Tag Archives: sex and gender

Sex Ed Program Provokes Fight Over Planned Parenthood in North Dakota

by iscciaglewstrone123 Posted on January 28, 2013

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Last year, a pair of researchers at North Dakota State University won a federal grant to conduct and evaluate a sex education program for at-risk teenagers with Planned Parenthood. But now the school is backing out of the grant, and critics say that political pressure from anti-abortion lawmakers is to blame.

NDSU professors Brandy Randall and Molly Secor-Turner won the three-year, $1.2 million competitive grant from the US Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families. The goal of the program—which NDSU announced in a press release last September—was to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases in teens who are homeless, in foster care, or in the juvenile justice system. The school signed an agreement with Planned Parenthood in November to provide the services, which were expected to reach as many as 430 teens between the ages of 14 and 19. Planned Parenthood’s office in Fargo would run the program, and the NDSU professors would evaluate its results. They had already started recruiting participants, and the program was slated to begin at the end of this month.

But in early January, anti-abortion activists in the state started complaining about the grant. “When I see something that says this is Planned Parenthood—they’re not even a part of the state of North Dakota. They don’t serve anyone in North Dakota, and they shouldn’t be a part of North Dakota. They’re not a part of how we do business in this state,” said Rep. Bette Grande on a local radio show decrying the partnership: “It is an overt abortion industry that we don’t want to be a part of.” On Jan. 15, NDSU President Dean Bresciani said on a conservative talk radio show that the school had decided to block the funds, citing a “legal hang-up” that prevents the school from working with Planned Parenthood.

As the local newspaper Forum of Fargo-Moorhead reports, NDSU now says that it is “freezing” the grant while it figures out if it violates a 1979 state law that bars state dollars, or federal dollars coming through the state, from being used “as family planning funds by any person or public or private agency which performs, refers, or encourages abortion.” North Dakota Catholic Conference praised NDSU for making “the right decision,” and it got glowing reviews in the anti-abortion outlet Life Site News.

The school’s claims about legal concerns are specious, at best, say its critics. The 1979 law that the school cites deals with the actual provision of family planning care, like prescribing birth control or other medical services, which this grant is explicitly not designed to provide. It’s an educational program. Moreover, Planned Parenthood doesn’t even provide abortions or any medical services at all in North Dakota; its only office is in Fargo, and that office has advocacy, outreach, and education programs. Nor does the program have anything to do with what’s being taught in public schools, as some anti-choice lawmakers have implied. It’s outside of school, it’s voluntary, and participating teenagers have to have the consent of their parent or guardian.

The decision to block the grant has also angered professors at NDSU, who see the move as politically-motivated interference with faculty research. Thomas Stone Carlson, president of the Faculty Senate, issued a public response to President Bresciani on Jan. 17:

We are aware that you have received significant pressure from legislators (Betty Grande and Jim Kasper in particular) who have political agendas that oppose the work of Planned Parenthood. The announcement of your decision to freeze this funding on a conservative talk show and the quick response of several conservative groups thanking legislators for this important victory against Planned Parenthood, makes it difficult to see your decision as anything other than bowing to political pressure.

“The university president lacks the courage and willingness to protect and defend academic integrity that he should have as university president,” Sarah Stoesz, president of Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, told Mother Jones. “Bresciani is caving to some ideologically motivated legislators because he is worried about state funding for the university.”

“To turn away the grant on an ideological basis really just defies logic, particularly in North Dakota, where there is so little available to at-risk youth,” she continued. “This is really a program that is a wonderful lifeline for kids that don’t have other options.”

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Sex Ed Program Provokes Fight Over Planned Parenthood in North Dakota

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New Mexico GOP Rep. Wins Prize for Abortion Trolling

by wqds234der Posted on January 24, 2013

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You might think the 2012 election taught Republicans that talking about rape and abortion is just a bad idea. But apparently Cathrynn Brown, a GOP state representative in New Mexico, didn’t get that message, because on Wednesday she introduced a new law that would bar raped women from getting abortions because doing so would be “tampering with evidence.”

Brown’s bill, HB206, would make obtaining an abortion after a rape a felony punishable by up to three years in prison. Here’s what the bill says:

Tampering with evidence consists of destroying, changing, hiding, placing or fabricating any physical evidence with intent to prevent the apprehension, prosecution or conviction of any person or to throw suspicion of the commission of a crime upon another.
Tampering with evidence shall include procuring or facilitating an abortion, or compelling or coercing another to obtain an abortion, of a fetus that is the result of criminal sexual penetration or incest with the intent to destroy evidence of the crime.

