Media Ignores Women's Health Disparities in Shriver Report

The "battle of the sexes is over" claims the much-heralded Shriver Report: A Woman's Nation Changes Everything on American work and family life. Go ahead, take a victory lap.

Unless, of course, you're among the millions of women who still earn 23 percent less on average in wages, pay 38 percent more for gender-rated health insurance or fear losing their jobs while trying to juggle disproportionate family responsibilities without flexible work schedules and reasonable family-leave policies.

Conservatives Sweeping 'Liberal Bias' From Bible

Progressives fired off fake verses one might find rewritten by the "family values'' fundamentalists behind Conservapedia, the so-called "trustworthy'' online information source for all things right-wing.

Verily I say unto thee, these U.S. conservatives, led by Andy Schlafly, begat by Phyllis Schlafly, best known for stopping the equal rights for women amendment, consider modern translations of the Bible to contain too much "liberal bias.''

Don't Mess Around in Texas

When I graduated from high school in San Antonio, Texas, I can remember at least two dozen girls (out of a class of 600) pregnant or already with babies. It may seem astonishing now, but it was fairly normal in 1991: so normal, in fact, that our high school had responded with an academic track geared toward expectant and young mothers.

The Breakup of the Pro-Life Movement

Congressman Tim Ryan (D-OH) is, in many ways, a typical pro-life American. He opposes abortion and, because of that, supports every effort to prevent the need for it. Just like most pro-life Americans, Ryan supports contraception -- primarily because it is the most effective way to prevent unintended pregnancy, and thereby abortion. And yet because of this, Ryan no longer qualifies as "pro-life." He was recently banished from the board of a national pro-life group he served on for four years. Ryan, in return, has turned vocal.

Women’s Lives: The Misogynist Football In The Healthcare Debate

One of the very real dangers in the debate on how to fix American healthcare is that women's health will become a bargaining chip, with the GOP and anti-abortion forces trying to frame healthcare reform as an endrun to government ‘interference' in our lives by ‘mandating' abortion and gasp, contraception.  Amanda Marcotte has an excellent post here that deconstructs the root  of why they are using this tactic and looks

George Bush's Sex Education Failure

"The data presented in this report indicate that many young persons in the United States engage in sexual risk behaviour and experience negative reproductive health outcomes." That is the very clinical and polite way a new Centre for Disease Control and Prevention reporton the rise.

Recenter Abortion Debate on Equality of Sacrifice

I am sickened by the death of Dr. George Tiller, a physician who displayed lifelong respect for the woman and her body. Operation Rescue condemned his murder, though in language that tacitly encourages violence. Randall Terry, calling Tiller a "mass murderer," even accused him of performing late-term abortions for women who had simply decided they did not wish to have a baby. Terry never lets facts stand in the way of his vicious war against the rights of women. Grand juries in culturally conservative Kansas rejected Terry's charges.