choice." They can choose to control their reproductive health and plan their lives.  They hold this right because of the struggles that went before.

Women today have the right to choose career over marriage and not be judged a failure.  They can attempt to reach for the stars.  But there is much left to do. Women still do not get equal pay for equal work, their reproductive rights are being challenged and lost in many states and the ERA has still never passed.

The Conservative "pro-life" movement continues to score many victories in state legislatures.  Abortion is virtually impossible in a number of states.  Women are at risk to going back to the days of life-threatening choices.  We must look at history and resolve that we are no less than the brave women who made our lives more equal.  Join JAC as we work to ensure that these rights are not a page in history.  It is time to complete this chapter and together we can write the best ending for future generations.

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Forget six degrees of Kevin Bacon.  Sally Oren can connect Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia, and Jefferson Airplane to Bibi Netanyau!

Scholars of Middle East politics and students of the San Francisco–centered psychedelic-rock movement of the 1960s have for years asked the same vexing question: Just how many degrees of separation exist between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia?

 

The answer, it turns out, is one. The person who connects Benjamin Netanyahu directly to Jerry Garcia—and Shimon Peres to Jim Morrison, and, for that matter, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to Janis Joplin—is Sally Oren, the wife of Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States. Oren, who today is in her early 60s, plays the role of diplomat’s spouse with distinction and grace. She hosts embassy functions and speaks at Jewish communal gatherings; she wears elegant gowns and attends White House parties. Forty-five years ago, however, she played Frisbee with the Grateful Dead and served as Jefferson Airplane’s muse.

 

I have known Oren for years, but only recently did I learn about her strange and enchanting past. At a dinner that included senators and Supreme Court justices, her daughter, Lia, told me—apropos of what, exactly, I cannot recall—“Jefferson Airplane wrote a song about my mother.”

 

I trusted Lia, but something like this demanded confirmation.

“Did Jefferson Airplane write a song about you?,” I asked Oren. Somewhat abashed, she answered, “Two songs, actually.”

Read more at The Atlantic

A new report from MotherJones shows that access to "the morning after pill" does not make women more promiscuous.

The so-called morning-after pill has exploded in popularity since it was first approved by the Food and Drug Administration 15 years ago. According to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 5.8 million American women used emergency contraception (EC) between 2006 and 2010. Nearly a quarter of sexually active women ages 20 through 24 have used it. 

 

All told, 11 percent of fertile, sexually active women said they had used EC, whereas back in 2002, the last time CDC surveyed women, only 4 percent had.

 

While more people are using EC, what's most interesting is who is using it and how. For instance, only 5 percent of women over 30 have used it. And most who have say they have only done so once—a rebuttal to the stereotype that the morning-after pill is enabling women to be irresponsible hussies.

Read more at MotherJones

The House leadership continues its attack on women by introducing  a version of VAWA that again strips the expanded provisions of the bipartisan Senate bill passed last week.

House Republican leaders quietly unveiled their Violence Against Women Act reauthorization bill on Friday, a proposal that differs from what the Senate passed last week in a handful of ways, namely in its omission of LGBT protections and its modified language targeting Native American victims of domestic abuse.

 

The GOP proposal was posted on the House Rules Committee website with little fanfare, along with an announcement that the committee will begin moving the bill forward in a Tuesday hearing. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) will sponsor the bill and the House is expected to bring it to a full vote later next week, a House Republican leadership aide confirmed.

 

Here is a link to their 288-page bill and a section-by-section analysis of what's in it. House Republicans are planning to take up the Senate bill, strip its contents and put their language into that bill.

 

A cursory look at the bill reveals some notable changes from the bipartisan VAWA bill that cleared the Senate last week.

