"Infographic: Women's Preventive Services Now Covered Under Obamacare"

From the Center for American Progress:

Summer Solidarity Rally 7-28-2012 11am-3pm

Unions Plan Solidarity Rally 

with Teachers at Military Park

Indiana AFL-CIO will sponsor a summer solidarity rally, Saturday, June 28, at Military Park in Indianapolis, 11 am-3 pm., soutrhwest corner of New York and West streets.

Music, food, family fun and taking back our state. 

This is going on now.

Youth Organizing & Policy Institute - Planned Parenthood

The location for our region is Ann Arbor, at the University of Michigan. The dates are August 24-26.


Click HERE for registration page.

Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) is proud to announce the 2012 Youth Organizing and Policy Institutes (YOPI’s) to be held in 8 states across the country this fall in partnership with local affiliates. This year, the toughest battles we’re fighting and the real threats to sexual and reproductive health and rights aren’t just in DC, they are happening where we live. If you're between the ages of 18 and 24, this series of trainings is for you! You will learn the hard skills of organizing and prepare to mobilize communities around the country! 

Each Regional YOPI will engage you in 3 days of skills and issue based trainings. In addition, participants will have the opportunity, on a volunteer basis, to engage in advocacy efforts sponsored by a local Planned Parenthood organization immediately following the training. The regional focus of the trainings will give you the opportunity to best learn skills to develop as leaders and to support Planned Parenthood in the current environment while highlighting organizing challenges specific to each region. We know that the importance of young people to our movement cannot be overstated and we're thrilled to have this opportunity to activate young people across the country to truly show our power. 

Review the schedule of events tab and sign up today for the training nearest you! If you have questions about the Institutes, please send an email toppfa.youth@gmail.com. Let us know how we can help you through the registration process. We look forward to seeing you at the Institutes this Fall.

-PPFA Youth Organizing Team



**Planned Parenthood Federation of America reserves the right to refund registration fees and rescind admission to the Youth Organizing & Policy Institutes (YOPI) for any reason. All YOPI participants are expected to contribute positively to the space. Video recording and intentional disruption of the events will not be permitted,** -PPFA Youth Organizing Team


**Planned Parenthood Federation of America reserves the right to refund registration fees and rescind admission to the Youth Organizing & Policy Institutes (YOPI) for any reason. All YOPI participants are expected to contribute positively to the space. Video recording and intentional disruption of the events will not be permitted,**

More info HERE.

Anti-Planned Parenthood (Indiana) Law blocked

From July 9th, 2012 - as posted in Think Progress:

A 2011 Indiana law, which would have prevented Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funds, has been blocked by a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrative ruling. An initial CMS ruling, made in June, found the law unacceptable, and Indiana asked the agency to reconsider. The CMS administrator blocked the law on the grounds that it denies women the freedom to choose their health care providers. 

The law would have made Indiana the first state to deny Medicaid funds to Planned Parenthood funds for general health screenings. According to one estimate, 9,300 Indiana women rely on Planned Parenthood for their health care, which includes cancer screenings, STD testing, and birth control. Indiana is trying to deny Medicaid funds to Planned Parenthood because they also perform abortions: 

Indiana had argued that Medicaid funds intended to help groups like Planned Parenthood provide general health care would indirectly subsidize abortions. The Hyde Amendment, a 1976 provision named after the late Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., bans all federal funds for abortion except in cases of rape, incest or when the life of the mother is at risk. 

The state also said Planned Parenthood could continue to receive Medicaid funding if it established separate fiscal entities for abortion and other health care. But CMS said such an option was premature. 

Hearing officer Benjamin Cohen wrote that the Indiana law violated the federal requirement that individuals must have the freedom to obtain care from any qualified provider. Restricting that choice just because a care provider also offers non-covered care isn’t allowed, he wrote. 

The law is being challenged on parallel tracks, both administratively at CMS and in federal court. The challenge in federal court is ongoing, but a lower court ruling agreed with CMS that Indiana is likely to lose the challenge. 

--------

And from Reuters (Tue Jul 17, 2012) - 

Planned Parenthood on Monday sued the state of Arizona in an effort to overturn a law that blocks funding for its health clinics because the organization also performs abortions. 

