An Oklahoma emergency room doctor refused to provide emergency contraception to a 24-year-old female rape victim because the doctor said it went against her personal beliefs.

The hospital was also unable to provide the victim with a rape kit, because they had no appropriate nurse on staff to administer the test.

According to the victim’s mother, Rhonda, the doctor at the hospital not only refused to help her, but did not get another doctor to provide them the medication. Emergency contraception’s effectiveness diminishes over time, and is most effective when taken immediately. The doctor, however, was shielded from providing the perfectly legal medication because of Oklahoma’s “conscience clause“:

She was treating my daughter like she had done something wrong. [...] My daughter said, “is it you who wont give [emergency contraception] to me? Do you have them here and you just won’t give them to me?” and she said, “That’s right. I will not give you emergency contraceptives because it goes against my beliefs.“

Watch the mother’s interview:

The young woman ended up going to another, where she received the medication she needed and the rape kit. But she would have had to go to two hospitals either way — because of budget cuts, Oklahoma has had to resort to a system of rotating Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners (SANE nurses).

After Republicans opposed expanding contraception access and would not back the Violence Against Women Act until it had been watered down, Democrats accused the party of waging a war on women.

But ahead of tomorrow’s vote on the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA), a bill that would ban physicians from performing abortions based on the fetus’ sex, anti-choice organizations have clumsily attempted to co-opt the “war on women” meme. Even though it is a measure that addresses a non-existing problem, the groups are warning members of Congress to support it:

– “Planned Parenthood is out of control, waging a ruthless war against young women and their (female) babies.” [Traditional Values Coalition email]

– “This is a real war on women. And it is wrong when we turn a blind eye to women being eliminated in the womb simply for being a member of the female sex.” [Americans United for Life letter]

– “Members who recently have embraced contrived political rhetoric asserting they are resisting a ‘war on women’ must reflect on whether they wish to be recorded as being defenders of the escalating war on baby girls.” [National Right to Life Committee letter]

And during floor debate today about PRENDA, GOP House members claimed the sex-selective abortion ban was part of the “war on women” as well:

– “This is the ultimate war on women. If we don’t allow women to be born, we cannot talk about any other rights.” [Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle (R-NY)]

“Sex selection is violence against women and it is the truest kind of war against women.” [Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ)]

Republicans may echo the anti-abortion advocates and try to claim PRENDA would stop a “war on women,” but it is a discriminatory bill that does not address equal rights for women. Rather than addressing inequality, PRENDA simply would exacerbate sex and race discrimination by targeting women of color from communities associated with sex selection whom doctors might suspect of wanting to have a prohibited abortion.

Obamacare includes a small business tax credit to help employers provide health insurance coverage. The issue, however, is that only 170,300 businesses out of a possible 4 million have applied for the credit because of the time-consuming application procedure. Now, the Obama administration is asking Congress to improve the process so that more small businesses apply for the credit.

Republicans are opposing the request, even though it would lower taxes for small businesses. They’re seeking to repeal Obamacare, not change it. “I don’t think expanding it is going to make any difference whatsoever,” said Rep. Sam Graves (R-MO), who chairs the House Small Business Committee.

But their runs against what GOP leaders proposed in 2009, during the debate over health care reform. Then-Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) had deputized Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO) to lead the Health Care Solutions Group and shape the GOP alternative to the Democrats’ health care proposals. “Unlike the Democrats’ government takeover of health care, this common-sense plan keeps patients and doctors in charge of key medical decisions,” Boehner said of the plan. In it, Blunt’s group called for a small business tax credit to help employers offset the cost of providing health insurance:

To expand availability and accessibility of health care coverage, the Republican plan: [...]

• Helps employers offer health care coverage to their workers by reducing their administrative costs through a new small business tax credit.

The Affordable Care Act’s tax credit was designed to help small businesses with fewer than 25 employees, which have the most difficult time offering insurance to their employees. These businesses make up almost 90 percent of all employers in the U.S., so improving the application process for tax credits would expand health insurance to thousands of workers.

An anti-abortion group called Live Action released a “sting” video Tuesday of a woman asking for a sex-selective abortion at a Planned Parenthood and being assisted by a staff member.

The sting, according to the group, shows that Planned Parenthood is helping women have abortions based on the gender of their fetus. But Planned Parenthood has already condemned the staff member’s behavior, saying, “Within three days of this patient interaction, the staff member’s employment was ended and all staff members at this affiliate were immediately scheduled for retraining in managing unusual patient encounters.”

Planned Parenthood also clarified that they strongly oppose sex-selective abortions and “racism and sexism in all forms.”

Lila Rose, the head of Live Action, claimed sex-selective abortion is a growing problem in the United States and that the video proves it. But the facts don’t agree with Rose, according to Jezebel:

Statistics do not indicate that the US has a problem with sex-selective abortions, nor do they indicate an increasing gender discrepancy in the American birth rate. In fact, according to the Centers for Disease Control, the sex ratio — the number of baby boys born per 1,000 baby girls — has actually been decreasing slightly but steadily over the last 30 years. In 1983, 1,052 boys were born for every 1,000 girls born in the US; in 2009, 1,048 boys were born for every 1,000 girls. This is only indicative of a “growing problem” if by “growing problem,” Rose means “growing anti-abortion rights talking point.”

Here’s the “sting”:

The release of the video conspicuously came one day before House members vote on a Republican-backed bill to ban physicians from performing abortions based on the fetus’ sex. Rather than addressing inequality, PRENDA would exacerbate sex and race discrimination by targeting women of color from communities associated with sex selection whom doctors might suspect of wanting to have a prohibited abortion.

House Republicans will force a vote tomorrow on a controversial abortion ban that would prevent sex-selective abortions. The bill seeks to somehow protect the “civil rights” of fetuses by banning physicians from performing abortions based on the fetus’ sex. While the woman would be exempt from prosecution, physicians who perform the procedure can be sued for damages.

Before GOP leaders bring up the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA) under a suspension of House rules, which will require two-thirds majority for passage, anti-choice organizations have been lobbying for it. In a clumsy attempt to subvert the War on Women meme, the National Right to Life Committee warned members of Congress against supporting a “war on baby girls“:

Of course, pro-life Members will support this legislation. But it is to be hoped that even many Members who deem themselves “pro-choice” will recoil at the notion that” freedom of choice” must include even the choice to abort a little unborn girl, merely because she is a girl. Members who recently have embraced contrived political rhetoric asserting they are resisting a “war on women” must reflect on whether they wish to be recorded as being defenders of the escalating war on baby girls.

Rather than addressing inequality, PRENDA would exacerbate sex and race discrimination by targeting women of color from communities associated with sex selection whom doctors might suspect of wanting to have a prohibited abortion. In February, the bill passed the House Judiciary committee with only Republican support. After the committee vote, House Judiciary Committee ranking member John Conyers Jr. (D-MI) said it “would require doctors to police their patients, undermining patient-doctor privilege” and violating a woman’s right to privacy guaranteed by Roe v. Wade.

When he introduced the bill, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) said he supported stopping sex-selective abortions because “U.S. Census data shows that certain populations have ‘son-biased’ ratios” and the abortion rate is five times higher for minorities. But Franks’ bill does nothing to address the actual issues behind the high unintended pregnancy rate in minority communities, like substandard health care and poor sex education, that lead to the higher abortion rate among women of color.

PRENDA would do nothing to eliminate sex discrimination in the U.S., and will only add additional, unnecessary barriers to abortion care. If House Republicans really wanted to promote equal rights for women, they would support bills like the Paycheck Fairness Act and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

A New Orleans women’s health organization was destroyed last week by an unknown arsonist, becoming the latest target of attacks on women’s health clinics in the south.

The organization, Women With A Vision, was likely singled out because it offers AIDS prevention help, HIV testing, and substance abuse assistance to sex workers, transgender women, poor women, and women of color. The clinic also does community outreach and education on those issues. Like two incidents in Georgia last week, no one was injured in the fire, but the clinic lost a good share of its resources.

The fire burned female and male condoms, HIV education posters, and suits donated for women to wear to job interviews. In a letter on their website, the group discusses the losses, and calls for donations from anyone who can help:

Thanks to the fast response of all of our supporters across the country, many of you have already heard that our office was broken into last night and set on fire. The worst damage was concentrated in our community organizing and outreach office where we store all of the resources we use to educate our community. We lost everything. We do not have an office to operate out of right now. Most of our office equipment and all of our educational resources were destroyed. Because of the targeted nature, we can only assume that this was intentional.

We are shaken to be sure, and deeply worried about how we will provide for our members while we are rebuilding. But the work will continue. This cannot and will not stop us from speaking out for people who do not have a voice.

Watch the director’s reaction to the fire:

Women’s health clinics in Georgia have been on heightened alert since the attacks there, and the FBI is investigating those fires. The New Orleans fire department is still looking into the fires at Women With A Vision, but witnesses reported seeing a man run from the building where the fire was set.

About 45 percent of the 1.6 million veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are seeking compensation for service-related injuries — more than double the 21 percent of veterans who filed such claims after the first Gulf War, according to an AP investigation. And new veterans are claiming an average of eight or nine ailments, and in the last year, the average has jumped from 11 to 14. By comparison, Vietnam veterans are receiving compensation for fewer than four injuries on average.

Officials tell the AP that the number of disability claims is increasing because of better treatment for battlefield wounds and more outreach from the Department of Veterans Affairs. And doctors are seeing different types of ailments, including traumatic brain injuries and PTSD:

More of the new veterans are women, accounting for 12 percent of those who have sought care through the VA. Women also served in greater numbers in these wars than in the past. Some female veterans are claiming PTSD due to military sexual trauma — a new challenge from a disability rating standpoint, Hickey said.

The new veterans have different types of injuries than previous veterans did. That’s partly because improvised bombs have been the main weapon and because body armor and improved battlefield care allowed many of them to survive wounds that in past wars proved fatal.

“They’re being kept alive at unprecedented rates,” said Dr. David Cifu, the VA’s medical rehabilitation chief. More than 95 percent of troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan have survived.

But the VA’s outmoded system can’t keep up with the backlog of claims. More than 560,000 veterans currently have delayed disability claims that are more than 125 days old. And as the volume continues to grow and cost of health care for veterans increases, Harvard economist Linda Bilmes estimates that the health care and disability costs of the recent wars will cost the nation $600 billion to $900 billion. Despite the mounting claims, the VA is streamlining its process to more effectively take care of veterans because its mission “is to take care of whatever the population is,” Allison Hickey, the VA’s undersecretary for benefits, told the AP. “We want them to have what their entitlement is.”

POMPANO BEACH, Florida — Although Rep. Allen West (R-FL) ran for Congress on a platform of completely scrapping Obamacare, he praised a number of its key provisions on Tuesday, putting him at odds with many House Republicans leading the repeal effort.

In an interview with ThinkProgress, West pointed to three popular provisions of the health care law that he would like to see preserved: allowing parents to keep children on their health insurance plans until 26, ensuring that people with pre-existing conditions aren’t denied insurance, and closing Medicare’s prescription drug donut hole:

KEYES: Say we repeal [Obamacare] tomorrow. Do you think that will then precipitate a drop in insurance premiums?

WEST: Well you’ve got to replace it. You’ve got to replace it with something. If people want to keep their kid on their insurance at 26, fine. We’ve got to make sure no American gets turned back for pre-existing conditions, that’s fine. Keep the donut hole closed, that’s fine. But what I just talked to you about, maybe 20, 25 pages of legislation.

Watch it:

The problem with West’s reasoning is that the pre-existing condition ban can’t function without an individual mandate or some other mechanism for bringing healthy people into the health care system. Without the individual responsibility provision, a death spiral begins whereby only sick people buy insurance and it soon becomes unaffordable for everybody. As the American Prospect’s Pat Caldwell writes, “the preexisting condition ban and the individual mandate are inseparably tied to one another.”

Still, West’s embrace of a few key parts of the Obamacare law puts him to the left of many of his Republican colleagues. As Politico reports, infighting has now broken out among Republicans between hard-liners who favor full repeal and lawmakers like West, who like some parts of the law. Rep. Steve King (R-IA), who is perhaps the man most responsible for Republicans coalescing around the full repeal effort, has long maintained that every piece of Obamacare needs to be scrapped, including the donut hole coverage. “There will always be those who slip through the cracks,” King explained last year.

West isn’t the only Republican who Congress who voted last year to fully repeal Obamacare but now wants to protect some of the health care law’s popular provisions. Salon notes that Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) defended the provision allowing children up to age 26 to stay on their parents’ insurance.

Erin Bouquin, New Mexico’s chief medical officer, said she was asked to resign after she promoted condom use in a TV interview as a way to slow the growth of sexually transmitted diseases among teenagers. An hour after her interview aired, Bouquin said she met with Health Department Secretary Catherine Torres and was asked to leave because she had not met the expectations of the state’s Republican governor.

The health department spokeswoman said there was no connection between the interview and Bouquin’s resignation, but Bouquin suspects otherwise because she said Gov. Susana Martinez (R-NM) favors abstinence-only sex education. “On the day I was asked to leave, I said the word condom three times on the news,” she told the Santa Fe New Mexican.

