Sluts for Choice

"So why does the media keep claiming the looming government shutdown is about 'abortion?' . . . In adopting this lazy shorthand, media outlets tacitly accept the Republican frame: PP’s main business is performing abortions, and the federal government—you, the taxpayer!—pays for them. None of this is true. Ninety-seven percent of PP’s business is providing birth control, basic gynecological care, treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, and the like. Its abortion services are not funded with taxpayer dollars. Thanks to the Hyde amendment, there has been virtually no federal funding of abortion since 1976. Next time, so-called liberal media, try these handy phrases: 'Birth control blocks budget agreement.' 'Government shut down looms over Pap smears.' 'Republicans to women: can’t afford cancer screening? Tough luck.'" ~ Katha Pollitt

As is typically the case, Pollitt is on the money. The 'policy riders' that the Republicans are pushing are about controlling women's health and sexuality. The protesters in the image here (shamelessly lifted from Bag New Notes) have the matter just right.
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Photo credit: Jewel Samad/AFP-Getty Images ~ Caption: Participants shout slogans and display placards during a rally to “stand up for women’s health” at the National Mall in Washington, DC, on April 7, 2011. Participants from across the country gathered in a show of support for Planned Parenthood, the family-planning group in the crosshairs of the budget battle blazing in Congress, where a federal shutdown is looming.

A Good Question

" ... Not content with depriving women of reproductive healthcare, House Republicans want to starve them and their children too. Their budget cuts the Women, Infants and Children Health and Nutrition program by $750 million and Head Start by $1 billion. It cuts $50 million from a block grant that pays for prenatal healthcare for 2.5 million low-income women and healthcare for 31 million children each year. As Charles Blow writes in the New York Times, proposed cuts to medical research strike directly at efforts to roll back the US infant mortality rate, now the highest among advanced economies. The Republicans seem bent on proving the truth of the bitter joke that “prolifers” care about children only before they are born. As for caring about women? Even as fetal vessels, the ladies just don’t count. After all, one in five women has visited a Planned Parenthood clinic—often for routine gynecological care. Is the GOP going to set up a replacement network of clinics to provide Pap smears and breast exams and STD testing and such? Or is Jesus now the national gynecologist? What on earth is the matter with these people?" (Katha Pollitt)

Anybody got a sensible answer?

The Assault on Lara Logan Should Not Be Marginal to Our Reflections on the Flowering of Democracy

Photojournalism is a dangerous occupation. But as is typically the case, the dangers are not evenly distributed. There are two forthright essays at The New York Times on the dangers that beset women journalists. You can find them here and here. The women who've written these essays - Kim Barker and Sarina Tavernise - were prompted to do so by the vicious attack on correspondent Lara Logan by a mob of men in Tahrir Square last week. It goes without saying, I hope, that Logan has proven courageous in making public her own experience. In case it doesn't, I recommend this thoughtful comment. It is good news that she apparently is recovering from the physical harm she suffered.

Yet another response to Logan's experience appears here at npr. In it, Jane Arraf rightly holds up a mirror to those here in the west who are condemning the sorts of cultures that allegedly sustain attacks like the one Logan endured. Arraf's remarks are not, as conservatives will surely insist, about blaming the West; they are an invitation to learn something about ourselves instead of merely posing as cheerleaders. There is nothing wrong with celebrating the spread of democratic values. But there is nothing wrong either with acknowledging how partially and precariously they exist here at home.