The law, signed by Governor Jan Brewer in May, is part of a national campaign against Planned Parenthood orchestrated by conservatives Republican lawmakers who oppose abortions. In the past two years, 13 states have taken steps to eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood, and the organization has filed lawsuits in six of them, including Arizona.Planned Parenthood says abortions account for only 3 percent of its services, which include cancer screening and birth control. 

"It is wrong for the state to tell Arizonans who they can and cannot see for their healthcare. The men and women of this state have the right to see the healthcare provider they deem is best for them," said Bryan Howard, president and chief executive officer of Planned Parenthood Arizona.... 

"We're in court and in legislatures in almost every state in the country," said Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund. "It has just gotten crazy. This is what I hear from women -- Republican women, independent women all over the country: They cannot believe that the Republican Party leadership is on a crusade to end birth-control access in America." 

....Anti-abortion advocates have long wanted to target Planned Parenthood, but until recently it was not politically feasible, said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, a Washington, D.C., group that works to elect anti-abortion candidates. 

"No one wanted to be perceived as being against family planning," said Dannenfelser, who said her group co-wrote model state legislation that was the basis for the Arizona law. "Any effort to defund (Planned Parenthood) was doomed to fail." 

That changed in 2010, after anti-abortion Republicans swept federal and state elections. Richards said Planned Parenthood's state and federal battles stem from a proposal by U.S. Representative Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican who last year spearheaded an unsuccessful effort to strip funding for Planned Parenthood from the federal budget. Pence is the Republican nominee for governor of Indiana in the November election... 

Pence's campaign made it politically acceptable to attack Planned Parenthood, Dannenfelser said... 

At the end of May, Planned Parenthood Action Fund announced its endorsement of Obama and said it would spend more than $1.4 million on an anti-Romney ad campaign."We're going to make sure every woman in America knows where candidates stand," Richards said. "What we have seen consistently is that when a politician says they're going to get rid of Planned Parenthood, women don't support them."

"The Sacredness of Life and Liberty"

Article about framing the 'pro-liberty', 'pro-family', 'development prevention' & birth control debate by George Lakoff and Elisabeth Wehling - as seen in Common Dreams.


snips:

The NY Times, on June 5, 2012, reported that so-called “morning-after pills” work by preventing women’s eggs from being fertilized, and not by preventing fertilized eggs from being implanted in the womb. The latest scientific findings show that “the pills delay ovulation, the release of eggs from ovaries that occurs before eggs are fertilized, and some pills also thicken cervical mucus so sperm have trouble swimming.” 

In short, morning-after pills do not operate on fertilized eggs at all. Why should this matter? Because many conservative Republicans, as well as the official Catholic Church, believe the metaphor that Fertilized Eggs Are People, and that preventing such egg-people from being implanted in the womb constitutes “abortion,” and hence, in their view, baby-killing. The Times article correctly reports that “it turns out that the politically charged debate over morning-after pills and abortion, a divisive issue in this election year, is probably rooted in outdated or incorrect scientific guesses about how the pills work.”

That’s the truth. Does the truth matter?

...

 
Women seeking freedom have always, and will always, seek to control development of life within their bodies. Where there have been laws against this, there have always been back-alley abortions, which are dangerous and have led to the maiming and death of women. 

Furthermore, protecting human life is a real issue in the United States. Protecting human life is one of the moral mandates of government. The lives and health of infants, children, and mothers – as well as all other Americans – should be protected through accessible and improved health care, pre- and post-natal care, a ban on poisonous food and environmental pollution, a renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, and so on. Even in Texas.  

"BIRTHRIGHT"

Article about Planned Parenthood as the movement against it was heating up - from November 14, 2011 - by Jill Lepore -  in the New Yorker


snips:

"The fury over Planned Parenthood is two political passions—opposition to abortion and opposition to government programs for the poor—acting as one. So far, it has nearly led to the shutdown of the federal government, required Republican Presidential nominees to swear their fealty to the pro-life lobby, tied up legislatures and courts in more than half a dozen states, launched a congressional investigation, and helped cripple the Democratic Party. What’s next?"  ...

