Women’s health advocates blast proposed GOP spending bill that would kill family-planning funding

The same week that anti-abortion-rights advocates and Catholic colleges pushed the Obama administration to repeal a recent decision to include contraception in a list of fully-covered preventive health-care services, House Republicans unveiled a proposed spending plan for 2012 that could leave many women without access to reproductive-health services, reproductive-rights More…

Study suggests more than socioeconomic factors at work when choosing birth-control methods

A recent study of sexually-active women in California finds that socioeconomic status does not fully explain why certain groups of women in the Golden State use more effective birth-control methods than others, according to a report published in the September 2011 issue of Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive More…

As legislative sessions close, anti-abortion rights laws go into effect starting with South Dakota

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NRSC chair Cornyn still not sure about Kyl’s ‘not intended to be factual’ Planned Parenthood stats

Last week, Twitter was host to a Stephen Colbert-encouraged pillorying of Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) following a spokesman’s claim that when Kyl said on the Senate floor that “well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does” is abortion-related, it was “not intended to be a factual statement” More…

New report will help U.S. ‘do more with less’ for women and girls

March is Women’s History Month, and to add to that history, the White House released an organized compendium of statistics on American women, focusing on their income, education, employment, health and their relationship to crime and violence. White House officials said Tuesday that President Obama will be using this information More…

Senate Shoots Down Nelson Abortion Amendment

The vote was 54 to 45 to set the bill aside, with seven Democrats (all men) voting to keep the bill alive, and two Republicans (both women) voting to table the measure.

Sponsored by Sens. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), the bill would have banned subsidized insurance plans More…

Mammography as Politics

They came from Colorado and Arizona, the two leaders of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, summoned to Washington Wednesday to explain the panel’s contentious new recommendations on breast cancer screenings. But Chairman Ned Calonge and Vice Chair Diana Petitti might have been surprised to discover that lawmakers were much More…

Here We Go Again

Moments ago, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) tried to set up a series of Wednesday afternoon votes on the first four amendments to the upper-chamber’s health reform legislation — two from Democrats and two from Republicans.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) objected, arguing that a number of Republicans More…

Mikulski Amendment Aims to Prevent Insurers From Scaling Back Mammogram Coverage

One of the biggest fears surrounding contentious new breast-cancer screening guidelines, which were unveiled last month by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, was that private insurers would use them as justification for scaling back coverage of routine mammograms. Now Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) is pushing More…

Mammogram Hearing Set for Wednesday

The House Energy and Commerce health subcommittee has scheduled a hearing Wednesday to examine contentious new guidelines recommending that women get breast cancer screenings less frequently and later in life.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force caused a storm this month when it suggested that routine mammograms begin at More…