Facebook rejected an ad this week that disputed scientifically unsound claims that abortion can cause higher instances of breast cancer, arguing that the advertisement violated the company’s guidelines “by advertising adult products or services, including toys, videos, or sexual enhancement products.” The news comes as a coalition of sexual violence prevention and women’s equality organizations are pressuring Facebook to take a stronger stance in favor of women’s health and crackdown against messages that “trivialize or glorify” violence against women.

“I’m a big supporter of that campaign,” Michelle Kinsey Bruns, the online manager of Women’s Media Center and the creator of the ad, told ThinkProgress in a telephone interview on Saturday morning. The ad linked to a page on the National Cancer Institute website reassuring women that “having an abortion or miscarriage does not increase a woman’s subsequent risk of developing breast cancer.”

The rejected ad via Kinsey Bruns’ Twitter handle @ClinicEscort:

Kinsey Bruns said she expected Facebook to disapprove of the ad, but submitted it anyway to highlight what she described as “the absolute inconsistency that Facebook is willing to apply to a woman’s body as an object of violence, but a woman’s body as a medical object is too scandalous to be approved.”

Indeed, the company has come under criticism for removing images of “mastectomies, breastfeeding mothers, and other non-sexualized depictions of women’s bodies” and labeling them as “pornographic,” while allowing photographs and forums that make light of abusing and raping women. That content often falls under the “humor” section of Facebook’s content guidelines. Activists are encouraging companies that advertise with Facebook to boycott the company until they can be assured their ads will not appear next to content that promotes sexual violence and abuse.

Kinsey Bruns submitted a similar breast cancer ad last year, with an illustration of a woman touching her breast, but it too was rejected. She says she plans to experiment more with the company’s guidelines, posting ads with celebrities like Nicki Minaj in outrageous clothing or showing “sideboob” to test the boundaries and inconsistencies of the media giant’s standards.

Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines state, “Ads may not promote the sale or use of adult products or services, including but not limited to toys, videos, publications, live shows, or sexual enhancement products. Ads for family planning and contraception are allowed provided they follow the appropriate targeting requirements.”

While pregnant teens are being shamed for making bad choices in the US, a new ad campaign in Britain is tackling the other side of the spectrum with an arresting image of a pregnant old woman. The campaign, sponsored by the pregnancy testing company First Response, purports to warn young women that their childbearing years are numbered.

The average British woman bears her first child at age 30, 5 years later than American women. In the name of “provok[ing] a debate about how old is too old to have a baby,” First Response Get Britain Fertile had make-up artists transform 45-year-old British TV presenter Kate Garraway into a cartoonishly ancient-looking pregnant woman.

Yet even as First Response claims there is a lack of awareness about the female biological clock, they tout a survey by YouGov finding 70 percent of British women believe having a baby in her 40s would be too old. Women were also quite clear about their motives to wait: two-fifths said they would delay having a child until they have financial stability, while over a third said the cost of childcare is a deterrent. Another third said they would wait until they found the right partner.

Nevertheless, First Response has decided the solution to the trend of women waiting longer to have children is to criticize them, prey on their fears of aging, and exploit social disgust for even moderately sexual old women.

Get Britain Fertile ambassadors Garraway and Zita West insist that they are not trying to push women into a panic over their ticking fertility clocks. Yet the campaign, which officially launches June 3, would do well to extend beyond the caricature of the old woman. Thus far, First Response has not suggested they will explore ways to bridge the vast disparity between the average cost of raising a child — roughly half a million dollars in the US, not including college tuition — and the employment prospects of the average 25-year-old couple. In the US, the average college-educated 20-something earns $45,000 a year, while their unemployment rate is far higher than their older counterparts. Highly-educated young people are also increasingly finding it difficult to find jobs that match their very expensive education. In the UK, two-fifths of all unemployed people are younger than 25. Nor does the campaign touch on the UK’s childcare costs, which are the second highest in the world.

Rather than address these real fiscal issues young women explicitly say are keeping them from having children earlier, Garraway writes that women are simply being too picky about settling down with the right partner: “I’m not suggesting for a minute that you settle for the first half-decent man who comes along – every woman has the right to hold out for Mr Right – but you may find that really addressing your feelings about having a family means the man you thought was Mr Right comes in a different form. I suppose the word for it is mindfulness.”

This advice ignores the far higher divorce rates among people who married younger than 30. In the UK, the divorce rate hit a 40-year low last year as couples delay marriage til age 30 or later.

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As Congress debates comprehensive immigration reform, members of both parties have insisted on barring undocumented immigrants who achieve provisional legal status from receiving Medicaid coverage or Obamacare subsidies (a provision that was already part of the health law). But preventing these immigrants from gaining basic health benefits is actually a fiscally irresponsible model that will only raise health care spending and contribute to a sicker U.S. population.

