Here's this week's reproductive rights news brought to you by the women of Our Word (and at least one of the guys!). If you see something you find relevant please email it to me, bayprairie at gmail dot com

William Saletan, The Judas Goat of pro-choice critique

William Saletan, the self-styled "liberal Republican," who hails these days from the elitist community of Chevy Chase, Maryland and who's the chief national correspondent and 'Human Nature' columnist at Slate.com is in the news again. This week, his topic is Plan B. But before we get into that, let's review his other great contributions to journalism.

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Here's this week's reproductive rights news brought to you by the women of Our Word (and at least one of the guys!). If you see something you find relevant please email it to me, bayprairie at gmail dot com

We have news from South Dakota.

South Dakotans Launch Major Grassroots Effort to Repeal Over-reaching State Abortion Ban

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - March 24, 2006

SIOUX FALLS, SD -- Today the South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families, a new coalition of community leaders from across the state, announced the launch of a major grassroots mobilization to refer the state abortion ban to the November ballot. The referral will allow South Dakotans to vote to overturn the nation's most extreme abortion law which was signed by Governor Mike Rounds on March 6. With Governor Round's signature, this law clearly endangers the health of women in South Dakota and violates the right of women and families to make private, personal health care decisions.

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Here's this week's reproductive rights news brought to you by the women of Our Word (and at least one of the guys!). If you see something you find relevant please email it to me, bayprairie at gmail dot com

Our award this week for worst medical legislator in a lab coat© goes to wild-eyed Mike Foley of Nebraska. Mike is a danger to women.

Foley: "Pro-life" beliefs are driving efforts

After two days of tiptoeing around the issue, Sen. Mike Foley acknowledged Thursday that his "pro-life" beliefs and his disgust with Planned Parenthood are driving his efforts to redistribute funding for women s health services.

'I am "pro-life" to the core, with no apologies,'? said Foley, who said he is working to make sure Planned Parenthood doesn t get state funding.

'They are to abortion what McDonald is to cheeseburgers,'? the Lincoln senator said. 'They do more than anyone else.

'And that s what this is about.'?

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Here's this week's reproductive rights news brought to you by the women of Our Word (and at least one of the guys!). If you see something you find relevant please email it to me, bayprairie at gmail dot com

Here's a story from Mississippi concerning reproductive rights from the BBC.

Abortion battle lines drawn in Mississippi

The Jackson Women's Health Organization is an anonymous enough building in the heart of strip mall America. Anonymous save for the permanent protest outside.

Arriving here is an intimidating, even shocking, experience. Anti-abortion campaigners hold up enormous and gruesome pictures of aborted fetuses. They stop every car going into the car park and try to persuade those inside to wind down their windows and take their literature.

The women going into this clinic for an abortion are screamed at. One protester, a man, yells "Don't go to those demons, don't let them take your money, don't let them kill your baby". When I ask him why he is being so aggressive, he tells me it's because America needs to know the truth: "Abortion is murder," he says.

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On January 1, 2000, Texas began enforcement of a law that requires physicians to notify a parent of a minor child seeking an abortion at least 48 hours before the procedure.

Today, March 9th, The New England Journal of Medicine is publishing a statistical study entitled Changes in Abortions and Births and the Texas Parental Notification Law by Theodore Joyce, Ph.D., Robert Kaestner, Ph.D., and Silvie Colman, B.B.A. The study concerns itself with analyzing abortion statistical changes due to Texas' recently passed parental notification law.

:::UPDATE::: I've tacked on additional material at the bottom of this post.

from Talk to Action

One can almost hear Mark Twain snorting in disgust.

(Image by Kafka/AP)
This week Governor Mike Rounds of South Dakota finally ended the suspense. After a prolonged, tantalizing and agonizing period of presumably sober deliberation, Rounds signed the Women's Health and Human Life Protection Act. The law protects human life beginning at "that point in time when a male human sperm penetrates the zona pellucida of a female human ovum." Unless, of course, the live human in question is a woman who wants an abortion '