NEWSREPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS

Victory! After 100 people signed the petition in just a few hours, the Department of Public Works quickly came to an agreement to allow the Walk for Choice to take place Friday and the banners to remain up until Saturday evening.

Anti-choicers rip down posters for a "Trust Women" event. Women's rights advocates complain about the vandalism. What does the city do?

Threaten to tear down the rest of the banners.

Somer Loen, an organizer for the Bay Area Coalition for Our Reproductive Rights (BACORR), has launched a petition on Change.org calling on the San Francisco Department of Public Works (DPW) to "protect free speech for pro-choice organization." In preparation for Trust Women Week (Jan. 20-27) the Silver Ribbon Campaign -- of which BACORR is a member organization -- put up banners to raise awareness, featuring slogans such as "Fix the Economy -- Support My Autonomy" and "Reproductive Rights Are Human Rights." Loen reports that they had a permit for the banners and an event on Jan. 20th, but the anti-choice Life Legal Defense Fund filed a "bogus" complaint with the city.

Loen and her fellow organizers were looking for a way to deal with vandals destroying their posters when the DPW shockingly invalidated their original permit for a Friday walk, refused to issue a new one requested for Sunday (so as to not overlap with a Friday Occupy event), and announced the remaining banners would be removed.

Somer Leon decided that she didn't want one more San Francisco woman tricked by crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs). With her volunteer group, the Bay Area Coalition for Our Reproductive Rights, Leon launched a campaign on Change.org, calling for truth-in-advertising legislation that would bar these "fake clinics" from claiming non-existent services. The bill passed the local Board of Supervisors with overwhelming support on Tuesday, with Leon's petition credited for demonstrating support for the bill.

Thousands of CPCs exist nationwide, and the majority -- 87%, according to a Congressional report -- mislead or lie to patients. These ideological fake clinics lure in pregnant women with false advertising about offering comprehensive reproductive health care, only to pursue a conservative religious agenda. They lack trained medical personnel, don't provide advertised services, and deceive patients with fabrications about abortion leading to breast cancer, mental illness, and infertility. Many resort to shaming tactics and pressure women to "accept Jesus"; some go as far as telling a patient she's not pregnant in order to keep her from considering abortion, which can pose a serious health risk.

Similar legislation has already passed in New York City, Baltimore, and Austin. What can you do to make sure that women in your hometown won't get tricked by crisis pregnancy centers?

In 2009, Dr. George Tiller was murdered in his Kansas church for daring to provide late-term abortions -- procedures provided to protect the health and lives of women or as a mercy for nonviable fetuses with severe abnormalities.

Harassment by both anti-choice legislation and extremist terrorism has lead to the closure of all but three reproductive health clinics in Kansas that offer abortions. In a state that once had 27 such clinics, many women have to drive hours to reach one of the few remaining places (all located in the northeast) to get any abortion procedure. It's a barrier to access that anti-choicers use to undermine a woman's right to control her own body upheld by Roe v. Wade -- and for many Kansas women, it means that they cannot, in reality, exercise their reproductive rights.

Julie Burkhart, Executive Director of Trust Women, says, "We cannot stand idly by while thousands of women go without reproductive health care. We must work so that all women in America are free, no matter where they live. That is why we work in Kansas." That's why Trust Women is working to establish a new women's medical facility with abortion services in Wichita, Kansas, where Dr. Tiller operated his clinic. Violence will not be allowed to deprive women of their rights.

Reproductive rights are under attack in Louisiana.

State Rep. John LaBruzzo recently introduced a bill in the Louisiana House that would have criminalized abortions, even in cases of rape and incest. For the time being, the House has decided not to vote on the matter because federal law mandates that rape and incest victims have the right to obtain abortions. Since defying the Hyde Amendment could result in Louisiana losing $4.5 billion in Medicaid funding, the House moved Bill 645 to the Appropriations Committee for further study. While that constitutes a minor victory for pro-choice advocates, the words LaBruzzo used to defend the bill continue to shock.

When a female legislator questioned Labruzzo about how effective the bill would be in reducing the abortion rate during a recent committee hearing, LaBruzzo proceeded to compare women seeking abortions to drug addicts.

“We’ve illegalized murder and drugs for a long, long time, and yet those crimes continue to take place,” LaBruzzo said. “And it’s not our stance here to say that ‘just because people smoke pot and break the law or use heroin and break the law, then we should legalize it.’"

May might traditionally be a month filled with sunshine, graduations, and proms, but it was a bleak month for women’s freedom and privacy. Anti-choice politicians in Washington, D.C. pressed forward with their War on Women–with great zeal.

Fortunately, Americans are realizing just how extreme this agenda is. On May 24, voters in a conservative congressional district in upstate New York elected pro-choice candidate Kathy Hochul (D) to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Rep. Hochul represents the district’s mainstream views, and she knows that voters want Washington to focus on creating jobs and protecting Medicare, not attacking a woman’s right to choose. NARAL Pro-Choice America PAC was proud to endorse Rep. Hochul; her election marks a pro-choice pick-up.

