NEWSBYAMIE NEWMAN

The first thing you notice about South Dakota's HB 1217, introduced last month into the State House, is the odd language: "An Act to establish certain legislative findings pertaining to the decision of a pregnant mother considering termination of her relationship with her child by an abortion, to establish certain procedures to better insure that such decisions are voluntary, uncoerced, and informed..."

As if the initial language isn't obvious enough as to the anti-choice intent behind the bill, dig deeper and you find the heart of the legislation. The bill actually mandates that women who seek abortion care must first present written confirmation that they've visited a crisis pregnancy center, to ensure they haven't been coerced into having an abortion, before being allowed to access private, legal, medical care. NARAL Pro-Choice South Dakota believes this is not the way to help women, and they are letting South Dakota House Representatives know in their Change.org petition.

Washington State is facing one of the worst budget crises in the state's history. A shortfall of over six billion dollars for the next biennium and a constitutional mandate to maintain a balanced budget puts an array of health and human services on the chopping block. Family planning services in Washington State are in danger of being gouged in a way that may place the state's program in danger for many years to come.

Cutting family planning in the state means, for the thousands of lower income residents who rely on the program, taking away critical preventive health care for women like breast exams, Pap smears, pregnancy testing, family planning counseling, and access to contraception. And though it seems as if it would save the state money, it actually shifts the costs to other areas like Medicaid-covered pregnancy and birth care and long-term state-funded health care. Family planning programs save money, pure and simple.

In numbers, for every one dollar spent on family planning services, over four dollars is saved. That's a tremendous return on investment. In fact, contraception is about equivalent to the excellent benefits seen from immunizations. It's preventive care that works.

Nationally, over 800,000 abortions are prevented each year by publicly funded family planning services. One-quarter of women will become pregnant within the first year of losing access to family planning care.

Unfortunately, there's more to write about when it comes to the exploitation of little girls. In the commenting section of my previous post on Vogue Paris' photo shoot featuring little girls as sex objects, someone brought up child beauty pageants. I call them perverse circuses, and they can be severely detrimental to girls' well-being, especially as they go woefully under-regulated in this country.

Take Mia, for instance. Mia was featured in the TLC program "Toddlers and Tiaras." At two years old, Mia can be found onstage in a tight-fitting gold bustier with cones where her (non-existent) breasts would be, a la Madonna during her "Like A Virgin" tour. But this is only after she rips off her white robe outfitted with angel wings. Get it? From sweet, little angel to sex-pot? Oh, wait. She's TWO.

Her faux strip routine is cut a bit short when, after she removes the robe to reveal the gold-breasted costume, she forgets what else is supposed to happen. You can't blame the two-year-old girl. After all, she hasn't yet learned how to bump and grind, or pretend to hump the stage the way Madonna did during her on-stage performances. The audience is whooping and screaming as if they're at an actual Madonna concert and everyone seems immune to the fact that this girl is engaging in an approximation of an overtly sexual performance by a grown woman known for her overtly sexual public persona. You can hear Mia's mother in the crowd screaming to her toddler, "Yeah, Mia! Work it!" Work what, exactly?

It's great for Madonna -- it's entirely offensive for toddlers. It's offensive for young girls, period.

Wow: compared to these hypersexualized photos of young girls in the December 2010 issue of Vogue Paris, Bratz dolls are practically Puritan.

The photo shoot features young girls (five, six years old at the youngest?) with come-hither eyes, lounging on leopard-print pillows, stiletto-heeled and red-lipped, mimicking only the more sexualized poses one finds in fashion mags. It's verging on repulsive.

Yet a spread like this doesn't make it through to publication in a "high-fashion" magazine like Vogue Paris without the nod of more than a few editors. Unbelievably, not one person felt these photos were not just inappropriate, but disturbing and clearly detrimental to the psychological and physical well-being of girls.

Maybe the editors of Vogue Paris need a copy of the the American Psychological Association's (APA) most recent report on the sexualization of girls in popular culture. An APA task force found that the proliferation of sexualized images of girls and young women in advertising, merchandising, and media is undoubtedly harmful to girls' self-image and healthy development. Analyzing published research on the effects of everything from music lyrics to magazines to video games on health and well-being, the task force unearthed startling consequences from the overwhelming portrayals of women and girls as solely sexualized beings.

