While Republican lawmakers across the country work to redefine abortion access, Ohio’s state senator Nina Turner has decided to redefine their party’s acronym. She showed up at a Planned Parenthood press conference at the state house today wearing a shirt that said, simply, “GOP: Get Out of my Panties.”

The new attire is a response to Ohio Republicans’ renewed push to severely limit abortion access for women in the state through a so-called “heartbeat” bill, as well as an upcoming initiative to strip funding from the state’s Planned Parenthood affiliates.

Turner says of her fellow lawmakers, “For the Republicans at the state level to disregard this message is astonishing to me. They are arrogant, they are inebriated with power, and that is exactly what we see going on here.”

Last week, Dena Patrick of Wishadoo! — an online charitable organization — posted a Change.org petition calling for the federal government to provide Hurricane Sandy first responders with health benefits, since thousands of disaster relief workers do not currently qualify for coverage. Today, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) granted her request, announcing that it will immediately begin providing permanent health benefits to more than 8,000 disaster assistance employees who work on intermittent or temporary schedules.

The Change.org petition drew tens of thousands of signatures within days, prompting OPM to open up the Federal Employee Health Benefits plan to “certain employees who work on intermittent schedules” to correct for the long-standing benefit shortfall:

“This regulatory change removes a longstanding barrier to [Federal Employees Health Benefits] coverage for FEMA’s disaster assistance employees who are helping the recovery effort in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy,” said John Berry, director of OPM.

The agency referred to the decision to grant seasonal firefighters health benefits in July as a sort of precedent for offering benefits to reservists, or part-time disaster workers, according to a government document. Currently, reservists make up the majority of about 3,000 FEMA employees sent to areas affected by the hurricane. Until Friday, they were offered federal health care benefits only when deployed. [...]

“Contacting the heads of the various agencies wasn’t even necessary. This was truly a grassroots, from the bottom up, movement,” Patrick said. The petition had more than 113,000 signatures as of Tuesday morning.

About 70 percent of the FEMA workforce serves on a part-time basis through the Reservist Program, meaning that they did not qualify for employer-based health coverage before today’s announcement — despite the dangerous nature of their work and the long hours comparable to full-time employees’ schedules. OPM’s decision to act in response Patrick’s petition is a swift move to correct this coverage gap for the disaster relief workers who are critical to the country’s clean-up efforts.

Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco launched a Global Turnaway Study this year to explore the potential social and economic implications of denying women access to legal abortion. And after documenting the experiences of the women who seek to terminate a pregnancy but are turned away from abortion services, the UCSF researchers found that those women were three times more likely than the women who successfully obtained abortions to fall below the poverty line within the subsequent two years.

The Gawker affiliate io9 summarizes some of the researchers’ preliminary findings, and notes that denying women access to abortion puts a strain on struggling women as well as federal assistance programs. Although the women who participated in the Turnaway Study were in comparable economic positions when they sought abortions, the woman who were unable to terminate their unwanted pregnancies were more likely to have slipped into poverty just a year later:

A year later, [the women who were denied an abortion] were far more likely to be on public assistance — 76 percent of the turnaways were on the dole, as opposed to 44 percent of those who got abortions. 67 percent of the turnaways were below the poverty line (vs. 56 percent of the women who got abortions), and only 48 percent had a full time job (vs. 58 percent of the women who got abortions).

When a woman is denied the abortion she wants, she is statistically more likely to wind up unemployed, on public assistance, and below the poverty line. Another conclusion we could draw is that denying women abortions places more burden on the state because of these new mothers’ increased reliance on public assistance programs.

The UCSF researchers also told io9 that their study did not find any statistical correlation between abortion and drug use, or abortion and clinical depression — in other words, women who successfully obtained abortions did not experience any negative emotional consequences stemming from their decision to end a pregnancy, including an uptick in drug abuse. In fact, the researchers explained, “One week after seeking abortion, 97 percent of women who obtained an abortion felt that abortion was the right decision; 65 percent of turnaways still wished they had been able to obtain an abortion.”

In fact, women often seek abortions for the very same reasons they seek access to affordable contraception: because they cannot currently afford to have another child. Women typically want to avoid unintended pregnancies in cases when having a baby would compromise their economic autonomy and prevent them from finishing school, keeping a job, or supporting their current families.

