The White House today announced an update to its widely supported and yet hotly contested decision not to expand the religious exemption for no-cost contraceptive coverage. At stake was whether religiously affiliated organizations such as Catholic hospitals and universities should also be excluded from the health-insurance requirement, even though many of their employees aren’t Catholic. [...]
Great news! Despite months of fierce lobbying by the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Obama administration announced today that it would not exempt Catholic hospitals from the Affordable Care Act requirement for insurance plans to cover employees’ birth control. The news, which comes on the first day of Trust Women Week, is a [...]
2011 brought an unprecedented assault by anti-abortion and anti-contraception state legislatures on women’s reproductive health—135 reproductive rights laws were enacted in 36 states, 68 percent of which restrict access to abortion. Reproductive-rights groups are fighting back with a simple but powerful pro-choice message: Trust women. The Silver Ribbon Campaign to Trust Women, a coalition of 42 national [...]
The official toll from 2011′s War on Women is in. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a record-breaking 92 new state-level restrictions on abortion were passed last year, the most ever. In response, reproductive-rights groups hope to make 2012 the year that women fought back—and won. To ring in 2012, the Silver Ribbon Campaign to Trust [...]
Last month we reported that victory was in sight in our months-long Rape is Rape campaign. At a December Senate hearing, FBI Director Robert Mueller let slip that “sometime this spring” the agency would update its archaic definition of “forcible rape.” Mueller’s prediction gave us reason for optimism, but an official announcement today from the [...]
Last week we were excited to report that victory is finally in sight in the months-long Rape is Rape campaign: An FBI Advisory Policy Board unanimously recommended that the agency update the archaic definition of rape it uses in its Uniform Crime Report (UCR). The only hurdle that remained was final approval of the change [...]
Today is International Human Rights Day, and this year there is much to celebrate. 2011 has been an extraordinary year for human rights activism worldwide, as the UN points out: This year, millions of people decided the time had come to claim their rights. They took to the streets and demanded change. Many found their [...]
Yesterday we reported that a critical vote on the fate of the “forcible rape” definition was scheduled to occur at the FBI Advisory Policy Board (APB) meeting in Albuquerque, N.M. As expected, the APB cast its vote. And it was unanimous in favor of adopting the new definition. After months of raising awareness and generating [...]
After a massive grassroots feminist campaign launched by the Women’s Law Project, the Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF) and Ms. urging the FBI to update its 82-year-old, impossibly narrow definition of “forcible rape” in the Uniform Crime Report (UCR), a key vote is scheduled to be cast today at an FBI Advisory Policy Board meeting in [...]
Personhood USA, the group behind the anti-abortion ballot initiative strategy so absurd that it has never come close to passing, wants you to know it’s not giving up. The group, which agitates for fertilized eggs to be declared “people” with full legal rights, is undeterred despite Tuesday’s defeat of such a “personhood” amendment by a margin [...]
