I read an interesting article in today's Washington Post by Michelle Boorstein, "Survey: Culture War Truce on the Horizon" http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/10/08/culture_wars.html?hpid=topnews as to whether current trends indicate a reversal in some of the trends among peo

Pop quiz, fellow progressives: how do you refer to the two sides of the abortion debate?

Did you say "pro-life" and "pro-choice"? Those are the terms I generally use when talking about the issue too. And, as I was reminded by a conversation between colleagues this morning, it doesn't make much sense.

For those of us who may have even the slightest inclination to give anti-abortion activists the benefit of the doubt, the time may have come to shed our last feeling of sympathy.

The Bush White House, in another spectacular display of ideology over science, is proposing a regulation that would deny federal funding to any medical facility that does not allow pharmacists to refuse to hand out Plan B, IUDs and even Birth Control pills for religious reasons. In classic right-wing strawman semantics, this is framed as a matter of "religious freedom" vs. patients' rights.

This alone, I expect, should not be too surprising. We have always been familiar with the Right's ongoing desire to overturn Roe v. Wade. But a deeper look reveals a new ideological battle front altogether: contraception. The Dominionist Right is now beginning to frame contraception as equivalent to abortion.

We would do well to remember that those who style themselves as "pro-life" are not simply anti-abortion. They are against modern sexuality and female sexual independence in their entirety. That the Dominionists are increasingly unveiling their radical agenda may be both a blessing and a curse. A short-term curse that hurts families with draconian punishments, but perhaps a useful opportunity that can help us begin to reverse the damage caused by this utterly wicked, perverse and backwards movement.

"I have stated time after time that Roe V. Wade was a bad decision, that I support a woman, the rights of the unborn."

-Senator John McCain

It is nearly unbelievable that a republican candidate, who many Americans consider more moderate than George Bush, has consistently proven he is an opponent of the most important womens health issues of our time. (In some legislation he was even MORE conservative than Bush and his crew on Womens Health!) It is the responsibility of women across the country to bring these issues to the forefront of our election, especially since much of the public isn't aware of his blatently discriminating votes against womens equality.

Watch this video:

Growing up as Catholic, I understood that the Church was not one to endorse candidates, but was rather, issue-based. While mainstream media portrayed the Church as ultra-conservative and seemingly detached from social realities, I knew it be otherwise. Religious leaders from Archbishop Romero, who connoted the term, "liberation theology," God's preference for the poor, to more familiar names including Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mother Teresa, and the basis of my faith, Jesus, all worked tirelessly to turn the world on its head, taking the risk to challenge the status quo as a means of improving the lives of marginalized groups.

On Monday, the New York Times featured a powerful, sobering essay by Waldo L. Fielding, M.D., a retired OBGYN in his mid-eighties. In it, he recounts the desperation of young pregnant women in the days before Roe v. Wade, when there were no safe, legal options available to them.

Note: This is going to be a brief entry because I have a lot going on at the moment and haven't really had time to process today's events.

The quick of it is, there is a very large anti-abortion demonstration being held in front of the Coffman Student Union at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and the pro-choice groups WSAC and the UPCC need people to protest with us. We'll be starting at 8am tomorrow (the anti-choicers are returning at 6am) and going all day, no matter what the weather, until the anti-choicers leave. As a reward for our hard work afterwards, we'll all be heading to MPIRG's Take Back the Night rally (6pm, Loring Park).

You can read a more detailed description of the day's events and tomorrow's plans after the break.

Yes, you two. I'm the one who argued with you about the bias of the information in some of your pamphlets. I'm calling you out.

First of all, I was right. There is no connection between abortion and breast cancer. It was disproven a few years ago. Interestingly enough, your pamphlet hasn't been revised since the middle of 2005, around the time when the connection was debunked. Don't you think that a pamphlet on such a controversial topic would be updated to reflect such an important revelation? Most of the quotes in there were from the late 1980s and mid 1990s, when a number of inconclusive studies were published. That's right: inconclusive, and there are a number of papers that explain this.

You see a young woman walking towards you wearing a t-shirt. As she approaches, you begin to make out the writing. It reads: "I was raped".

What's your reaction?

If you're anything like me, you're more than just a little uncomfortable. Even as the former organizer of a Take Back the Night rally and sexual assault awareness programming, I still struggle with what to do when such an intense personal statement is thrust into the public sphere -- on something as ordinary as a t-shirt.

The shirts -- which are on sale at Scarleteen -- have a specific rationale as written by Jennifer Baumgardner.

Anti-choice activists want us to believe that they're about preserving life, and that they care about babies. The truth is, they don't. "Pro-life" policies kill women. They killed Olga Reyes. And they'll kill tens of thousands of women this year, just like they did the year before and the year before that.