As Huffington Post notes, the bill isn’t likely to pass: Democrats control both chambers of the legislature. But it is some world-class trolling that this is even being introduced.

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New Mexico GOP Rep. Wins Prize for Abortion Trolling

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In 2012, the House GOP Blocked the Violence Against Women Act. Will They Do It Again?

by ghd12australia Posted on January 23, 2013

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Congress is giving preventing violence against women another try.

On Tuesday, Senators Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Mike Crapo (R-Id.) reintroduced the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. Previous reauthorizations of the Violence Against Women Act have passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, but when the 1994 act, known as VAWA, needed to be reauthorized for a third time last year, the House GOP blocked it.

Many Republicans opposed about the bill’s increased number of visas for undocumented victims of domestic violence, its extension of tribal authority over non-tribe members who abuse their Indian partners, or its establishment of employment protections for gay and lesbian domestic violence workers. But the GOP’s main talking point against the bill was procedural: Pointing to an application fee for visas for undocumented immigrants of domestic violence, Republicans said the bill raised revenue. The Constitution requires bills that raise revenue to originate in the House, not the Senate.

The new version of the bill resolves the House GOP’s procedural objection by removing the portion that would have increased the number of special visas alotted for undocumented immigrant victims of domestic violence. Law enforcement uses them to grant legal status to undocumented victims so that those victims can assist in prosecuting their attackers, who might otherwise use their lack of legal status as leverage to keep them silent. There is a cap of 10,000 of these “U visas” a year, and the government consistently hits the cap. Although the visas themselves are handed out by law enforcement, and the increased number of visas would have come from unused visas in past years, Republicans objected to the increased number as an invitation for fraud. “Caps are a way to control the flow of people. They are a stop-gap measure against fraud,” Senator Chuck Grassely (R-Iowa) said in a floor speech against the bill last year.

Nevertheless, women’s rights activists are supporting the new version of the bill, citing other provisions in the bill helping immigrant victims of domestic violence and a promise from Senator Leahy to use a potential immigration reform bill to address the U visa issue. “Does it thrill us that the U visa piece is not in there? Absolutely not,” says Lisalyn Jacobs of the women’s rights group Legal Momentum. “Are we sanguine about it, because we think we can now get a bill over to the House they can act on we hope? Yes.”

Although Leahy and Crapo’s new version of the bill resolves House Republicans’ procedural objection, it’s unclear whether the House GOP will back it. The House version of the bill was reintroduced with no Republican cosponsors. Anti-domestic violence campaigners have resolved to press on regardless.

“There is no excuse to let VAWA reauthorization continue to drag on, especially when you see what is happening around the world, when you see what’s happening in India, when you see what happened in Steubenville,” says Rosie Hidalgo of Casa Esperanza, a group focused on domestic violence in the Latino community. “To have our own Congress unable to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act sends the wrong message.”

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In 2012, the House GOP Blocked the Violence Against Women Act. Will They Do It Again?

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Mississippi and the State of Abortion 40 Years After Roe

by hanhuogekennog Posted on January 22, 2013

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Tuesday is the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion throughout the United States. To mark the date, we’ve posted my dispatch from Jackson, Mississippi, where women may soon be unable to exercise the right Roe v. Wade guaranteed them, because the state is threatening to close its last abortion clinic.

Last April, Mississippi passed a new law requiring all doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. The two doctors that provide abortions at JWHO live out of state and don’t have those admitting privileges, although the clinic already has a relationship with a local obstetrician who can admit women to the hospital in case of an emergency. When the law passed, the clinic knew it would not be able to comply. The local hospitals in this largely anti-abortion state refused to grant admitting privileges to abortion providers. A judge gave the clinic until mid-January to apply, but, as expected, no hospital would grant the privileges.

This was, I should note, the point of the law. Upon signing the legislation, Republican Gov. Phil Bryant called it “the first step in a movement, I believe, to do what we campaigned on—to say that we’re going to try to end abortion in Mississippi.”

Now Jackson Women’s Health Organization could be closed very soon. Last week, the Health Department completed its inspection and determined the clinic is not complying with the new law. This was expected; the clinic’s legal representatives from the Center for Reproductive Rights filed a motion asking the court to block enforcement of the law because it could not comply. The inspection begins the legal process to revoke the clinic’s license, but actually doing so will take until the first week of March, according to the clinic’s lawyers. The clinic is briefing the judge later this week, and expects that there will be a hearing or some sort of decision before March.