The common argument against providing health care to undocumented immigrants is that, since they’ve broken the law, they should be punished. A part of that punishment involves denying them health care services through public entitlement programs or federal subsidies that are dependent on Americans’ tax dollars. “We must value the contribution of immigrants to our country. In doing so, we must protect our borders, we must protect our workers, and we must protect the taxpayer,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on Thursday.

But the taxpayer already foots the bill for undocumented immigrants’ care — just in an incredibly inefficient and half-baked way. Under the auspices of the Reagan-era Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), hospital emergency rooms can’t turn away patients based on their citizenship or insurance status. That doesn’t mean that their care magically becomes free — undocumented men and women who use the emergency room are still slapped with a hefty hospital bill.

However, if they are unable to pay that bill — which is fairly likely considering that they probably don’t have any insurance — then a combination of the federal government, state governments, hospitals, and other American consumers of U.S. health care are forced to absorb the cost. In turn, that raises prices for medical services, since hospitals want to recoup some of their losses. Some studies have estimated the price of subsidizing undocumented immigrants’ health care at about $10.7 billion per year.

The federal government has long been aware of this problem. In fact, soon after EMTALA’s passage, lawmakers authorized a special Medicaid fund that mostly goes towards subsidizing emergency treatments for undocumented immigrants. The program costs about $2 billion per year, and most of that money is used on delivering babies for pregnant, undocumented women who go to the emergency room.

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Republican Party of Virginia Treasurer Bob FitzSimmonds, a former aide to and “very close friend” of gubernatorial nominee Ken Cuccinelli II (R), told Virginia blogger Ben Tribbett that he is “not a big fan of contraception, frankly.”

FitzSimmonds — who was Cuccinelli’s legislative director during his time in the Virginia Senate, as well as a multiple-time state senate candidate himself — is the former executive director of what is now the Care Net Pregnancy Help Center and the former chair of the Virginia Crisis Pregnancy Center Directors Association. Crisis Pregnancy Centers are faith-based operations that seek to discourage pregnant women from considering abortion. He created an abstinence-only curriculum for area schools called the “Keep It Simple Say NO abstinence program“.

At last weekend’s state party convention, Tribbett asked FitzSimmon whether he supported the distribution of emergency contraception on college campuses. “I’m not a big fan of contraception, frankly,” the Republican Party official explained. “I think there are some issues, we’re giving morning-after pills to 12-year-olds, and pretty soon I guess we’ll hand them out to babies, I don’t know.”

Watch the video:

FitzSimmonds also told Tribbett that sex education has caused the spread of sexually transmitted diseases: “I believe that we don’t recognize the causal effect between the type of sex education that we’ve been giving and the spread of STDs. We focus on things like abortion, cause it’s a big pressure thing. I go into schools 15-20 times a year, I run a non-profit that goes into schools and talks to kids about sex. They’re all abortion and HIV. HIV’s kind of hard to catch. Abortion happens if you get pregnant. But we’re on the track for 50 percent of the American people to have Herpes by the time these kids are my age. And that is a profound — not only health but sociological crisis facing this country.”

FitzSimmonds posted on his Facebook page shortly after last November’s election, “When Obama is 90 years old and he dies and goes to Hell, he is going to say ‘This is all Bush’s fault.’”

(HT: BlueVirginia)

Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) has a message for her party: expand Medicaid — or else.

The combative GOP governor is sticking by a threat she made to veto all legislation until lawmakers resolve the 2014 state budget and pass Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. On Thursday, Brewer proved that wasn’t just talk, vetoing five bills sent to her desk in quick succession.

“I warned that I would not sign additional measures into law until we see resolution of the two most pressing issues facing us: adoption of a fiscal 2014 state budget and plan for Medicaid,” wrote Brewer in her veto message. “It is disappointing I must demonstrate the moratorium was not an idle threat.”

Arizona officials only have five weeks before reaching the constitutional deadline for passing a budget. Last Thursday, six Republican state senators joined a unified Democratic caucus to pass a Medicaid expansion bill — but efforts have been gummed up in the state House since then.

Brewer isn’t letting the issue slide. She has been touring the Grand Canyon State to shore up support for the expansion and put pressure on reticent lawmakers in her own party.

Some Republicans opposed to the expansion have warned of dire political consequences for lawmakers who buck the traditional conservative opposition to Medicaid. In a letter to Republican legislators, the chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Committee wrote of the state senators who voted for expansion, “Their egregious actions will have serious consequences. Their political careers are all but over and their days numbered.” He referred to Brewer as a “rogue governor” in the same statement.

But Brewer appears to be sticking by her convictions. At the beginning of the year, she became the third Republican governor to embrace expansion, asserting that it would provide health coverage to 50,000 low-income Arizonans. While promoting the expansion in March, Brewer attested to the dire consequences of failing to expand Medicaid. “The human cost of this tragedy can’t be calculated,” said Brewer, flanked by public health officials, doctors, and advocates for the poor. “Remember, there is no Plan B.”

The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) estimates that expanding Medicaid would cut Arizona’s uninsurance rate by nearly a third.

