Awwwww yeah. Also, hell yeah.
Despite the rending of garments, filing of lawsuits, protests and demonstrations and even threats of violence, something amazing happened this week:
Beginning today, up to 47 million women may be eligible to get free access to preventive health care services as that provision of President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act goes into effect.
Ladies, we have health care. We have basic, preventive, life-saving, life-changing health care:
- Well-woman visits
- Gestational diabetes screening
- HPV DNA testing
- STI counseling
- HIV screening and counseling
- Contraception and contraceptive counseling
- Breastfeeding support, supplies, and counseling
- Interpersonal and domestic violence screening and counseling
It's not everything. It's not perfect. It doesn't help every single American woman who currently doesn't have affordable access to health care. But those of us who are fortunate enough to have health insurance are now guaranteed access to and coverage of these very basic, very good-for-us-ladies care, including, yup, those sweet, sweet slut pills (aka, contraception) that we all like, most of us use at some point in our lives, and can (as the video above from the Guttmacher Institute explains) make all the difference in the world for us to control our own bodies, our own reproduction, and our own lives. It's better for us, and it's better for our families. In fact, it's better for everyone.
As our vice president would say, it's a big fucking deal.
Such a big deal, according to Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Of course), it's like 9/11 and Pearl Harbor:
"I know in your mind you can think of times when America was attacked. One is December 7th, that's Pearl Harbor day. The other is September 11th, and that's the day of the terrorist attack," Kelly said at a press conference on Capitol Hill. "I want you to remember August the 1st, 2012, the attack on our religious freedom. That is a day that will live in infamy, along with those other dates."
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Freedom died on Aug. 1 because women with health insurance now get diabetes screening. Oh, the humanity!
The status quo, the standard Republicans fought so hard to preserve, was the absurd notion that women don't need women's health care. During the fight over health care reform, for example, Sen. Jon "Not Intended To Be A Factual Statement" Kyl famously said that since he didn't need maternity care, he saw no reason to require insurance companies to provide it for anyone. Sen. Debbie Stabenow brilliantly responded, "I think your mom probably did."
And now it is the official position of the Health and Human Services Department of these United States of America that just because Jon Kyl doesn't personally need it doesn't mean it's not important. And that is a factual statement.
It's been a long, hard fight for us, with Rush Limbaugh insisting that any woman who uses, or even cares about, contraception is a slut, and the ever-obeisant Republican Party nodding along. We know that breast cancer screening is also, apparently, a sluts-only thing, since forced-birthers have been running around screaming that abortion causes breast cancer (no, assholes, for the millionth time, it doesn't), ergo, we don't really need to provide or fund breast cancer screening, because if you get breast cancer, you're probably a baby-killing slut and you deserve it. Republicans have nodded along with that one too. Only sluts need health care; non-sluts maintain perfect health through the magical power of Bible study or something.
Yeah. Well. Rep. Mike Kelly can suck it. And Sen. Jon Kyl can suck it. And Rush Limbaugh can suck it. And those whining, crying Catholic bishops can most definitely suck it. Because this week, critical provisions of Obamacare that are for us, for our lady parts needs, went into effect. And millions of American women are better off now than they were a week ago. And if that's upsetting to men who think vaginas are icky and women's health care is pretty much exactly like a terrorist attack and the end of freedom and democracy, and it makes them sooooooooo sad because Jesus Thomas Jefferson 9/11?
Well, that's just the cherry on top, isn't it?
This week's good, bad and ugly below the fold.
- Oh, give it up already, losers:
A group that seeks to establish legal rights for embryos is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to allow a state ballot initiative on the issue to proceed.
The Oklahoma Supreme Court, in April, stopped the circulation of a ballot petition that would define a fertilized human egg as a person under state law, effectively banning abortion. [...]
Personhood USA, the anti-abortion-rights group, appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday — its first effort to make their case to the highest court in the land.
But don't take these personhood freaks—or, as Erin Gloria Ryan at Jezebel calls it, the "Embryos Before Hoes Advocates"—too seriously:
No need to get your Fallopian Tubes in a twist just yet, though — it's highly unlikely that the High Court will even agree to hear Oklahoma's goofy argument, and even if they do, the only way they'd win is if Justice Scalia clones himself 4 times and disguises the clones as Justices Bader Ginsburg, Kennedy, Kagan, Sotomayor and somehow knocks the real Bader Ginsburg, Kennedy, Kagan, and Sotomayor out for a few days, which is way too Scooby Doo dastardly even for a guy who goes hunting with Dick Cheney.
- Call me crazy, but I really have no interest in a one-man show starring and about a convicted rapist who, oh yeah, also beat his wife until she finally left him. Guess I'm just unusual that way.
- In an editorial this week, the New York Times pointed out that there is "a striking overlap" between the House Republicans' anti-woman agenda and Mitt Romney's policies. And that's not a good thing.
- Joe Biden penned a column calling on Republicans in Congress to stop being dicks and renew the Violence Against Women Act. But actually, this little clarification at the end is my favorite part of the entire article:
ABOUT THE WRITER
Joe Biden is vice president of the United States.
- Let's give a little gold star to Mississippi, the state with the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country, for starting to think that maybe—just maybe—the state's rigid abstinence-only education program needs some adjusting. Maybe.
- How about a lady moderator for a change?
Late Tuesday morning, three teenage girls from Montclair, N.J.—Emma, Sammi, and Elena—trooped into the Washington headquarters of the Commission on Presidential Debates. The trio carried with them a box full of petition pages with more than 118,000 signatures, calling on the commission to choose a woman to moderate at least one of this year’s presidential debates.
Though not yet old enough to vote, the high-school sophomores are appalled that a woman has not moderated a general-election presidential debate since 1992. Determined to correct what they regard as blatant discrimination, the girls launched an online petition campaign in May through Change.org in the hopes of swaying the commission’s 2012 choices.
- This happened:
If Maeve Binchy had been a mother ...
Does a female novelist need to have experienced motherhood to truly understand human emotions?
And of course this is always an issue for male writers too, right? Oh, sure that Shakespeare guy was a decent writer. But did he have children?!?!?!?! Puke.
- Click this right now. Go on. We'll wait for you.