Every day 10,000 young people become infected with sexually transmitted infections and 2,000 young women become pregnant, according to James Wagoner of Advocates for Youth,

If you live in Wisconsin, however, you're in luck -- for the time being. If you're between the ages of 15 and 44 years old, and make up to 300% of the federal poverty level, you have access to free family planning, sexually transmitted infection testing, and vasectomies. It means that if you're wanting to be responsible and prevent pregnancy and STI transmission, protect your health and the health of those with whom you are sexually intimate, you'll have access to those tools that will help.

Wisconsin recently became the first state to expand the free family planning and STI prevention program to more residents (as well as make it permanent), under its Medicaid program, with the help of the federal government. The expansion was approved on December 22nd and now allows individuals who make up to $32, 490 to access the health services. It's cost-effective; it's smart public health policy; and it's the right thing to do.

Unless, that is, you're a Republican about to take the reins of the state's government.

Never doubt that a small or large group of concerned citizens can make a big difference.

Thanks to the hundreds of emails sent by Change.org members and action taken by advocates and concerned police officers themselves, the New York Police Department is changing how it handles sex crime statistics. According to the Wall Street Journal, The NYPD is accepting six recommendations from the recently convened Sex Crimes Working Group to change the way reported rapes and sexual assaults are handled to ensure that victims of these crimes are treated respectfully. In other words, we're hopeful that the downgrading of sex crimes in NYC will soon be a thing of the past.

In a post by Women's Rights editor Alex DiBranco and my own earlier post on Change.org, we have been reporting on the ways in which the NYPD has been "manipulating" statistics on rape and sexual assault in the city. The Village Voice initially uncovered, earlier this year, a pattern of undercharging reported rapes as misdemeanors instead of felonies -- or simply ignoring them altogether -- by the NYPD. Officers were ordered by their superiors to underreport or cover-up sexual assault cases in order to meet "performance measurements" for specific crimes.

Police officers themselves came forward to expose the false reports; a tenacious journalist who had been assaulted herself demanded answers from the Manhattan District Attorney; and groups like the NYC Alliance Against Sexual Assault consistently made claims that the downgrading of rape and sexual assault charges was a chronic problem.

Here's a tip for the Sudanese police officers caught on video publicly flogging a woman as she screams out in pain and from sheer terror: you might at least appear to care about the fact that you're inflicting severe, humiliating punishment upon a human being. Especially now that the video has inspired global ire.

The woman on the video is being flogged in a public parking lot -- a small, white car and a smattering of people watching provide a backdrop. The police officers with whips seem almost bored by their task. She screams in terror. The two-minute video is soul crushing simply to watch. It's not hard to imagine that the Sudanese woman must feel not only overwhelming pain but, also, humiliation, anger, sadness. Her basic human rights are being beaten out of her, for all to watch.

Shockingly. initial outrage over the video centered not on the fact that the unidentified woman was being beaten by police officers but rather that she was being flogged "improperly" under Sharia or Muslim law. The Sudanese public order system allows for flogging on a person's back, but not to the face, hands or legs, notes CNN. Women's rights activists were incensed for other reasons. Namely that this woman, who was arrested under Article 154 and 155 of the Sudanese Penal code, which both deal with prostitution, was being publicly beaten, you know, in any way, shape or form.

The activists immediately gathered to peacefully protest the flogging, shouting, "Humiliating your women is humiliating all of your people." They were promptly jailed, but have been released on bail. Protesters are using the public flogging and subsequent arrests as an opportunity to challenge Sudanese laws which allow flogging at all -- especially when it comes to the sexist treatment of women in the country. Thankfully, the incidents have prompted international outrage from groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Change.org members can use our voices to join the chorus of activists voices from around the world calling for an end to what advocates are clearly labeling human rights abuses against Sudanese women.

For those of us with young children, nieces, cousins, friends, it's not easy to explain the appalling state of professional sports' treatment of female athletes globally.