Arguing that Michigan women should be forced to buy separate insurance coverage for abortion services, even in the cases of rape or incest, a prominent anti-choice leader in the state claimed that paying extra money to terminate a pregnancy resulting from rape is the same thing as paying extra money for car insurance.

Right to Life of Michigan is currently pushing to prohibit the state’s insurance providers from covering elective abortion services, which would force women to pay additional money to purchase a separate insurance rider to terminate a pregnancy. If the group collects enough signatures, the issue will appear on the 2014 state ballot. This week, when reporters asked Right to Life president Barbara Listing why the proposed insurance ban doesn’t include an exception for rape or incest, she compared those sexual crimes to car accidents and floods.

“It’s simply, like, nobody plans to have an accident in a car accident, nobody plans to have their homes flooded. You have to buy extra insurance for those,” Listing explained.

Jessica Tramontana, a spokesperson for the liberal activist group Progress Michigan, called Listing’s comments “appalling” and pointed out that rape can’t be compared to those catastrophic events because sexual assault isn’t actually an accident. “Nobody can anticipate being the victim of a crime,” Tramontana said.

Ultimately, requiring women who become pregnant from rape to negotiate additional red tape to terminate that pregnancy forces them to bear an even greater burden for the crime perpetrated against them. Women should not have to plan ahead for rape and buy a second insurance plan in advance, just as they should not have to carefully select the clothing they wear to prevent being sexually assaulted.

Preventing insurance plans from covering abortion is a popular anti-choice tactic — and represents just one of many ways that anti-choice politicians successfully drive up the cost of women’s reproductive rights — but Michigan’s stringent version of the policy is out of step with the national standard. The federal government, 32 states, and the District of Columbia all offer exceptions in the cases of rape and incest in their bans on public funding for abortion. Americans also overwhelmingly support ensuring that victims of rape and incest have access to abortion services.

This isn’t the first time that abortion opponents have suggested that sexual assault is somehow analogous to car trouble. In 2011, when Kansas was considering the time type of insurance ban, a state lawmaker suggested that women could plan ahead for rape just like drivers plan ahead by bringing a spare tire.

The 104-year-old Anna Louise Inn in Cincinnati, Ohio, has long provided a refuge for women struggling to overcome drug addictions or prostitution, escape abusive husbands, or simply get back on their feet. When Western & Southern Insurance Group initially approached them with plans to purchase the safe house several years ago and turn it into a hotel, the Anna Louise declined. Western & Southern sued over a zoning issue, and, after a costly 2-year legal battle, the Fortune 500 company finally bought the house last week for $4 million.

The insurance company initially sued to keep the Anna Louise from using a windfall of tax credits to renovate the home. The federal low-income housing credits required the Anna Louise to use the funds over 30 years, finally giving the struggling house security in the neighborhood. As Cincinnati City Beat reported at the time, Western & Southern’s PAC and the CEO’s family donated heavily to one city council member who changed his vote last minute in an attempt to sabotage the Anna Louise’s development agreement. When it cleared anyway, Western & Southern sued as a stalling mechanism — as long as there was legal action, the Anna Louise would be banned from claiming the much-needed funds. With the credits set to expire at the end of the year, Cincinnati Union Bethel, the nonprofit that runs the Anna Louise, faced the choice of either giving up the house or the funds that could help them set up elsewhere.

Cincinnati Union Bethel told the Associated Press they gave in to the sale because they couldn’t afford to sustain a legal fight with the insurance giant. One woman who took shelter at the house for two years after leaving an abusive relationship explained, “Western & Southern had the money to fight and the Anna Louise Inn didn’t. When you have that much money and you want something, eventually you’re going to get it.”

The two-year legal fight devolved rapidly into nasty attacks on the women at the house. John Barrett, The CEO of Western & Southern, accused the Anna Louise of taking “a bailout” from taxpayers in order to prop up “a homeless shelter and prostitution recovery center.” A key tactic in the company’s crusade against the safe house was to vilify its residents as degenerates who did not belong in the fast-developing neighborhood.

Western & Southern has already bought up a sizable portion of Cincinnati’s historic Lytle Park neighborhood, where the house is located. The company developed Cincinnati’s tallest building in 2011 and plans to turn the Anna Louise into a boutique hotel as it has done with other historic properties in the area. When asked about the public relations cost to his company over the past two years, Barrett told the Cincinnati Enquirer, “If you believe in something, you believe in it. That’s what this company’s always done: stood up for its rights.”

On Thursday, California officials revealed insurance companies’ opening bids for the state’s Obamacare marketplace in 2014. The numbers are great for consumers — and terrible for right-wing fear mongering over the health law.

Covered California, the agency tasked with constructing and maintaining the Golden State’s insurance marketplace, announced in a press release that rates submitted by 13 insurers for the 2014 individual marketplace were far lower than initially expected, ranging from a stunning 29 percent below the current average premium for small business health plans to only two percent above them.

