Citing the right of parents to be involved in their children's lives, the House Judiciary Committee has passed a bill that would make it a crime for anyone but a parent to accompany a minor across state lines to have an abortion and would impose a prison sentence on any doctor who performed an abortion on an out-of-state minor without a parent present.  This bill now goes to the House floor where is has 158 cosponsors and a companion bill awaiting in the Senate.

The House Judiciary Committee voted 20-13 on Tuesday to advance a bill that would make it a crime for anyone but a parent to accompany a young woman outside of her home state to have an abortion. The committee rejected several proposed amendments that would have provided exceptions for victims of rape or incest, women facing threats to their health, and grandparents and older siblings trying to accompany their family members to abortion clinics.

 

The Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act (CIANA), sponsored by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), imposes a prison term of up to a year for a doctor who performs an abortion on an out-of-state minor that is not accompanied by a parent. It has 158 cosponsors in the House and a companion bill in the Senate.

 

"This legislation is based on common-sense," Ros-Lehtinen said in a statement on Monday. "Parents have the right to be involved in their children’s lives."

 

Opponents of the bill argue that it fails to consider the extenuating circumstances in which a teen would turn to another adult -- such her grandmother or adult sister -- for support, and could force young women to instead turn to unsafe alternatives to terminating her pregnancy.

Read more at Huffington Post

Thursday, March 8 is International Women's Day, and Republicans in Congress are celebrating by debating a new bill that would restrict abortion rights.

 

The House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution held a hearing on Thursday to discuss the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act (CIANA), which is sponsored by two Florida Republicans, Marco Rubio in the Senate and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in the House. The bill would make it illegal for anyone but a parent to accompany a young woman across state lines to seek an abortion -- even if her parents are absent or abusive.

 

Perhaps more significantly, the bill is the latest in a long series of attempts by Republican lawmakers to criminalize physicians who perform abortions, to chip away at women's constitutionally protected right to decide when and if they will have a child and to otherwise politicize women's health.

In response to recently proposed legislation aimed at stating life begins at conception and others requiring invasive testing to make sure women "know the facts" prior to having an abortion, several state lawmakers around the country have introduced bills to ensure that men are informed of importance of medical testing for erectile dysfunction and the dangers its treatment can pose, as well as legislation requiring testing prior to a vasectomy. 

On Tuesday, Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner (D-Cleveland) will introduce a bill aimed at cracking down on prescription drugs like Viagra that treat erectile dysfunction. Turner’s legislation would make men jump through certain hoops — such as psychological screenings — before they could obtain the meds. The bill follows FDA recommendations to determine the underlying causes of erectile dysfunction — but that’s certainly not the only reason Turner is putting the measure forward.

“All across the country, including in Ohio, I thought since men are certainly paying great attention to women’s health that we should definitely return the favor,” Turner told TPM. Her bill is one of several pieces of legislation offered over the past several weeks by women lawmakers eager to prove a point about the raging contraception debate.  Their bills seek to regulate men’s sexual health, from Viagra to vasectomies, just as Republican-led state governments and Congress have zeroed in on access to abortion and family planning care.

 

Turner’s bill mimics language found in Ohio’s so-called Heartbeat Bill, which passed the Ohio state House and is now pending in the Senate. The bill would ban abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detected, sometimes as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. Turner’s bill, she says, offers men a taste of their own medicine — it would require physicians to inform patients in writing of the risks involved in taking erectile dysfunction drugs and requires men to sign a document acknowledging the risks, just like the anti-abortion bill does.

Read more at Talking Points Memo

An LA Times Editorial calls on Rep. Darrell Issa and other politicians to get back to governing and stop playing politics with their power, their committees and women's health.

When Rep. Darrell Issa, the California Republican who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, convened a hearing Thursday on religious freedom and the mandate that health insurers cover contraception, he ignited a firestorm of protest before he even started.

The first of two panels he assembled was all male — something that a Democratic congresswoman on the committee noted immediately and not favorably, given thatwomen's healthwas at the heart of what was being discussed. A photo of the panel of clergymen at a table before the committee went viral on Facebook.