As we celebrate this key victory, it’s important to acknowledge that we still have quite a climb before we can stop the War on Women in the House.

The anti-choice leadership of the U.S. House of Representative is waging a War on Women.

The latest attack: a bill that could subject survivors of sexual assault who choose abortion care to "rape audits" by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

According to Mother Jones, H.R.3, the extreme “Stupak on Steroids” bill, could "turn IRS agents into abortion cops."

What these politicians may have overlooked is that their overreaching has galvanized America's pro-choice majority. Since November, NARAL Pro-Choice America member-activists have sent 311,000 messages to Congress in opposition to the extreme anti-choice agenda. And in just the last few weeks, we've added an average of nearly 1,000 new names a day to our activist network.

The pro-choice movement is united, and we’re taking our voices to Washington, D.C. On April 7, NARAL Pro-Choice America will be joined by Planned Parenthood and other pro-choice organizations for a pro-choice lobby day. Join us there!

Bei Bei Shuai currently languishes in jail without the opportunity to even post bail. Her crime? Being deeply depressed and attempting to commit suicide.

But for anti-choicers in Indiana, where Shaui lives, what's important isn't this woman's mental or physical health. They're not disturbed that Shaui found herself so unable to cope with life that she swallowed rat poison, a slow and agonizing way of dying, or looking to help her get better since she survived after the intervention of friends. No, instead they want to toss in jail. Because Bei Bei Shaui was pregnant at the time, and after the failed suicide attempt, a c-section was performed on her -- and a few days later, the premature baby delivered died.

As Robin Marty writes on RH Reality Check, in arresting and charging Shaui, "the state has just declared that any pregnant woman who is hurt in any way that could be seen as self-inflicted could be charge as a potential self-aborter and murderer." Obviously, charging a pregnant woman with murder for either a self-induced miscarriage or premature delivery sets a dangerous precedent for women's bodily rights.

Of course, there's no evidence that we've seen that Shaui's desire was to self-induce an abortion -- the evidence perhaps only exists in the minds of anti-choice prosecutors. (Not that this should really matter, since, again, a woman's body should still be her own.) The willingness to set such a precedent shows a callous disregard for individuals suffering from a mental condition. This is a tragic story, but Shaui certainly isn't getting the help she needs while locked in jail, either for the initial depression or grief over the death of her prematurely delivered baby. And the I wonder where the justification for refusing bail lies -- this disturbed woman hardly poses a danger to society. She wasn't looking to harm anybody else, only, sadly, herself.

What's in fashion for spring? According to one branch of Dillard's department store, racism and anti-abortion extremism.

The American Independent reports that the Southern department store giant's Memorial City location in Houston, TX, is set to sponsor a fashion show fundraiser for Heroic Media. That's the Austin-based outfit behind a series of race-baiting anti-abortion billboards creating controversy across the country.

Last month, Life Always -- which shares an owner and a North Austin office with Heroic Media -- erected a billboard in New York City with an image of a young Black girl next to the words "the most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb." The billboard directed viewers to crisis pregnancy centers, which are non-medical, ideologically driven outfits that use shame, misinformation, and scare tactics to convince women not to have abortions. Change.org members joined the successful push to get the offending billboard taken down almost immediately.

Today, March 11th, is the National Day of Appreciation for Abortion Providers. Despite threats of violence by anti-choice extremists and the cold-blooded murder of Dr. George Tiller, these brave individuals put themselves at risk to protect a woman's health and her right to make decisions about her own body. To say, hey, thank you, sincerely, you can take a stand for women and pro-choice doctors by standing up against concerted attacks on vital funding.

As I wrote last month, House Republicans have taken aim at family planning in order to strip Planned Parenthood of its funding. Never mind that the majority of services provided by Planned Parenthood are things such as HIV testing, birth control, and cancer screenings. Members of Congress opposed to women's bodily integrity believe the simple fact that an organization provides abortions amongst its many offering means that it should be ground into the dirt. (On the state level, a bill introduced just yesterday in Kansas would strip the nonprofit status of any medical facility that opted to provide abortions, a shocking new form of attack.)

To their everlasting credit, Planned Parenthood stays strong and continues to offer all comprehensive reproductive health services, from prenatal care to adoption counseling to abortion procedures. But they need your help. The Senate has rejected the House's decision to strip Planned Parenthood of funding, which means the two bodies of Congress will have to hash out their differences. Your voice asking Congress to stop efforts to eliminate family planning funding could tip things in the right direction.

Today, I'm especially proud to be a proud New Yorker. This afternoon, the New York City Council took a step forward for women by passing a bill telling crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs): no more tricking women.

CPCs across the country are infamous for their manipulative, shaming, and downright deceitful tactics in trying to keep women from exercising their right to choose an abortion. NYC's "fake clinics," are no exception, caught by a NARAL Pro-Choice NY investigation frightening women with made-up risks of breast cancer and mental illness, and lying about the status of their pregnancy and the laws surrounding abortion (pdf). And they snare women seeking comprehensive information and medical care by presenting themselves as unbiased clinics. But it's not Halloween, and the NYC Council now says: masks off.