Activism
If Bush Decides Contraception is Abortion, it Must Be True, Right?
Why would anybody be surprised that the Bush administration plans to propose new federal regulations allowing health care providers to run roughshod over established scientific and medical principles, even when they are doing it with your taxpayer money?
After all, Bush’s first official act after taking office was to issue an executive order reinstating the global gag rule, which prevents international family planning programs receiving U. S. Funding from even uttering the word abortion. Why would anybody be surprised that an administration willing to breach medical ethics by preventing doctors from giving patients full information about their health care options is also willing in its waning days to go the second mile for its zealous anti-choice base and redefine medical ethics to suit their ideology? Even to redefine important forms of contraception as abortion?
The right has made sexual matters unspeakable while the left and center have made it a central tenet to keep these matters private. No wonder that even the public discussion of reproductive issues so often gets giggles and Bush’s minions get a free ride as they go about their merry way to steamroller science with their ideology.
Here’s some of the text of the proposed regulations, explained by Cristina Page’s excellent analysis on RHRealityCheck:
Read MoreMomsRising–The Women’s and Men’s Movement of Tomorrow
I took an early morning walk today in Central Park with Joan Blades, founder with her husband Wes Boyd, of the progressive political on-line grassroots powerhouse, moveon.org. But her agenda wasn’t moveon.com. Joan is a serial entrepreneur and a very successful one, whether creating a software company or a new nonprofit organization. It was the latter she wanted to talk with me about today: her latest venture, MomsRising.
Joan has plunged her creative hands into a key mobilizing issue of the day, building a more family-friendly America in the workplace and public policy. Fresh from getting the New Jersey legislature to pass a paid sick leave measure, she brought me up to date on the organization she started in 2006 in response to her own experiences as a mom in the workplace.
MomsRising has over 140,000 citizen members already and is aiming for 1,000,000 to participate in their citizen advocacy agenda. Over 85 national and state organizations have aligned with MomsRising to create a coalition that works at the state and national levels to bringing motherhood and family issues to the forefront of the country’s awareness so they can advance workplace policies such as paid sick leave, maternity and paternity leave, flexible work hours, and equal pay for equal work. Quality childcare and healthcare access are also on their rather large plate. And they’re pumping up their political fundraising so they can do more lobbying on all these issues.