It's contraception game time: puritanical fairytale "morals" will go up against the Obamacare birth control mandate over the next few weeks as four different appeals courts decide whether private businesses should be able to object to the policy on the grounds of religious freedom/thinking unchained vaginas are icky.…
American women have more than doubled their use of emergency contraception in recent years, thanks mostly to millennials, according to the latest episode of Girls. No, just kidding; we know 11 percent of women have used emergency contraception at least once, up from 4.2 percent in 2002, and that nearly one in four…
When conservative blowhards argue that women should pay for their own damn contraception, they really mean women should pay for their own sluttish decisions; religious right talking heads never tire of asking why employers should subsidize sinful lifestyles. But here's the real question: why should women bear the cost…
The Obama administration released new regulations today clarifying which religious groups and organizations can opt out of providing birth control under the Affordable Care Act. It's a little complicated, but the good news is that it looks like the new rules should only affect insurers and third party administrators,…
Here's a word you should know, if not from listening to the Avenue Q soundtrack until your college roommate threatened to throw the CD out of the window: schadenfreude. It's German, and it means being happy when others meet misfortune. It's a perfect way to describe how I felt when I read that Hobby Lobby, the…
On Thursday, President Obama had a video conference with the attendees of BlogHer '12. He spoke about the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and—naturally—the positive effects of Obamacare ("I happily accept the term") on women's health: free contraception, access to preventative care like mammograms, and, eventually, no…
Well, that was quick. After several chest pounding weeks of rallying the troops around a lawsuit that claimed the Affordable Care Act's contraception mandate violated religious freedom, the sanctimonious roar of Republican Attorneys General from seven states was squished by the gavel of a federal judge who says the…
Usually, when the Supreme Court upholds a law, that's it; the law is constitutional. If you want to keep on challenging that ruling, you basically have to make an entirely new law that mandates the opposite of the upheld law and then wait for it to be challenged all the way back to the Supreme Court, and then the…