The House GOP bill entirely leaves out provisions aimed at helping LGBT victims of domestic violence. Specifically, the bill removes "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" from the list of underserved populations who face barriers to accessing victim services, thereby disqualifying LGBT victims from a related grant program. The bill also eliminates a requirement in the Senate bill that programs that receive funding under VAWA provide services regardless of a person's sexual orientation or gender identity. Finally, the bill excludes the LGBT community from the STOP program, the largest VAWA grant program, which gives funds to care providers who work with law enforcement officials to address domestic violence.

Read more at Huffington Post

With the passage of a HR 592, the House seems to be blurring the lines of separation between Religion & State.

The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a bill Feb. 13 to allow houses of worship damaged by Hurricane Sandy to receive disaster aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, despite warnings by advocacy groups that the measure flouts the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state.

 

House members voted 354-72 for HR 592, the Federal Disaster Assistance Nonprofit Fairness Act of 2013. The bill, co-authored by Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) and Rep. Grace Meng (D-NY), now heads to the Senate.

 

The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty was among groups making last-ditch efforts to ask members of Congress to think twice before passing legislation that could have serious consequences for religious liberty.

Read more at ABP News

Israel is reportedly setting up a field hospital to treat refugees from Syria near the northern border.

The IDF is reportedly preparing to erect a field hospital near Israel’s border with Syrian border on the Golan Heights in order to treat Syrian nationals wounded in the ongoing fighting and attempting to cross into Israel for medical assistance.

 

The decision to set up the hospital was taken two days after Israeli troops — in an unprecedented move in the two-year Syrian civil war — evacuated seven wounded Syrian refugees to an Israeli hospital after they had approached the border and appealed for help.

 

According to the plan, reported by Channel 10 on Monday night, the makeshift hospital will be set up close to the border in the central Golan Heights or near the Quneitra border crossing with Syria. The logic behind the move, the report said, was for Israel to be prepared to meet further possible medical pleas from additional Syrian refugees without having to take them for treatment inside Israeli territory.

Read more at Times of Israel

The IDF reportedly expects that after Saturday’s incident, Syrian refugees will flock to Israel for sanctuary from the bloody civil war that has

Indiana is closer to mandating not one, but two invasive vaginal ultrasounds when a woman has a medication-induced abortion.

The Indiana state Senate on Wednesday advanced a bill that would require women to undergo an ultrasound procedure both before and after having a medication-induced abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy.

The Senate Health and Provider Services Committee approved Senate Bill 371 on Wednesday by a vote of 7 to 5, sending it to a full vote in the state Senate. The bill, introduced by state Sen. Travis Holdman (R), imposes heavy regulations on clinics and physicians that offer medication abortions, which are generally used to end a pregnancy up to 10 weeks from a woman's last period. It would require women to be presented with the sound and image of the fetal heartbeat before the abortion and to return for a follow-up ultrasound to ensure that she is no longer pregnant and has stopped bleeding.

Dr. Anne Davis, the consulting medical director for Physicians for Reproductive Health, said the requirement would place an undue burden on women seeking to end their pregnancies. "She can do a blood test at any local facility after an abortion to show that the hormone levels are going down as they should, there's no medical reason to make her drive back to the abortion clinic and go through another ultrasound," she said. "This is yet another onerous, medically unnecessary barrier."

Both ultrasounds, abortion physicians explain, would likely have to be performed with a transvaginal probe, since medication abortions usually occur too early in the pregnancy for the external "jelly-on-the-belly" procedure to provide a clear image. Davis said that transvaginal ultrasounds are the "standard procedure" used for first-trimester abortions and that they can be "physically or emotionally uncomfortable." Requiring two of these ultrasounds, she said, would be medically unnecessary, and would make abortion access more difficult for poor and rural women who cannot get time off work, need to make childcare arrangements and have long distances to drive.

Read more at Huffington Post

The Senate has the 60 votes necessary to pass Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and override any possible filibuster.

Next up in the Senate: The Violence Against Women Act.

 

Senate Democrats have achieved the 60 votes necessary to bypass a filibuster and reauthorize the domestic violence legislation.

