Carole Joffe's blog

Before marrying Rick Santorum, Karen Santorum lived with a pro-choice Ob-Gyn 40 years her senior. Today, Santorum the candidate believes the government should be able to ban contraception and abortion, and criminalize extra-marital sex and gay sex among other things. The Senator’s fervent desire to deny the rest of us the sexual and reproductive choices that his own wife once enjoyed is breathtakingly hypocritical and cruel.  

A critique of reproductive politics written in the 1970s about events in the ‘20s and ‘30s is remarkably relevant to today’s leading reproductive controversy: the Obama Administration’s overruling of the FDA decision to allow over-the-counter status of Plan B emergency contraception for young women under the age of seventeen.

There is another 99 percent group in our country, distinct from but inextricably entwined with the now more familiar #99Percent. I refer to the 99 percent of American women who have ever had sexual intercourse and have used a birth control method at least some of the time.

Todd Stave, the landlord of the clinic where Dr. Carhart practices in Maryland, found that the best way to stop anti-choice harrasment was to use their own tactics against them. Carole Joffe interviews Stave for RHRC.

Rick Perry had a vasectomy. But in his relentless attacks on contraception, and of course, abortion and comprehensive sex education, Perry is doing all he can to reassure his base that many of his fellow Texans will not have the same opportunity to control their childbearing as the Perry family had.

Dr. Tiller’s murder and the closing of his clinic brought renewed national attention to the problems facing women who need abortions late in pregnancy. While he was viciously attacked by anti-choicers, one of whom eventually killed him, he was beloved by his staff and his patients for compassionate care in extraordinary circumstances.

What’s at stake in the HHS decision around the IOM recommendations on contraception?  First, the health and rights of women who will benefit from easier access to contraception. And second, the IOM’s action draws attention to the extent to which contraception  has become yet another front in the nation’s unending culture war.

Betty Ford’s tenure as First Lady was the last time in American politics someone in that role could inspire bi-partisan admiration—even while expressing her own political views. Her passing reminds us of what has been lost in our political culture.

Norway, where abortion is not politicized, has a better record than the United States with respect to teenage pregnancies and births, but also has a lower abortion rate—a reflection, among other things, of Norwegians’ better access to contraception, its comprehensive sex education policies, and its generally more mature attitude toward human sexuality.

This war on providers has been going on so long it has become essentially “the new normal,” with significant public attention only when a provider is murdered.