I live in Los Angeles now, but I am a native Detroiter–a proud daughter of a great city. So I have watched my hometown’s long, downhill slide with sadness. Years of political corruption, corporate welfare, apathy, outsourcing, downsizing and relocating finally reached a boiling point, and the city filed for bankruptcy in July. Residents fed […]
Author: Carol King
Not the singer/songwriter Carole King. Been a feminist for as long as I can remember and committed to reproductive rights even longer.
The War on Women: Michigan Front
Yesterday in Lansing, Michigan, on the steps of the state Capitol, a crowd estimated at 2,500 to 5,000 watched in delight as women legislators help enact a performance of The Vagina Monologues, joined by its writer, Eve Ensler (see photo at bottom). What led up to this? Former Michigander Carol King reports: Michigan’s rabid anti-choice […]
Gail Collins’ Lone Star Takedown
If you know that Mitt Romney once drove to Canada with his dog strapped to the roof of his car in a crate, it’s probably because you read Gail Collins’ regular column in The New York Times. She’s mentioned it in more than 60 pieces, and whenever she wickedly weaves it into a story I […]
Michigan’s Surprise Anti-Abortion Blitz
This week, the War on Women in Michigan moved from low-intensity combat to a full-scale firefight. Without warning, state Rep. Bruce Rendon (R-Lake City), launched a package of three anti-choice bills (H.B. 5711, 5712 and 5713) that represent an unprecedented assault on reproductive rights. Among other things, the bills would turn conscientious health care providers of late-term abortions […]
Let’s Make Poverty History
Today, more than 17 million American women are living in poverty, and more than 7.5 million of those in extreme poverty–meaning that they survive on less than $5,672 a year. Female-headed households are really hurting: Forty percent live in poverty. These women and their families aren’t numbers. They may be you, me, our families or […]
Blunt the Blunt Amendment
Tomorrow, the U.S. Senate will vote on the Blunt Amendment–or, as conservatives choose to euphemize it, the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act of 2011.
Blunt and his buddies in the Senate and House have tried to frame this as a religious liberty issue, but that’s disingenuous: It’s an attempt to impose their religious, and moral, values on anyone who works for anyone who holds different religious and moral values.
Reminder: Abortion Is 14 Times Safer Than Childbirth
Anti-choice zealots have been gunning for Planned Parenthood and reproductive health care providers for years now. They’ve created obstacles to women’s reproductive health care by misconstruing, misinterpreting, misrepresenting and misusing facts to try to convince women that they don’t know what’s good for them.
Now, an unbiased scientific study once again shows definitively that abortion is much safer than childbirth. It is 14 times less likely to lead to death.
Money for Nukes, No; For People, Yes
I need to get this out of the way immediately: I attended an event at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. I know, I know. You’d sooner walk on hot coals barefoot than set a well-covered foot onto the floor of the Reagan Library, unless you were there for a protest. Normally, so would I. But […]
Poverty in the U.S.: Do the Math
For the first time in many years, poverty is news again. Newspaper headlines, television report and the blogosphere have reacted to the latest Census Bureau report showing that U.S. poverty increased last year, and that women and children are among the poorest of the poor. In fact, poverty among women is at the highest level in […]
Abuse Survivors Will Try To Take Pope to Court
For eight years, I walked through the doors of my Catholic elementary school under the words “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” I haven’t thought about my grade school, Patronage of St. Joseph, in a very, very long time. But as I listened the other night to Barbara Blaine, founder and president of […]