Nonetheless, conservative anti-choice advocates are currently pushing to limit access to both abortion and contraception — while simultaneously slashing funding for the social safety net programs that poor women rely on.

While the defeat of California’s GMO labeling proposition was widely mourned by the food safety movement, a far more insidious ballot initiative that passed in North Dakota on Election Day has been largely overlooked. North Dakotans quietly voted through a “Farm Amendment” last Tuesday banning any regulation that “abridges the right of farmers and ranchers to employ agricultural technology, modern livestock production and ranching practices.”

The full constitutional amendment is exceptionally vague, reading in entirety:

The right of farmers and ranchers to engage in modern farming and ranching practices shall be forever guaranteed in this state. No law shall be enacted which abridges the right of farmers and ranchers to employ agricultural technology, modern livestock production and ranching practices.

The Farm Bureau-sponsored amendment, the first of its kind, gives blanket protection to concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) that dominate the rural state. These facilities have been exposed time and again for abusing livestock, passing off sick cattle as healthy, and, most seriously, polluting water and air quality with massive amounts of animal manure. Drinking water pollution has been a serious problem for communities near these operations, which the US Geological Survey identified as the largest source of nitrogen pollution in the country.

These large factory farms already have a tight grip on legislators. Earlier this year, the USDA was pressured into apologizing for its internal Meatless Monday initiative by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Rep. Steve King (R-IA), who claimed the optional vegetarian day was a full-scale attack on agriculture. The meat industry has also managed to pass “ag gag” laws in five states that make it illegal for whistleblowers to secretly film inside facilities or take a job under false pretenses.

But perhaps the most telling demonstration of the meat industry’s power is the Environmental Protection Agency’s recent abandonment of a farm waste reporting rule that simply required CAFO owners to disclose basic operations. The rule would have allowed the EPA to track how many animals each CAFO holds, how much manure is being discharged into the water supply, and which facilities are violating the Clean Water Act. Threats of lawsuits by CAFO owners were enough to nip even this basic regulation in the bud.

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Now that President Obama has been elected to a second term, political opponents of his landmark health care reform law are beginning to concede that Obamacare is here to stay. And the general public agrees.

As a new Kaiser Family Foundation poll reports, the majority of Americans don’t support repealing Obamacare. In fact, after the presidential election, the number of Americans advocating for a full repeal of the health reform law dropped to an all-time low at just 33 percent — compared to nearly half of Americans who would rather keep the law in place:

Last week, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) acknowledged that Obamacare is “the law of the land,” suggesting that Republicans in Congress may finally cease their repeated attempts to repeal the law. But his office quickly walked those statements back, clarifying that Republicans remain very committed to opposing Obama’s health reform.

However, if Republican lawmakers continue to stand in opposition to Obamacare by undermining some of the health law’s key provisions, public opinion still isn’t on their side. Previous polling has shown that Americans tend to be broadly supportive of Obamacare’s individual provisions — such as allowing young adults to remain on their parents’ insurance plans, and preventing insurance companies from discriminating against Americans with pre-existing conditions — even if they remain unsure about what the entire law means for the country.

The declining support for repealing the health law is a blow to the anti-Obamacare candidates who poured over $20 million into advertisements attacking the Affordable Care Act during the 2012 election cycle. On the other hand, at least six candidates in tight races across the country won last week after advocating for the health reform law throughout their campaigns.

In the wake of lax workplace standards at a Massachusetts-area compounding pharmacy where contaminated steroid shots led to a deadly meningitis outbreak — resulting in 32 deaths across 19 states so far — the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has found evidence of gross workplace negligence at another drug-making facility owned by the same people as the outbreak-linked pharmacy.

Ameridose — a Westborough-based compounding company founded by brothers-in-law Barry Cadden and Greg Conigliaro that provides pre-filled compounded medication to hospitals across the country — recently opened its doors to federal regulators for a month-long inspection after the public health crisis spurred by its partner, the New England Compounding Center. The FDA found that Ameridose fell far short of safety, cleanliness, and accountability standards, potentially compromising patient safety around the United States:

Inspectors said they found insects within 10 feet of a supposedly sterile area where drugs were manufactured. In another case, inspectors reported a bird flying into a room where drugs are stored.

Elsewhere, the report cites leaks and cracks in the ceiling and walls of a clean room used to manufacture sterile drugs. The same room contained “thick residues that were orange, brown, and green” on equipment used for sterilization.