If a fertilized egg has constitutional rights, women cannot have equal rights with men. This, however, is exactly what no one wants to talk about, because it’s complicated, and it’s proved surprisingly easy to use the issue to political advantage.... 

The first birth-control clinic in the United States opened on October 16, 1916, on Amboy Street in Brooklyn. There were two rooms, and three employees: Ethel Byrne, a nurse; Fania Mindell, a receptionist who was fluent in Yiddish; and Byrne’s sister, Margaret Sanger, a thirty-seven-year-old nurse and mother. Sanger and her sister came from a family of eleven children, one of whom Sanger helped deliver when she was eight years old. When Sanger began nursing poor immigrant women living in tenements on New York’s Lower East Side, she found that they were desperate for information about how to avoid pregnancy. These “doomed women implored me to reveal the ‘secret’ rich people had,” Sanger wrote in her autobiography. (A study conducted in New York at the time found that forty-one per cent of women who received medical care through clinics operated by the city’s department of health had never used contraception and, of those, more than half had had at least one abortion; they averaged almost two apiece.) 

Between 1912 and 1913, Sanger wrote a twelve-part series for The Call, the socialist daily, titled “What Every Girl Should Know.” Because any discussion of venereal matters violated the Comstock law, Sanger’s final essay, “Some Consequences of Ignorance and Silence,” was banned on the ground of obscenity. By way of protest, The Call ran, in place of the essay, an announcement: “ ‘What Every Girl Should Know’—NOTHING!” ... 

At Sanger’s trial, during which the judge waved a cervical cap from the bench, Sanger hoped to argue that the law preventing the distribution of contraception was unconstitutional: exposing women, against their will, to the danger of dying in childbirth violated a woman’s right to life. But the judge ruled that no woman had “the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception.” In other words, if a woman wasn’t willing to die in childbirth, she shouldn’t have sex. Sanger went to Queens County Penitentiary. She was sentenced to thirty days. 

…Senator James Reed, of Missouri, told the lobbyists that “Birth Control is chipping away the very foundation of our civilization,” that “women should have many children and that poverty is no handicap but rather an asset.”...
During the Second World War, Planned Parenthood touted controlling family size as part of the war effort. Birth control continued to gain religious support. In 1946, more than thirty-two hundred Jewish and Protestant clergy signed a resolution in support of Planned Parenthood. In the nineteen-fifties, the organization was run primarily by men interested in population control. Barry Goldwater was an active supporter of Planned Parenthood, and his wife served on the board in Phoenix.... 

Here is where we are. Republicans established the very federal family-planning programs that Republican members of Congress and the G.O.P.’s Presidential candidates are this year pledging so vigorously to dismantle. Republicans made abortion a partisan issue—contorted the G.O.P. to mold itself around this issue—but Democrats allowed their party to be defined by it. And, as long as Planned Parenthood hitches itself to the Democratic Party, and it’s hard to see what choice it has, its fortunes will rise and fall—its clinic doors will open and shut—with the power of the Party. Much of the left, reduced to a state of timidity in the terrible, violent wake of Roe, has stopped talking about rights, poverty, decency, equality, sex, and even history, thereby ceding talk of those things to the right. Planned Parenthood, a health-care provider, has good reason to talk about women’s health. But, even outside this struggle, “health” has become the proxy for a liberal set of values about our common humanity. And it is entirely insufficient.

Read the whole thing: 

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_lepore#ixzz20wLv6Fek

Carol Gilligan and Moral Dilemmas

Go to link at the Big Think

In 2002, Carol Gilligan became University Professor at New York University, with affiliations in the School of Law, the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She is currently teaching a seminar at the Law School on Resisting Injustice and an advanced research seminar on The Listening Guide Method of Psychological Inquiry. She is a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge affiliated with the Centre for Gender Studies and with Jesus College.  

She received an A.B. in English literature from Swarthmore College, a masters degree in clinical psychology from Radcliffe College and a Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard University. Her landmark book In A Different Voice (1982) is described by Harvard University Press as "the little book that started a revolution."  Following In A Different Voice, she initiated the Harvard Project on Women's Psychology and Girls' Development and co-authored or edited 5 books with her students.

Interesting way of approaching complex questions, especially questions relating to abortion.