Women\'s Issues

The firestorm continues surrounding new recommendations that women screen later in life and less frequently for breast cancer, with Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) — herself a breast cancer survivor — blasting the advice as both dangerous and confusing to women.
“These are very disturbing recommendations,” Wasserman Schultz told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer yesterday.

The abortion debate in the Senate is looking more and more like that in the House every day.
Last week, it was liberal Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) predicting that anti-abortion lawmakers in the upper chamber wouldn’t be able to rally the 60 votes needed to pass an amendment to health reform legislation restricting abortion. This week, [...]

Rep. Bart Stupak, the adamantly anti-abortion Michigan Democrat, has stirred up a firestorm with his amendment prohibiting abortion coverage under insurance plans targeting low- and middle-income women on the exchange. And he isn’t backing down.
In an interview with Detroit News, the 57-year-old Catholic warned that “the other side is playing with fire,” if they try [...]

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), a long-time abortion rights advocate, is predicting that a controversial amendment restricting abortion coverage that passed the House won’t win the 60 votes needed to pass in the Senate, The Huffington Post reports.
“If someone wants to offer this very radical amendment, which would really tear apart [a decades-long] compromise, then I [...]

The Hill reports:
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), the Democrats’ chief deputy whip in the House, said that she and other pro-abortion rights lawmakers would work to strip the amendment included in the House health bill that bars federal funding from subsidizing abortions.
“I am confident that when it comes back from the conference committee that [...]

The Michigan Messenger’s Todd Heywood reports:
While the state is coming down from its second temporary shut down in two years, ever increasing unemployment and unresolved budget issues, Michigan House Republicans this week introduced legislation to amend the state constitution to define life as beginning at fertilization.
The resolution to amend the constitution was introduced by Democratic [...]

Does the conservative Minnesota Republican congresswoman now support abortion rights? How else can one read the following statement, made earlier today Tuesday on Sean Hannity’s radio program? From TPM’s Eric Kleefeld:
“That’s why people need to continue to go to the town halls, continue to melt the phone lines of their liberal members of Congress,” said [...]

From Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker comes this simple but not-much-discussed observation: Empathy is not, as some seem to think, a scourge peculiar to Hispanic females. Indeed, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) is as empathetic as Sonia Sotomayor, Parker appropriately pointed out yesterday, the only distinction being that their empathies rest with different folks.
Senators also hammered [...]

For a comedian-turned-politician with no formal legal training, the newest senator and Judiciary Committee member, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) asked Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor some of the most complex but elucidating questions about Supreme Court cases we’ve heard yet. After bonding with Sotomayor over their mutual love of the Perry Mason show as kids, [...]

Earlier today I talked to Jill Stanek, an anti-abortion rights activist who hounded Barack Obama over his vote against Illinois’s Born Alive Infant Protection Act, about the possibility of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin stepping out as a pro-life advocate after she leaves the governor’s office.
“It would be exciting if Sarah Palin were to decide to [...]