The goal in highlighting the Jackson Women’s Health Organization is to illustrate the state of abortion care 40 years after Roe. Mississippi is the most extreme example of a state where lawmakers have introduced restriction after restriction in the past decades, pushing providers to the point where they have one clinic and zero in-state abortion providers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the state has the lowest abortion rate in the country.

Many people will say, “Oh yeah, well, it’s Mississippi, what do you expect?” But there are other states that aren’t too far away from this reality. Both North and South Dakota are also down to one clinic and zero in-state providers. The number of abortion providers in the country has declined 38 percent from its peak in 1982, according to the National Partnership for Women & Families. Meanwhile, states have passed a record number of new abortion restrictions in the past two years: 92 new laws in 2011 and 43 in 2012. So although many women may have the right to access abortion, the actual opportunity to do so is becoming harder to come by.

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Mississippi and the State of Abortion 40 Years After Roe

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So Glad the "Girls" Are Back

by graptorm Posted on January 13, 2013

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Amidst a busy week at the Mother Jones San Francisco office, five of us gathered late-night, burritos in hand, to watch a sneak preview of Season 2 of Girls. Despite all being twentysomethings and female, not all of us feel like we can identify with main characters Hannah (Lena Dunham), Marnie (Allison Williams), Jessa (Jemima Kirke), Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet), and the others portrayed in this series about friendship, sex, and ambition in New York City. (Zaineb Mohammed warned us at the start that she hate-watches the show.) Nevertheless, we couldn’t let DC-based film critic and infamous naysayer Asawin Suebsaeng be the sole proprieter of MoJo‘s critical take on Girls. (See his takedown of Season 1, former MoJo fellow Maya Dusenbery‘s response, and his slightly less acidic takedown of Season 2—though he still considers the show “a crime against humanity.” Really, Swin?)

We weren’t blown away by the first episode. But sit tight. The series gets better—full of sharp dialogue and humor, awkward intimacy, experimentation with love and drugs, and self-realization or lack thereof—by the fourth episode. Swin thought some of those less glamorous moments came off sleepy: We felt that, even when imperfect, they were thought-provoking—and, at the very least, refreshing. (As Sarah Zhang put it: “Yes, thank you, awkward parties!”). And as you’ll see below, the show is fodder for great debate, which in itself makes it worth a view. (Warning: minor spoilers sprinkled throughout).

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So Glad the "Girls" Are Back

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How Season 2 of "Girls" Resembles Season 6 of "Californication"

by johnsmithwindows Posted on January 12, 2013

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Last year, Lena Dunham’s Girls on HBO was the next big thing—a profoundly bland and unstoppably irritating trek through a Brooklynite’s perdition of unpaid internships, failed orgasms, and daunting First World Problems.

When it premiered last April, the series marked a new low for the premium cable network, even managing to surpass John From Cincinnati in its level of galling unwatchability. The inaugural season was practically drowned in its commitment to a mumblecore-hued comic universe defined by limp execution, clumsy timing, and deafening familiarity. It was inertia disguised as quirkiness, stock narrative masquerading as bold art, and peskiness paraded as high comedy.

Season 2 premieres on Sunday, ushering in another 10-episode, two-month reign of Girlsmageddon. And I’ll be the first to admit there’s been a noticeable improvement: Girls season 2 is definitely less of a crime against humanity than Girls season 1. But the modest boost in quality is nothing to write home about.

In the first four episodes, we find that some things have changed, but most have stayed exactly the same—preserved by the emotional permafrost of twentysomething New Yorkers.

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How Season 2 of "Girls" Resembles Season 6 of "Californication"

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House Republicans Derail Bill Targeting Rapists

by anjunonstennyao Posted on January 3, 2013

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In the past year, Republicans have gone wild when it comes to rape. They blocked the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act because it would have given tribal courts broader jurisdiction over rape on Native American lands. They told women they can’t get pregnant from rape and that babies that result from rape are God’s will. Though the GOP did pay a political price for some of this (see: Rep. Todd Akin), as the 112th Congress was hurriedly finishing up its business in the past few days, House Republicans yet again played politics with rape and sabotaged a bipartisan bill that would have made it easier to track down rapists.

The Sexual Assault Forensic Evidence Registry Act, also known as the SAFER Act of 2012, was introduced by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) in the Senate in May, and by Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas) in the House in December. It would have reallocated $117 million to help make a dent in the nationwide backlog of untested “rape kits,” which contain forensic evidence collected after sexual assaults that can help identify perpetrators. There are some 400,000 untested kits sitting in labs around the country. As long as this DNA evidence goes unanalyzed, it’s easier for rapists to avoid arrest and prosecution.

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House Republicans Derail Bill Targeting Rapists

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