"But why can't women play in major league baseball?" my eight-year-old daughter has asked me on more than one occasion. Will someone tell me how to answer that one without resorting to "because it's stupid, that's why" at some point in the conversation? It's the answer I'd give if my daughter asked me about this latest story of international sexism, sports, and snow.

Women ski jumpers have been fighting to be recognized by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as the athletes they are and demanding to be included in the 2014 Winter Olympics to be held in Sochi, Russia. Astoundingly, ski jumping is the only activity in the Olympic Winter Games that does not allow women to compete. Yes, you read that right. It doesn't allow women to compete.

It's why Change.org member Sarah Nelson created a petition which over two hundred Change.org members have already signed, to request equal opportunity for women at the 2014 Oympic games.

Update: Thanks to the hundreds of emails sent by Change.org members and action taken by advocates and concerned police officers themselves, the NYPD has accepted six recommendations from a special sex crimes task force to improve how it deals with rape.

In February, journalist Debbie Nathan was sexually assaulted in a New York City park. She immediately reported the incident to the police, who took the report, but purposefully and wrongly classified the assault as a misdemeanor. It was only after Nathan protested to the Manhattan District Attorney, who did his own investigation, that the incident was reclassified as a felony. According to the Huffington Post, "the six officers who responded to Nathan's attack admitted leaving key portions of her story out of the report."

Why would they leave out key portions of her story?

An investigative report by the Village Voice uncovered nothing short of a scandal. A series of articles exposed the New York Police Department's practice of consistently "undercharging" crimes in an effort to meet "performance measurements" (quotas are illegal) and make crime statistics appear more palatable. The manipulation of statistics was caught on tapes in which NYPD higher-ups can be heard telling street cops to downgrade crimes or simply not to report particular crimes at all.

Numerous courageous police officers have come forward to tell their tales of questionable police policies, such as retired detective Harry Hernandez, who details a harrowing account of police misconduct related to serial rapist Daryl Thomas. While NYC sexual assault prevention groups say that the issue of under-reporting and undercharging of crimes has been a "growing problem" over the last two years, these "shady police policies," writes Alex DiBranco on the Women's Rights blog, had particularly devastating consequences when Thomas was able to sexually assault six different women in a single neighborhood over a period of two months. He was on his way to a seventh when a "lucky break" fueled his capture by police. The brutal spree should have triggered alarm bells, but went unnoticed for so long because the NYPD kept downgrading the assaults to "criminal trespassing."

Isn't it time to stop seeing bullying as something that just happens within school walls? What happens when we catch bullies in action among the grown-up set, in positions of authority -- like, say, the police force? We should call it out, speak up, and make it clear that bullying will not be tolerated, no matter who's doing the bullying.

A transgendered woman, Akasha Adonis, was attacked by a fellow shopper outside of a Kohl's department store in Jackson, Tennessee, on the day after Thanksgiving. Her treatment from the Jackson Police Department can be classified as nothing short of bullying and the behavior displayed by Kohl's employees was clearly neglectful.

Adonis and her mother were waiting outside of one of four Kohl's entrances just before 3 a.m., ready for those magic doors to open to embark upon a "Black Friday" shopping spree. A fight broke out when another woman shoved Adonis' mother aside to get through the open door, so Adonis naturally moved in to protect her mother. Then a male made his way into the frenzy and assaulted both Adonis and another woman at the doors. What happened next was horrifying. According to the Tennessee Equality Project's (TEP) blog, Grand Divisions, the man "hit Akasha and pulled out her hair ... then shoved his hand in her mouth with his thumb, tore three of her teeth out of socket, and broke her jaw as he forced Akasha to the ground." After that? The male assailant walked into the store to go shopping, as Kohl employees stood by and watched the scene unfold, greeting customers.

When the Jackson Police showed up and began questioning Akasha Adonis (who was obviously badly hurt), her mother, and the other woman attacked, they were initially respectful. But when Officer Ashley McCullar saw that her driver's license had a man's name, he turned his back, dismissed Adonis' story, and told other officers Adonis was the "He not She."