The Democrats who made political hay of Issa's choice of witnesses were right; surely it says something troubling that the committee didn't bother to find a single woman to testify on its first panel. (There were two on the second.) But it is at least as troubling that there was no one at all — male or female, on either panel — called to testify in support of the Obama administration's proposed mandate.

Read more at the Los Angeles Times

A new chart shows the extreme positions of the GOP Presidential candidates when it comes to women's health care.  It's not just about contraception and abortion.

Conservatives have launched an all-out assault on affordable access to birth control, but their war on women’s health care doesn’t stop at contraception. We’ve compiled a chart showing the extreme positions on women’s health care issues that the four remaining GOP presidential contenders have taken. To a man, they oppose everything from no-cost coverage for cancer screenings to the elimination of domestic violence as a preexisting condition.

Read more at Think Progress

A new poll by CBS/New York Times shows that a majority of Americans, including Catholics, support the coverge of birth control in health insurance plans.

The new CBS/New York Times poll shows that the White House’s fight over contraception in health insurance plans is in fact on the winning side with the public — and among Catholics, too, the group whose church leadership has mounted the mount vigorous campaign against it.

The poll of American adults asked: “Do you support or oppose a recent federal requirement that private health insurance plans cover the full cost of birth control for their female patients?” The answer was: Support 66%, Oppose 26%.

A follow-up question then specifically brought the religious element into the equation: “And what about for religiously affiliated employers, such as a hospital or university — do you support or oppose a recent federal requirement that their health insurance plans cover the full cost of birth control for their female employees?”

Read more at Talking Points Memo

February 2, 2002, Chicago, IL  - The Joint Action Committee for Political Affairs urged its members to write, email and call the Susan G. Komen Foundation to protest its decision to defund Planned Parenthood of funds that were reserved for for breast cancer screenings, education and referrals for mammograms.

JAC views this blow to women’s health as a narrowing of  the separation of religion and state via the politicizing  of medicine. Increasingly, the right wing arm of the Republican party has sought to marginalize women’s health by legislating away reproductive health. Now, it seems that breast and pelvic health are the newest targets. When an organization like Komen which  purports to care for women’s breast health allows the politics of some of its board and senior staff to over rule medical issues, the threat is no longer just invisible.

In April 2011, Komen hired Karen Handel as its senior policy director, who ran and lost as an anti  abortion candidate in Georgia’s 2010 gubernatorial election. Her extreme views are well-documented and are seemingly changing the gestalt of Komen.

Additionally, a member of  Komen's Advocacy Alliance Board is  Jane Abraham, the General Chairman of the Susan B. Anthony List and of its Political Action Committee.  Among other involvements, Abraham helps direct the Nuturing Network, a global network of crisis pregnancy centers,   It seems that Komen has turned right and left women and science behind.

Some of Komen’s affiliates sent emails trying to explain the new policy that organizations who are under local, state or federal investigations cannot apply for grants. They cite the witch hunt  by Rep Stearns (R-FL) who has subpeonaed Planned Parenthood records trying to find that they co-mingled federal funds and used them for abortions. This magnifies JAC’s concern that a private sector organization is reacting to an anti-abortion Congressional leader who has no proof of any wrong doing. The fact that many women will lose access to breast care and may suffer life-threatening conditions does not seem to concern Komen. Their guiding principles are lost to the right. Women and men must protest any time the anti-science, anti-medicine or anti-women forces seize control of an organization like Komen

Congresswoman Nita Lowey responds to critics who say the administration was wrong to protect access to contraception for millions of women under the Affordable Care Act.

Read more at Huffington Post

Coinciding with the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, House Republicans have introduced three new bills to restrict access to abortion.

Read more at The Hill Blog

What does Pro-Choice really mean?  It is so much more than access to abortions, and we need to keep stressing that.

With the anniversary of Roe v. Wade on Jan. 22, the words "pro-choice" seem to be everywhere. You’ll hear them in impassioned speeches, and see them on colorful posters, on blogs and in tweets.  And when you do, you’ll probably think of abortion.

That’s understandable. And undeniably, the right to choose an abortion is something that must be protected.  A woman chooses abortion for the most intimate, personal reasons, and no one else is qualified to make that choice.

But abortion is far from the only choice a woman makes about her reproductive health. And if you really think about it, why wait to defend those reproductive health choices until she is at the door of an abortion clinic?