For Californians who will gain coverage in the marketplace, that means affordable health plans with a minimum base of ten “essential health benefits,” including prescription drug services, mental health care, and maternity services. And the announced rates are even better for consumers considering that they don’t take Obamacare’s federal insurance subsidies into account. Depending on income, the average middle-aged Californian would pay anywhere from $40 to $300 per month for a mid-level “Silver” health plan on the marketplace. Younger, healthier Americans looking to buy bare-bones “Bronze” health plans would end up paying less than $170 per month — or even nothing at all — if they make less money and receive federal Obamacare subsidies.

That stands in stark contrast to heated GOP rhetoric and outlandish insurance company predictions about Obamacare. Last week, the Republican-led House of Representative voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act for the 37th time. During a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on Obamacare “rate shock” last week, House Republicans predicted hikes as high as 66 percent for Californians’ premiums based on internal documents from 17 major U.S. insurance companies.

Such claims may make for good politicking — but as the California numbers underscore, they aren’t actually reflected in reality. During last week’s House hearing, Topher Spiro, Vice President for Health Policy at the Center for American Progress (CAP), warned against making hysterical claims about health insurance rates under Obamacare. He noted that independent analyses have shown that an influx of Americans into the insurance pool and marketplaces designed to foster competition would actually end up lowering Americans’ premiums, especially in high-population states like California.
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Illinois public schools will be required to include medically accurate information about birth control in their sex ed classes under a measure that the state legislature passed this week. HB 2675, which Gov. Pat Quinn (D) is expected to sign into law, will prohibit health classes from teaching abstinence-only curricula.

Illinois’ current law requires sex ed classes to emphasize abstinence as “the expected norm,” and stipulates that “course material and instruction shall stress that pupils should abstain from sexual intercourse until they are ready for marriage.” Public schools can choose between teaching abstinence-only education, using a mix of stressing abstinence while providing comprehensive information about birth control and condoms, or simply declining to provide any sex ed instruction. Under HB 2675, schools won’t be able to choose the abstinence-only option anymore — they’ll need to either offer comprehensive information about prevention methods, or decide not to offer any sex ed courses whatsoever.

State Sen. Linda Holmes (D) spearheaded the measure because she doesn’t believe that abstinence-only curricula adequately equips teens with the resources they need to safeguard their sexual health. “In fantasy land, we teach our kids abstinence — and they listen. But we know they don’t necessarily follow that advice,” Holmes explained. “They are going to be confronted with the issue of sex before they’re 21 years old, or 25, or whenever they decide to get married.”

Holmes is right. By their 19th birthday, seven in ten American teens will have had sex. And even the Americans who grow up in socially conservative communities aren’t delaying sex until marriage — by some estimates, 80 percent of unmarried evangelical Christians have had sex at least once. But when those young people become sexually active, they often don’t understand how to effectively protect themselves. Since abstinence-only classes often mislead students about the facts about contraception, 60 percent of young adults underestimate birth control’s effectiveness and are more likely to skip it because they don’t believe it will make a difference.

Abstinence education can also have lasting consequences for adolescents’ sense of self-worth. Because messages emphasizing abstinence and sexual purity often teach students that sexual activity is something be ashamed of, the youth who receive those messages may internalize those feelings of guilt and shame.

While banning abstinence-only education is a step in the right direction, HB 2675 still allows Illinois schools to opt out of providing any type of sexual health education. Luckily, some school districts in the state have already taken matters into their own hands to ensure their students will receive the information they need. Chicago’s public school system recently instituted a standardized policy for requiring age-appropriate comprehensive sexual health information in every grade.

At a congressional committee hearing to discuss a proposed measure to criminalize abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, a Texas lawmaker told a woman who made the difficult choice to terminate a non-viable pregnancy that she should have carried the fetus to term anyway — even though an MRI had already revealed that he was missing a large part of his brain and didn’t have much chance of survival.

On Thursday, Christy Zink testified in opposition to H.R. 1797, a 20-week abortion ban that anti-abortion representatives of Congress keep attempting to impose upon the women in the nation’s capital. Abortion opponents claim that 20-week bans are necessary to prevent “fetal pain.” But in her testimony, Zink pointed out it’s misleading to suggest that this abortion restriction would serve this purpose, since forcing her to carry her pregnancy to term would have actually caused her unborn son considerable pain.

At 21 weeks, Zink’s doctors discovered that her fetus had no brain function. That type of fetal abnormality was impossible to detect earlier in her pregnancy. “If this bill had been passed before my pregnancy, I would have had to carry to term and give birth to a baby whom the doctors concurred had no chance of a life and would have experienced near-constant pain,” Zink explained. “If he had survived the pregnancy — which was not certain — he might never have left the hospital. My daughter’s life, too, would have been irrevocably hurt by an almost always-absent parent.”