“JUST TOPPED ‘magic number’ of 60 bipartisan cosponsors of my #VAWA legisl.; We’re moving briskly toward Senate vote on the Leahy-Crapo Bill,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) wrote Thursday afternoon on Twitter.

 

The seven Republicans who have joined 53 Democrats in support of the legislation are Sens. Kelly Ayotte (NH), Susan Collins (ME), Mike Crapo (ID), Dean Heller (NV), Mark Kirk (IL), Jerry Moran (KS) and Lisa Murkowski (AK).

 

A floor vote is expected as early as next week.

Read more at Talking Points Memo

New plans to address contraception coverage objections for religious non-profit organizations would allow employees to still access coverage via a third party under their employer-based insurance.

The Obama administration proposed broader latitude Friday for religious nonprofits that object to the mandated coverage of contraceptives, one that will allow large faith-based hospitals and universities to issue plans that do not directly provide birth control coverage.

 

Their employees would instead receive a stand-alone, private insurance policy that would provide contraceptive coverage at no cost.

 

The new proposal aims to find middle ground between faith-based nonprofits that have a religious opposition to contraceptives and women’s health advocates who vociferously supported the required coverage of birth control without co-payment.

 

It could also breathe new life into lawsuits filed against the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive requirement, some of which were put on hold until the Obama administration clarified its policy on the issue.

 

Under this proposal, objecting nonprofits will be allowed to offer employees a plan that does not cover contraceptives. Their health insurer will then automatically enroll employees in a separate individual policy, which only covers contraceptives, at no cost. This policy would stand apart from the employer’s larger benefit package.

 

The faith-based employer would not “have to contract, arrange, pay or refer for any contraceptive coverage to which they object on religious grounds.”

Read more at Washington Post

After hastily removing all evidence of her last attempt that would put the victims in jail, AZ lawmaker Cathrynn Brown is back with a new bill that would charge medical providers who perform an abortion for a rape victim with a felony.

We all remember last week when Republican state legislator Rep. Cathrynn Brown introduced a bill that would charge rape survivors seeking an abortion with a felony, right?

And we all remember when she was promptly Internet shamed and removed all evidence of the bill from her website, posthaste?

Well, she’s back. And so is the bill.

After finding out that the public doesn’t take too kindly to putting rape survivors in jail, Rep. Brown amended the legislation. Now, instead of charging women who terminate a pregnancy caused by rape with “tampering with evidence,” the updated bill will charge state abortion providers. Why? For “facilitating” the destruction of evidence.

So abortion after rape would still be a crime in New Mexico. And that is still a problem.

Read more at Salon.com

In a recent article with NYT Magazine, Israeli President Shimon Peres discusses Israel, Palestine, President Obama, Prime Minister Netanyahu, the Peace Process and much more.

“This part of the conversation is highly sensitive,” said the spokeswoman for Israel’s president. “I want all cellphones taken out of the room.” It was July 25, 2012, and I was interviewing Shimon Peres in a wood-paneled suite at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. I handed my phone to one of the guards standing at the door, and Peres swiftly opened a scathing monologue against a potential Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear sites. “Israel cannot solve the problem alone,” he said. “There is a limit to what we can do.”

 

Referring to the continuing tension between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama, Peres said: “I cannot tell you what Bibi’s considerations are on the subject of Iran. I am not his spokesman and also not [Defense Minister Ehud] Barak’s. That’s not my job. I am not looking for confrontations with them. I do think that I can explain the American pattern. America knows how to throw a punch when it has to, in order to keep the world balanced. But the punches follow a set procedure. They don’t begin by shooting. They try all the other means first — economic sanctions, political pressure, negotiations, everything possible.

 

“But in the end,” he added, “if none of this works, then President Obama will use military power against Iran. I am sure of it.”