Read more at RH Reality Check

Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius has announced there will not be an exemption for no-cost birth control for employees of religious-affiliated institutions.  This will not impacts houses of worship, but will apply to non-profit institutions including hospitals, universities and service organizations.

In an election-year decision certain to disappoint religious conservatives, the Obama administration announced Friday that church-affiliated institutions will get only one additional year to meet a new rule to cover birth control free of charge.

Friday’s announcement by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius does not apply to houses of worship. Churches, synagogues, mosques and other places of worship were already exempt from the birth control coverage rule.

But in many cases, other religious-affiliated employers such as hospitals and universities traditionally have not provided any birth control coverage for their employees. They were seeking a broader exemption that would allow them to continue that practice.

Read more at Washington Post

In a rulling last week, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that women must be have an ultrasound prior to an abortion, and doctor must describe what the ultrasound shows.

The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a ruling last week, pretty much says that women are idiots and that Texas can dragoon doctors into becoming ideological tools.

Ultimately, you can thank the state Legislature, which last year passed a bill requiring doctors to describe sonogram images to a woman before an abortion — an effort to get women to change their minds about ending pregnancies. But the 5th Circuit is holding up its end.

Earlier, U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks imposed a preliminary injunction on that law in August, finding it probable that — in forcing doctors into medically unnecessary speech and women to listen — First Amendment protections are breached.

Read more at MySanAntonio.com

Appeals court has ruled Texas may enforce a law requiring mandatory sonograms for women seeking an abortion.

A Texas abortion law passed last year that requires doctors to show sonograms to patients can be enforced while opponents challenge the measure in court, a federal appeals court said Tuesday in a ruling that signaled the judges believe the law is constitutional.

When the state will begin enforcing the law was not immediately clear. The group that brought the case, the Center for Reproductive Rights, is weighing how to proceed and has 14 days to ask for a rehearing of the case. If there are no appeals by then, the court would likely allow the state to begin enforcing the law.

The three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a temporary order against enforcing the law and went further to advise U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks how he should ultimately rule in the case. Chief Judge Edith H. Jones used her opinion to systematically dismantle the argument that the Texas law infringes on the free speech rights of doctors and patients, the key argument against the law.

Read more at ABCNews.com

In the early morning hours of January 1st, fire raged through the abortion clinic in Pensacola, FL that has been the site of attacks and protests for the last 30 years.

An abortion clinic that burned here New Year's Day has been in the crosshairs of the anti-abortion movement for decades: the scene of bombings, shootings and other violence.

Things calmed down in the past 15 years, save for the near-daily protesters who carried anti-abortion signs, Bibles and white crosses as they marched outside of the unassuming, two-story grey building. Yet once again, the clinic is encircled by yellow police tape.

Authorities said the fire was suspicious and they are investigating whether it was intentionally set. So far, they have said only that the blaze started in some bushes near the back of the American Family Planning building. No one was injured.

Read more at CBSnews.com

A look at abortion laws enacted in 2011 shows significant restrictions across the country

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Yesterday I wrote about how little health-care legislation managed to move in Washington this year. After the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, barely anything related to health could make it through a polarized Congress. I overlooked, however, one area where a lot did happen: reproductive health. There, a wave of state-level abortion restrictions that passed this year have reshaped access more than any other year in three decades.

As the above chart from the Guttmacher Institute shows, 2011 marked a sea change for abortion rights. States passed 83 laws restricting access to abortion, nearly four times the 23 laws passed in 2010. A lot of that had to do with the 2010 elections, which ushered in a wave of Republican legislators and governors. This year, the number of states with fully anti-abortion governments — in which both the governor and the legislature oppose abortion rights — increased from 10 to 15.

That cleared the way for new restrictions. Five states banned all abortions after 20 weeks of gestation; until last year, only Nebraska had such a restriction. Seven now require an ultrasound, or the offer of one, prior to the procedure. Eight will no longer allow private insurance plans to cover the procedure. A handful of states are, to this day, battling the Obama administration over whether they can bar abortion providers, such as Planned Parenthood, from receiving government funds, even for the non-abortion services they provide.

Read more at Washington Post