This Week in Reproductive Rights: Men worry access to birth control doesn't benefit them
With the House set to vote, maybe, eventually, on the American Health Care Act, Planned Parenthood and its patients must now brace for the possibility that the health care organization will lose its federal funding.
"One in five women have come to Planned Parenthood for health care and they are not going quietly into the night," Planned Parenthood Federation of America President Cecile Richards said on a press call Thursday. "And neither are we."
Ryan and his cohort would trim not just Planned Parenthood from the federal budget, but also wipe out previously required essential benefits including maternal care. Many Republican men of Congress are fine with this, seemingly because they are men, and will never have to use them.
In a statement, Planned Parenthood called the AHCA "the worst legislation for women's health in a generation." As such, the members of Congress who will cast decisive votes on the bill can expect their offices to flood with protesters on Friday and Saturday.
Best of luck explaining your choices, guys.
• This week, we read a fun new study that confirms what heterosexual women maybe already knew: Men may view the female orgasm as a "masculinity achievement," rather than the fair and fun result of a mutually pleasurable exchange. Perhaps you, a woman, thought your orgasm was a thing by and for you, but, as with pretty much everything else, men are more than ready to make your orgasm entirely about them.
• A majority of men — who sound like the same guys who think female orgasms are all about them— reported in a recent survey that they've never personally benefited from women's access to birth control. We wonder if they've ever given a passing thought to all the children they don't have, and also if they'd like to go fuck themselves.
• On Monday, a group of women dressed in the red robes and white bonnets iconic to The Handmaid's Tale protested Texas' latest anti-abortion legislation in its Senate chambers. Good to know Margaret Atwood's imagined dystopia is right around the corner.
• On Tuesday, a Republican man publicly postulated that rape and incest might just be the "will of God," who might gift victims "beauty from ashes" in the form of a baby. Oklahoma Rep. George Faught isn't the first lawmaker to suggest pregnancy resulting from sexual abuse can be a divine gift in disguise, but he is our most recent, shining example of what's heartless in men's regulation of women's bodies.
• With Neil Gorsuch in the offing for the vacant seat on the U.S. Supreme Court bench, the Lady Parts Justice League released a helpful, Schoolhouse Rock-inspired primer on emergency contraception and human reproduction. "I'm Just a Pill" paints Plan B in terms so simple, even a Republican Congressman could understand them — now, how to get them to sit down and watch?
• Infant mortality rates are down nationwide, according to data from the CDC released this week. While fewer infant deaths every year is indisputably a good thing, the lingering racial disparities that divide maternal demographics are not, which makes the GOP's proposed cuts to maternal health care requirements all the more disheartening.
• On Tuesday, the Texas Senate passed its "wrongful births" bill, which would make it legal for doctors to lie to their patients, allowing them to withhold information on potential fetal anomalies if they think parents would choose abortion over birthing a baby with a serious disability. Doctors keeping critical information from their patients — sure what could go wrong.
• And as a bonus, here's a neat photo of a couple dozen men, who discussed all of these reproductive rights issues on Thursday without us:
