In the latest in a series of conservative-led attacks on women’s reproductive rights, New York’s Sunset Park Clinic will no longer offer abortion services in the face of a Catholic protest group’s ongoing harassment of doctors and patients.

According to the New York Daily News, the 22-year-old establishment is being forced to shutter its doors and offer significantly reduced services after the so-called “Helpers of God’s Precious Infants” incited enough protests to drive away doctors and patients in droves:

Abortion advocates said they had never heard of a clinic in the city closing under pressure from protesters.

“It was getting more and more difficult. Doctors were getting harassed and patients were getting harassed,” said building and clinic owner Terry Lazar about his decision to eliminate abortions. “It was a decision we finally had to make.”

Lazar said the clinic tried to provide both abortions and other types of procedures, but doctors and patients refused to cross the throngs of religious protesters who tried to convince them not to go in.

“You had protesters with signs and banners yelling at people telling them they were baby killers,” Lazar said. “We were trying to do both and it just wasn’t working. We would have gone out of business.”

The clinic, which will reopen under the name New York Center for Specialty Surgery, will offer only outpatient surgeries after completing renovations. The “victory” for the anti-abortion activists come at the cost of essential services for women and is a cautionary tale for supporters of reproductive rights in New York.

“It’s really a shame. I feel very badly and I’m disappointed about it,” said Julie Kashner, president of the Brooklyn and Queens chapter of the National Organization for Women. “This means that women will have to be inconvenienced to get their health care. If [the clinic on 43rd St.] closed down, this could mean future closings and that’s very disappointing.”

When Congress finally gets around to passing the Farm Bill after the election, they are likely to overlook a small provision tucked into the House version, which would eliminate all substantive regulation of genetically modified foods. A new study published in Environmental Sciences Europe adds to the mounting evidence that GMOs need more, not less, regulation. The study finds that GM crops triggered a flood of toxic herbicides — 527 million pounds — since they were introduced in 1996.

The 16-year study pokes a large hole in a central selling point of biotechnological firms like Monsanto Company that specialize in crops engineered to withstand herbicides like Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller. As Tom Philpott points out, Monsanto promotes their ubiquitous Roundup Ready crops’ ability to reduce pesticide use on their website. While Roundup Ready crops did reduce herbicide use by 2 percent between 1996 and 1999, “superweeds” quickly evolved to resist a chemical in Roundup called glyphosate, which forced farmers to apply heavier and heavier doses of the herbicide.

While there has been no conclusive evidence that eating GM foods has adverse health effects, glyphosate has been linked to birth defects, hormone disruption, and cell degeneration. The pervasive use of Roundup has led to traces of the chemical in rain and the urine of city dwellers.

Though the study found that insecticide use has declined since 1996, the EPA is investigating the emergence of a new breed of pesticide-resistant rootworms that are showing the same kind of evolutionary patterns as superweeds.

Should the GM-friendly provision in the House Farm Bill pass, the USDA would be forbidden from considering studies like these while approving or denying a GM crop for commercialization. If the agency fails to approve or deny a new crop within a year, it would automatically hit the market without even a cursory review. This new study could remind Congress of the risks involved in rubber-stamping GM products — however, since Monsanto has spent $6.3 million this year lobbying Washington, many lawmakers will be tempted to look the other way.

Under President Obama’s health reform law, each state must either set up its own health insurance exchange or have the federal government create one for it by 2014. Obamacare requires plans on the exchanges to include “essential benefits” that clear benchmarks across 10 categories, including mental health and prescription drug coverage.

But in an attempt to give states flexibility in constructing their exchanges, the Obama Administration sketched out relatively lax prescription drug benchmarks, requiring insurers to provide just one drug per drug class to individual and small-group plans — i.e., one cholesterol drug, one anxiety drug, etc. According to Kaiser Health News, this means that under Obamacare mandates, consumers with more extensive prescription drug needs would be forced to pay for medication out-of-pocket. States, sensitive to the potential coverage hole and consumer needs, are choosing exchange benchmark plans that exceed Obamacare requirements:

So far, the benchmark plans cover about 62 percent of the drugs available in different drug classes, Avalere Health found in analyzing eight plans. Coverage of drugs in the classes studied ranges from a low of 26 percent in California’s benchmark plan to a high of 93 percent in Mississippi’s likely benchmark.

“The eight state benchmark plans display a wide range of coverage of brand and generic drugs in the classes we examined,” said Bonnie Washington, senior vice president of Avalere Health.

The one-drug-per-class minimum was one way the Obama administration gave flexibility to insurers trying to hold down costs, said Caroline Pearson, a director at Avalere. “They set the bar so low that most commercial health plans will exceed the one drug per class to be attractive to consumers,” she said.

State efforts to improve the quality of prescription drug coverage under insurance exchange plans highlights the potential consumer benefits of allowing states to experiment with their health models under Obamacare — but the wide discrepancies in coverage serve as a reminder that not every state is equally invested in doing right by its consumers.

In 2008, Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) claimed that it is “common practice” for women “who are not actually pregnant” to get abortions.

Akin, now a senatorial candidate, demonstrated his limited understanding of female biology this summer when he said a woman cannot get pregnant from “legitimate rape” because “the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down.”

But his newly unearthed comments, courtesy of BuzzFeed, show that he may not understand what the procedure of abortion is at all, since he claims it can be administered to a woman who is not pregnant:

You find that along with the culture of death go all kinds of other lawbreaking. The not following good sanitary procedure, giving abortions to women who are not actually pregnant, cheating on taxes, all these kinds of things. The misuse of anesthetics so that people die or almost die. All of these things are common practice, and all that information is available for America.

Watch it:

Akin’s attempts to win over female voters aren’t going well. Shortly after he launched “Women for Akin,” he said his opponent was not being “ladylike” enough during their debate because she attacked his congressional record.

But such remarks may not matter: Recent polls show Akin and Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) neck-and-neck.