 

I was surprised by Peres’s stridency. He had long been perceived as a moderating force on Netanyahu, a mediator between the prime minister and the international community that was losing patience with him. A month earlier, Obama awarded Peres the Presidential Medal of Freedom — America’s highest civilian honor. But the ceremony served only to deepen the rift between Peres and Netanyahu, and three weeks later, as reports became more frequent that Netanyahu was planning to send bombers to Iran, Peres took advantage of his 89th-birthday celebrations to speak out publicly against an attack. The prime minister’s office responded with ferocity, proclaiming, “Peres has forgotten what the president’s job is,” and recalling that in 1981, Peres opposed Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s decision to bomb Iraq’s nuclear reactor, an act that many Israelis consider a great achievement.

Read more at New York Times

With Roe v Wade turning 40, here is an interesting look at the national numbers from Think Progress.

Tuesday is the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that ensures legal access to abortion services. But four decades after Roe gave women the freedom to make their own reproductive choices, the reality for women in the U.S. isn’t so clear cut — even though more Americans now support legal abortion than ever before, abortion rights are under serious attack across the country. Here’s the current state of abortion rights in the U.S., by the numbers:

• 70: Percentage of Americans who now oppose overturning Roe, the highest number since 1989. Most religious groups also want to leave Roe in place.
• 135: Number of new state-level abortion restrictions enacted over the past two years. 2011 and 2012 represented the worst years for reproductive freedom since the 1973 Supreme Court decision.
• 87: Percentage of U.S. counties that don’t have an abortion clinic. At least four states — North Dakota, South Dakota, Arkansas, Mississippi — only have a single abortion clinic left.
• 45: By the time American women reach this age, nearly half of them will have had an unintended pregnancy at some point in their lives. About one in three will have had an abortion.
• 20: Number of states that allow insurers or employers to deny women affordable contraception by refusing to comply with Obamacare’s birth control mandate. Studies have shown that Obamacare’s contraception provision will help reduce the national abortion rate.
• $470: Average cost of a first-trimester abortion. Even though most of the women who have abortions have health insurance, the majority of women pay out of pocket to have an abortion.
• 42: Percentage of women who have abortions whose income levels fall below the federal poverty line. Seven out of ten women who have had an abortion would have preferred to have the procedure sooner, but many of them were forced to delay because they needed more time to raise the money for it.
• 0.3: Even fewer than this percentage of abortion patients experience complications from their procedure that require hospitalization. Studies have repeatedly shown that having an abortion is far safer than giving birth.

As the Roe v Wade decision reaches its 40th anniversary, Terri O'Neil, president of National Organization of Women, reflects on what it has meant and what still needs to be done.

Forty years ago this month, the Supreme Court affirmed a woman's right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. The landmark Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion in the United States, forever changing and literally saving the lives of countless women. The impact of Roe has been both inspiring and frustratingly insufficient.

 

Access to abortion care, as well as birth control, helped pave the way for women to participate in the world outside the home in ways that men have long taken for granted. During the second half of the 20th century, we witnessed the incredible transformation of women's role in U.S. society. Women streamed into universities and workplaces. They began taking on jobs that once seemed permanently reserved for men. They moved into positions of power in politics and corporations. Their economic status relative to men improved dramatically.

 

Could all this have happened without Roe v. Wade and the earlier cases that established the right to use contraception? Of course not. As now-retired U.S. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor once noted, women's ability to "organize intimate relationships and make choices that define their views of themselves and their place in society" was directly attributable to Roe. She continued: "The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives."

 

But the ongoing march toward full equality for all women requires more than an acknowledgement that a "right to choose" exists. One in three women will have an abortion before the age of 45, making the procedure a common and necessary aspect of women's reproductive health. But it is by no means the be-all and end-all of our health. Without access to the full spectrum of reproductive care—from prenatal care to mammograms, comprehensive sex education to STD/HIV screenings, in addition to birth control and abortion—a woman's ability to define her place in society will remain elusive. That these services are disproportionately out of reach for women of color, young women, immigrant women, and Native American women speaks to the limitations of Roe.

Read more at US News & World Report