The number of Iowans diagnosed with HIV infection last year rose to its highest level since reporting began in 1998.

Iowa Right to Life wanted to prevent clinics that provide abortion services from receiving family planning funding for low-income women in the state. Now the funding has been cut altogether.

Through our television sets, it seems, we get nearly every possible opinion and viewpoint on nearly every possible topic. Just not abortion.

Was the opinion issued Friday by the Iowa Supreme Court an expansion or a clarification of the state's existing residency requirements for sex offenders? At the end of the day, according to some members of law enforcement, it doesn't matter one way or another.

Only two steps remain in Iowa's legislative quest to require insurance companies to provide coverage of vaccinations for the human papillomavirus, the major cause of cervical cancer.

Iowa has become the seventeenth state to refuse Title V, Section 510 funding for abstinence-only sex education. Iowa currently receives roughly $319,000 in matching funds from the federal funding stream.

The 2007 school-climate survey released by the advocacy group Iowa Pride Network identified progress in ensuring the state's high schools provided safe learning experiences for LGBT youth.

It isn't unusual for Iowa high school students Stacey Hoch and Venessa McDole, both peer advisors, to speak with their classmates about sensitive subjects. Thursday morning, however, they took their advocacy one step further by speaking in front of policymakers to encourage them to reject federal abstinence-only funds.

At a state policy briefing on Thursday morning, Iowa legislators were asked to end federally funded abstinence-only sex education in the state. The move would make Iowa the seventeenth state to reject Title V abstinence-only funding.

Iowa has roughly 100,000 low-income women -- 12.3 percent of all women of childbearing age -- who need, but are not receiving, publicly assisted family planning services. The lack of access has been costly to Iowa, a state where half of all pregnancies are unintended.