FDA inspectors also said the company did not investigate at least 53 incidents of bacterial contamination that arose during testing of stock drug solution.

“There is no documented evidence that your firm implemented permanent corrective actions to prevent these sterility events from recurring,” investigators wrote.

Although the FDA has not formally linked Ameridose to any illnesses, and the company asserts that none of its drugs have been outright contaminated, the compounding pharmacy has seen dozens of complaints from hospitals and patients that their medications have not worked as advertised. The FDA’s recent findings raise concerns that lax safety procedures in the largely unregulated compounding pharmacy industry could lead to more public health emergencies and patient deaths.

Earlier this month, Massachusetts approved tighter state regulations on its compounded drug industry, empowering state officials to track the production and distribution of compounded drugs in an effort to prevent the kinds of outbreaks caused by the Massachusetts compounder. Later that week, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) introduced federal legislation to grant the FDA similar oversight of the industry.

Georgia’s harmful immigration law, modeled after Arizona’s SB 1070, requires anyone who is applying for or renewing a professional license in the state to provide documents to prove their citizenship or legal residency. But the massive amount of paperwork required to do this is creating a bureaucratic nightmare for doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals in the state.

Instead of taking a matter of days, the process is leading to delays of weeks or months for health care workers to renew or apply for their professional licenses. As a result, about 600 nurses and 1,300 doctors have lost their ability to work in Georgia so far.

The Georgia secretary of state’s office — which processes license applications of nurses, pharmacists, and veterinarians — does not have enough staff to work through the cumbersome process to restore licenses for those medical professionals, partly because the office saw its budget cut by 40 percent at the same time as the immigration law went into effect. Georgia’s medical board is responsible for licensing other medical professionals in the state, such as doctors, physician assistants, and even acupuncturists, and is running into the same problem:

Director LaSharn Hughes says she sent 41,000 letters of notification out on a recent Thursday. “And by Monday, we’d burned up a fax machine,” Hughes said. “We didn’t have the staff. We didn’t have the equipment.”

Phones go unanswered. Paperwork piles up. And processing delays, coupled with confusion over the new rules, mean lots of expired licenses. [...]

Donald Palmisano Jr. executive director of the Medical Association of Georgia, says the law fixes a problem that never existed — at least not among doctors. “We’re not aware of any undocumented immigrants that are physicians,” Palmisano said.

Even D.A. King, a right-wing activist who helped write Georgia’s immigration law, said he thinks the provision goes too far. Earlier this year, a bill to fix portions of the extreme immigration measure failed in the legislature. “I am not only outraged, but sincerely disappointed and puzzled that our repair legislation was not allowed a vote,” King said. Meanwhile, state officials say the documents requirement has not uncovered any undocumented immigrants who applied for professional licenses.

Now that the election is over and Obamacare is here to stay, states are facing rapidly approaching deadlines for some of the health law’s provisions. But since many Republican governors resisted working toward Obamacare’s key state-level reforms in the hopes that Mitt Romney would win the presidency and repeal the health law, they are now caught in a position where they haven’t done their homework — and many of them don’t have enough time to catch up before the November 16th deadline for submitting their health exchange plans.

In the interest of encouraging states to work out the best plans for their residents, however, the Obama Administration will give those recalcitrant governors a little more time. The Department of Health and Human Services has announced that states will have until December 14th to submit their detailed plans for state-level health exchanges, although they will still have to declare their intentions to form an exchange by this Friday.

“This administration is committed to providing significant flexibility for building a marketplace that best meets your state’s needs,” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius wrote. “We have heard from many states that additional time would allow you to submit a more comprehensive, complete blueprint application for your exchange.”

Nevertheless, at least five Republican governors have already stated their intention to block Obamacare’s implementation in their states, and continue to refuse to set up their health exchanges or expand their Medicaid programs. Lawmakers like Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) are being pressured to reconsider their positions and cooperate with Obamacare to extend coverage to their state’s low-income residents — but if intransigent governors continue to resist the health reform law, Obamacare won’t be able to operate as it was intended, potentially falling short of its goal to extend coverage to roughly 30 million previously uninsured Americans.

The Obama administration may be facing an uphill battle, since last week’s election results ensure that Republican governors will control 30 states by next year.