In order to justify his support for H.R. 1797, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) suggested that Zink should have given birth to her son anyway, regardless of the pain that may have caused her family. The congressman told a story about a different couple who decided to give birth to a fetus with different types of disabilities — suggesting that Zink should have made the same choice for her son, instead of deciding to “rip him apart”:

GOHMERT: Ms. Zink, having my great sympathy and empathy both. I still come back wondering, shouldn’t we wait, like that couple did, and see if the child can survive before we decide to rip him apart? So. These are ethical issues, they’re moral issues, they’re difficult issues, and the parents should certainly be consulted. But it just seems like, it’s a more educated decision if the child is in front of you to make those decisions.

Watch it (around the 5 minute mark):

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On Thursday, the Associated Press reported that doctors had, for the first time, used a 3D printer to create a life-saving artificial airway for a baby boy. The Ohio child was born with a birth defect that cause his airway to collapse, putting him at constant risk of suffocation — until doctors asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for permission to print him a new one.

The FDA agreed, although it still hasn’t adopted an official policy on bioprinting body parts. But the agency will be forced to make a decision soon enough, as increasingly sophisticated 3D printers take the American field by storm. Here are five ways that 3D printers could be a game changer for U.S. health care:

1. Cutting down the backlogged kidney transplant list. 80 percent of the approximately 113,000 Americans on the organ transplant list need a new kidney — but only 30,000 transplants are performed in the U.S. each year, contributing to 4,000 annual kidney-related deaths. But with the use of “Bio-Ink” and 3D printers, that could all change. Researchers at the University of Iowa have been using a “bioprinter” to simulate living tissue structures. Dr. Ibrahim Ozbolat, who is heading the project predicts that fully formed, transplant-ready organs could be an impending reality. “The long-term goal of this [lab] is to create functioning human organs some five or 10 years from now. This is not far-fetched,” said Ozbolat.

2. Regulating diabetes by creating entirely new organs. As if creating organs from stem cells wasn’t enough, Dr. Ozbolat’s team has an even loftier goal in mind: the creation of entirely new organ structures to treat Americans’ medical problems. “One of the most promising research activities is bioprinting a glucose-sensitive pancreatic organ that can be grown in a lab and transplanted anywhere inside the body to regulate the glucose level of blood,” said Ozbolat of his goal. Considering the epidemic-level of diabetes in the United States — and the associated health care costs of the disease — that would be a true medical revolution, essentially nullifying the disease. And if Ozbolat’s team could create that kind of technology, it could potentially be modified to treat cancers and other chronic conditions.

3. Grafting skin onto burn victims. The current process of skin grafting requires the painful removal of skin from an unaffected area of the patient’s body. But researchers at the University of Toronto have developed a method of loading skin cells and various other polymers into a 3D printer to artificially create thick layers of skin. Strikingly, the team used a simplified 3D printer that costs far less than the average $200,000, and claim that their printer can produce tissue for 1/1000th of that cost “even by the most conservative estimates.”

4. Making prostheses resemble the original missing limb. This is a field in which there has already been significant progress with 3D printers — and garners major potential for patient satisfaction and quality of life. The trouble with many prostheses is that they wear down, don’t perfectly conform to patients’ limbs, and can present a stigma for patients who need them. But scientists at Bespoke Innovations have created prosthetic coverings “that perfectly mirror the sculptural symmetry and function of the wearer’s remaining limb,” and can even be customized to conform to the patient’s fashion style. Actually creating an entirely new limb would be ambitious — but considering that doctors recently replaced 75 percent of a man’s skull with a 3D-printed implant, that might not be out of the question, either.

5. Addressing poor Americans’ dental health needs. One aspect of U.S. health care that gets overlooked is the meager availability of dental coverage, especially for the poor. But the use of 3D printing in orthodontics could help change that by making dental procedures cheaper and more efficient — or at the very least could help rectify some the medical consequences of paltry dental coverage. A digital scan of the inside of a patient’s mouth and a 3D printer is all that’s needed to create crowns, bridges, and dentures. It also makes the process less invasive and more accurate by making it unnecessary to create physical molds of patients’ mouths.

On Wednesday, students and alumni of Swarthmore College, the University of Southern California, the University of California, Berkeley, and Dartmouth College filed federal complaints against their respective schools for failing to adequately address sexual assault and harassment on campus. If found guilty by the Department of Education, the campuses could be subject to disciplinary actions, including fines and the loss of federal funding for student aid.

The complainants allege that the colleges have violated either the Clery Act, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, or both. The Clery Act requires all campuses to report crime statistics, including for sexual assault, and Title IX prohibits sex-based discrimination at educational institutions.

“We are asking the Department of Education to open an investigation into these complaints and take appropriate actions to force these colleges to comply with the law or risk losing their federal funding,” said Gloria Allred, a civil rights attorney representing many of the plaintiffs.

A growing number of students at major colleges and universities have been stepping up their efforts to combat rape and sexual assault in schools. Last month, Los Angeles’ Occidental College was served with similar federal complaints. The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill is undergoing a federal investigation for allegedly threatening to expel a student who spoke out publicly about her own rape.