The governor’s office and health department denied any involvement in Bouquin’s resignation. Martinez’s spokesman Scott Darnell said in a statement that “the governor is a proponent of taking a balanced and multi-pronged approach to controlling the spread of sexually transmitted diseases; there is nothing in Dr. Bouquin’s interview that would conflict with that approach

New Mexico has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the nation, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) will soon introduce legislation that would allow states to use federal funds they’re receiving through Medicare, Medicaid, and other health care programs to build a universal single-payer system. Advocates are describing the bill as a “lifeline” for advocates:

It would create a mechanism for states to request federal funds after establishing their own health insurance programs…. It would, for the first time, create a system under which a Medicare-for-all program could be rolled out on a state-by-state basis. In California’s case, it would make coverage available to the roughly 7 million people now lacking health insurance.

“This is a huge deal,” said Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog, a Santa Monica advocacy group. “This is a lifeline for people who want to create a Medicare system at the state level.”

The bill could warm the hearts of liberals who expressed frustration with the Affordable Care Act’s more moderate approach of building on the existing health care system and should also satisfy GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The former Massachusetts governor has sought to differentiate his 2006 health reform from Obamacare by rejecting a federal prescription for reform and promising to “pursue policies that give each state the power to craft a health care reform plan that is best for its own citizens.”

The ACA creates state flexibility by granting waivers to states that meet certain coverage standards and a bipartisan group of lawmakers has offered legislation expanding the provision by allowing states with innovative health care solutions to opt out of certain provisions beginning in 2014. Romney, meanwhile, has pledged to build on the ACA’s flexibility and grant states to the ability to opt out of the law entirely.

McDermott’s measure would go even further and encourage states to repurpose federal funds to build a universal single-payer health system of their own. If Republicans are truly interested in states rights, they will back it in mass.

The vast majority of women in the U.S. are not using the most effective method of birth control available, according to a new study from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

The study finds that the pill is significantly less effective at preventing pregnancy than long-lasting contraceptive methods such as the intrauterine device (IUD), building on earlier research that has drawn the same conclusion. In fact, women using IUDs or implants were a staggering 20 times less likely to get pregnant than women who used shorter contraceptive methods like the pill.

Yet few women in the U.S. currently use this type of contraception because IUDs are often very expensive — with co-pays costing hundreds of dollars — and rarely covered by insurance plans. As the study’s lead author, Dr. Brooke Winner, told Reuters:

Nationally, only about 5 percent are using long-lasting methods like IUDs and implants. We know one of the barriers to why they’re not using them more frequently is up-front costs. If [more] women were using these products nationally, there would be a very significant drop in unintended pregnancies, which would have far-reaching effects.

Although the birth control pill is the most commonly used contraceptive in the U.S., its effectiveness diminishes when women miss any of their daily pills or struggle to fill their monthly prescriptions on time. So if IUDs are significantly more effective at preventing pregnancy than the pill, doctors ought to be encouraging more women to use them. As another one of the study’s authors points out, “If there were a drug for cancer, heart disease or diabetes that was 20 times more effective we would recommend it first.”

Fortunately, President Obama’s new birth control regulation that expands access to birth control may help both doctors and women address this issue. Because the new policy would eliminate co-pays for contraceptives, IUDs would become a viable option for the women who currently can’t afford them — and, as the Guttmacher Institute has documented, removing cost barriers to contraceptive services greatly increases the number of women who choose to use the most effective methods.

The Senate Armed Services committee approved an amendment on Thursday to eliminate restrictions on abortion funding in military medical facilities. The provision would allow the military to fund abortion care in cases of rape and incest. Currently, the Defense Department only offers abortion services to military women when their lives are in danger with no exemptions for cases of rape or incest.

Supporters of the amendment, sponsored by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), said removing the restriction is a matter of fairness for military women:

Supporters argue that it would simply provide parity between civilians insured by the government and uniformed service members. [...]

“This is about equity,” Shaheen said. “Civilian women who depend on the federal government for health insurance — whether they are postal workers or Medicaid recipients — have the right to access affordable abortion care if they are sexually assaulted. It is only fair that the thousands of brave women in uniform fighting to protect our freedoms are treated the same.”

Shaheen’s provision would mirror the Hyde Amendment, which allows Medicaid funding for abortions in cases of rape and incest, so women with military-provided insurance plans would have the same health care options as civilian women with government health care plans.

And because nearly one in three women will be sexually assaulted while serving in the military, Shaheen’s amendment expands access to necessary services so that women do not have to pay out of pocket if they seek abortion care after being rape.

Now that the committee has approved the measure — with three Republicans voting for it — it heads to the Senate floor. When Shaheen introduced this amendment last year, anti-choice senators blocked it from being considered.