Other elite institutions such as the University of Notre Dame, Harvard University, and Amherst College have also been in the news over complaints that administrators have failed to foster a safe campus environment and contributed to victim-blaming and rape culture. Just last week, Yale University was forced to pay a $165,000 fine after federal investigators determined that it had violated the Clery Act by failing to report instances of rape.

While some colleges have taken small steps towards improving their policies on sexual assault and campus safety, the latest round of federal complaints underscores how entrenched rape culture is in many American campuses.

Over the past several years, Texas lawmakers have kept themselves busy by launching multiple attacks on women’s health. In 2011 and 2012, state officials slashed family planning funding, repeatedly attacked Planned Parenthood, and enacted stringent abortion restrictions. Not so this session.

As the San Antonio Express-News reports, every single anti-abortion bill proposed in Texas this year was successfully blocked before it reached the House or Senate floor. Of course, that wasn’t for lack of trying — altogether, anti-choice lawmakers introduced at least 24 different measures to restrict Texas women’s reproductive rights. Some of those bills even had the backing of key leaders in the state, like Gov. Rick Perry (R) and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst (R). But Democratic members of the state legislature pushed back, and won.

“Democrats stuck together very well this session and made strong arguments and strong advocacy on behalf of a woman’s right to choose,” state Sen. Kirk Watson (D), the head of Texas’ Democratic caucus, told the Express-News. “Just this week, I’ve had pressure from leadership pushing to bring up bills in an almost threatening way, and we have stood up to that. …Now we’re at the end of the session, and they’re dead.”

The failed anti-abortion legislation included a “fetal pain” measure that would have criminalized abortion services after the 20th week of pregnancy, as well as several bills intended to force abortion clinics in the state to close their doors.

Democrats in the state explained that anti-abortion lawmakers experienced significant backlash during the 2012 elections, in the height of the so-called “War on Women.” Republicans took a “big hit” in that election, and the balance of the legislature tipped. After Texas voters continued to express disapproval over the new legislation that compromised women’s health, GOP lawmakers began to relent. They even agreed to work to reverse some of the family planning cuts.

Not every state had similar success defeating anti-choice initiatives, however. In the first quarter of 2013, state lawmakers proposed an astounding 694 provisions about reproduction — and some of them, including the most stringent abortion bans this country has seen since Roe v. Wade legalized abortion over 40 years ago, became law this year.

Obamacare critics have been pointing to several companies’ claims that the law is forcing them to cut their part-time workers’ hours as proof that the health law is bad for businesses and employees. But a new report finds that employers were cutting health benefits and workers’ hours long before Obamacare was even an idea.

According to data compiled by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI), large employers have increasingly been turning to part-time workers for their labor. Between 2007 and 2011, the percentage of workers employed in part-time jobs increased from 16.7 percent to 22.2 percent of the work force. That means that workers’ hours have also been declining, since using more part-time workers lets companies scale back on how many hours those employees can work.

But these companies’ cuts haven’t been limited to workers’ hours — they’ve been cutting back on part-time employees’ health benefits, too. During the same four year period, part-time workers experienced a 15.7 percent decline in the likelihood of having health coverage through their jobs:

As the graph demonstrates, that trend existed even before the recession, and has only gotten worse since then.

Cost-cutting at the expense of employees’ benefits and wages certainly isn’t new behavior for large companies. Even employers with full time workers have been shifting the cost of medical care onto their employees through the increasing use of high-deductible and bare bones health plans — something that industry experts expect to continue. Over the last decade, average annual health insurance premiums rose by approximately 97 percent — but workers’ contributions to those premiums increased by an outsized 102 percent in the same time span.

This reflects the dangers of a health care system in which employers are the major providers of Americans’ health coverage. Recent history suggests that companies would have continued slashing workers’ benefits and hours anyway — Obamacare has just given them a convenient excuse.

Most U.S. states saw a dramatic drop in their teen birth rates between 2007 and 2011, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control. The national rate of teen births declined by 25 percent, and some individual states saw their rates drop by 30 percent or more:

Every single state except for West Virginia and North Dakota showed some kind of decline in the number of teenagers giving birth. But significant regional disparities remain. The CDC found that the lowest rates of teen births are in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Vermont — which each have rates under 17 births per 1,000 teen girls — while Arkansas and Mississippi have the highest rates at about 50 per 1,000. Overall, the highest rates of teen births continue to be concentrated in the South.

The CDC’s research builds on previous data that showed the United States’ teen pregnancy rate has plunged to record lows since 1991, largely because of adolescents’ expanded access to contraception. “Credit goes to teens themselves who are clearly making better decisions about sex, contraception, and their future,” Bill Albert, the chief program officer of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, told the Associated Press.

But those type of preventative health resources aren’t equally available to teens in every part of the country. Over the past decade, teen pregnancy rates have consistently been higher in Southern states that don’t provide students with adequate sexual health instruction. Since abstinence-only courses often present misleading information about contraception, a full 60 percent of young adults underestimate birth control’s effectiveness and are more likely to skip it because they don’t believe it will make a difference. And teens in rural areas still struggle to access contraception, partly because there are fewer health clinics in less populous places and partly because a societal stigma surrounding teen sexuality still pervades conservative communities.

Unfortunately, this correlation isn’t limited to teen pregnancy and teen births. Southern states that don’t offer comprehensive sex ed classes also have the highest rates of STDs.

As the United States has continued to grapple with addressing its teen pregnancy rates — which are higher than the rates in any other developed nation — there has been some debate over the best tactic to effectively lower the rate of unintended teen births. Public health campaigns to dissuade adolescents from becoming pregnant typically rely on shame-based tactics that tell young women they will be failures if they become pregnant. But there’s evidence to suggest that providing youth with the support they need through community programs, rather than shaming them about their sexuality, is actually a more effective way to encourage them to make healthy sexual choices.

Oklahoma residents are still recovering from this past week’s devastating tornadoes, which killed over 20 people and likely incurred billions of dollars in damages in Moore and Shawnee. But their elected officials are currently focusing on some other priorities that fall outside of disaster relief. On Wednesday, Oklahoma state senators approved a bill that would strip funding from the state’s Planned Parenthood clinics.

As the Huffington Post reports, Senate Bill 900 doesn’t actually specifically mention the name of the national women’s health organization. But, since the legislation would reallocate the state’s family planning funds to public providers and hospitals, Planned Parenthood — which is a private organization — would effectively lose the funding that used to go toward those services.

The bill passed on Wednesday by a 33 to 8 vote, and now heads to the House. At least one Republican in the House told the Huffington Post that he plans to vote against it. “To defund a program like Planned Parenthood would be a mistake. They perform a valuable service as far as breast cancer screenings, cervical cancer screenings, parenting classes, many things that benefit our state that we’re sorely in need of,” State Rep. Doug Cox (R) explained.

This is hardly the first time that Oklahoma has indirectly attacked Planned Parenthood’s funding. Last year, the state’s Department of Health decided to end its WIC contract with Oklahoma’s Planned Parenthood affiliate — effectively cutting off the state funding that the organization relied on to provide health services to low-income women in the Tulsa area. Planned Parenthood tried to block Oklahoma officials from arbitrarily ending the 18-year contract, but their request was denied by a federal judge. As a result, Planned Parenthood was forced to lay off staff and shut down one of its Tulsa health clinics.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the only attack on women’s health that Oklahoma lawmakers have advanced recently. In February, a state senator attempted to push through a bill that would have allowed employers to deny birth control coverage to their workers for any reason. Anti-choice legislators in Oklahoma have also repeatedly pushed “personhood” measures to endow embryos with the full rights of U.S. citizens, which would outlaw all abortions and some forms of birth control.

A top Senate Republican is comparing Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to convicted felon Oliver North for soliciting private donations to help implement the Affordable Care Act.

In an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) charged that Sebelius circumvented Congress’ refusal to provide funds for the administration’s health care law by raising those dollars from outside groups, just as “Col. North was accused of using money raised in an arms-for-hostages swap with Iran to fund and work with private organizations providing military support to rebel armies in Nicaragua.”

In 1987, North admitted that he lied to Congress about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal — in which officials secretly sold arms to Iran to fund a resistance movement to the government in Nicaragua — and shred documents to cover-up the government’s actions. He was indicted on 16 counts and convicted of three: accepting an illegal gratuity, aiding and abetting in the obstruction of a congressional inquiry, and ordering the destruction of documents.

“With Iran-Contra, Congress had also prohibited support for the rebels, while in the case of health-care funding, Congress has refused to provide the amounts that the administration has asked for,” Alexander wrote. “But the principle and the legal prohibitions are the same.” Republican chairmen and ranking Republicans on five congressional committees have asked the Government Accountability Office to look into the matter.

Obama administration officials insist that Sebelius was following authority laid out in the Public Health Service Act — which allows the secretary to “support by grant or contract (and to encourage others to support) private nonprofit entities working in health information and health promotion, preventive health services, and education in the appropriate use of health care” — but “has made no fundraising requests to entities regulated by HHS.” The New York Times reported on May 12 that Sebelius did solicit donations from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and H&R Block.

Indeed, asking private organizations to contribute to administration causes is old practice in Washington, as Alexander himself knows.

In 1991, while serving as Secretary of Education for President George H. W. Bush, Alexander actively and enthusiastically sought private dollars to fund the administration’s education initiative, America 2000. Alexander crisscrossed the country to sell the program after Congress failed to approve Bush’s education funding request.

As he explained in a San Diego Union-Tribune op-ed on Sep. 27, 1992, “President Bush asked Congress to appropriate a half-billion dollars to redesign such new American schools. Congress balked, the business community didn’t. The president has asked American businesses to raise $200 million to fund design teams to help communities create such schools.”

Bush made the fundraising pitch in the Rose Garden in July of 1991 during an event with private donors, with Alexander standing by his side. “Funds are pouring in — I don’t want to say ‘pouring,’ because we’re going to put the arm on you all on in a minute here — but funds are coming in well,” the president said. “[A]lready $30 million has been raised, much of it from the corporations that are represented here today.”
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The County of Los Angeles Department of Public Health wants to help promote safer sex practices by passing out one million and one condoms by the end of this year. In order to accomplish that goal, city officials are hitting the road — in a 40-foot “condom mobile” featuring the images of professional athletes reminding people to “suit up.”

Last year, the county’s health department sponsored its first-ever condom contest to give residents the opportunity to design an official Los Angeles branded condom wrapper. And now, the new bus will be handing out free condoms packaged in the winning design. The county has also partnered with local LGBT intramural sports leagues that will help them distribute additional free condoms.

This isn’t the first creative initiative to address California’s rising STD rates by expanding access and exposure to prevention methods. A new state-sponsored initiative called the “Condom Access Project” makes it easier for California teens tp obtain sexual health resources by allowing them to order free condoms online. And Los Angeles voters recently endorsed a measure requiring adult film stars to wear condoms on screen.

Education campaigns about safer sex may be especially necessary since not all of California’s students are receiving that type of instruction in school. Last year, the ACLU sued a Fresno County school for failing to provide accurate sexual health education to students. Students there were taught that sexually transmitted infections can be prevented by going out in groups with friends and getting plenty of rest.

The debate over Medicaid expansion has devolved into a GOP platform for grandstanding about the health reform law and the Obama administration. But an NPR article from Tuesday shines a light on what, exactly, most Republican governors’ refusal to expand Medicaid will mean for real Americans by examining poor communities in a state headed by one of Obamacare’s most ardent critics: Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX).

The piece centers on particularly destitute populations in southern Texas, where some uninsured residents are so poor, sick, and unable to cope with their medical bills that they resort to desperate measures such as crossing the border into Mexico for medications and even sharing their insulin shots:

[M]any of those who live here [in Brownsville] — including poor Latino immigrants, both legal and undocumented — suffer from diabetes and lack of insurance. Some of those uninsured diabetics, including American citizens and others living here legally, used to go across the border to Matamoros, Mexico for insulin. But now with the fear of brutal drug violence and tougher border restrictions, families share their insulin shots rather than risking the crossings.

A community health worker in Brownsville noted that “many of those who used to cross the border would qualify for Medicaid under the expansion offered by the health care law.”

This inequity is further exacerbated when dealing with a more serious or life-threatening chronic condition. One official at Brownsville’s local health clinic described how difficult it is to provide specialty care services to the poor and uninsured, emphasizing that Medicaid coverage would make it far easier to convince physicians to take on patients:

“Once you diagnose a cancer, then what?” said Dr. Henry Imperial, the clinic’s medical director. “How are you going to give me chemotherapy or surgery or radiation therapy? It goes out of our hands.”

Those complications can make for some intense arm-twisting among Brownsville’s medical ranks. Imperial said he often plies fellow doctors in town with beer to see his uninsured patients. “When they see me approaching them, they start running away,” he joked before turning somber. “It’s just tough. I could not do an appendectomy. I cannot operate on gall bladders. I need a surgeon.”

Most specialists, including surgeons, in Brownsville, accept Medicaid, said Imperial. “It does pay for services that otherwise the patient does not receive.”

GOP leaders like Perry and even some of the more serious conservative academic critics of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion regularly cite the program’s low reimbursement rates as a reason for dismissing it. Perry has denounced expansion as doubling down on a “broken system,” since doctors won’t want anything to do with Medicaid to begin with.

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Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) this week said that prayers to God will ensure Obamacare’s repeal, after 37 House of Representatives attempts to do so.

“I think the President will ultimately be forced to repudiate his own signature piece of legislation because the American people will demand it,” she told an evangelical radio host Tuesday. “And I think before his second term is over, we’re going to see a miracle before our eyes, I believe God is going to answer our prayers and we’ll be freed from the yoke of Obamacare.”

She added, “I believe that’s going to happen and we saw step one last week with the repeal of Obamacare in the House. We have two more steps. We serve a mighty God and I believe it can happen.”

But this was not really “step one” for the House. At this point, House Republicans have devoted 43 out of 281 days in session to symbolic votes against Obamacare. In the last Congress, they devoted 15 percent of their time, or $50 million dollars, to a signed law that is already largely being carried out. Even top Republican leaders and Republican governors have admitted they lost their battle against Obamacare, though they vow to continue to hold symbolic votes on the matter.

Meanwhile, Bachmann has also accused Obamacare of “literally” killing people and tied it to news that the IRS was inappropriately targeting conservative groups.

(HT: Raw Story)