The single idea that recurs again and again in the rhetoric of religious reactionaries is the notion that something is against nature. Prophylactic devices should not be used because they do violence to nature. People of the same sex should not be allowed to wed because their lifestyle is unnatural. These people claim to own a trademark on the ( Read more... )

Hey folks. I know it's Friday and we're supposed to be non-serious here, but I have a question that I've been pondering about ever since I heard it being said around here that the Democratic campaign had tried to dilute the focus point of what should have been the issue #1 on these elections, namely Jobs Jobs Jobs and The Economy, Stupid. I've ( Read more... )

[WARNING: very gory NSFW pic, please don't open if you don't want to see dead fetuses!] This article includes a picture of a young mother on the hospital bed, the corpse of her 7-month old stillborn baby laid lifeless beside her after the lethal injection she was given by the local family planning authorities. This is a moment that millions of ( Read more... )

I had occasion to listen to a good Episode of Science Friday on NPR this week, which had a substantive interview with Kristina Gemzell

(her credentials) The meat of it was, that Levonorgestrel based Emergency Contraception (Of which Plan B is an example) does not, despite various claims, have any effect that prevents the implantation of a ( Read more... )

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17612550

"Every year we are presented with a plan. Every doctor is told how many women we are expected to give contraception to; how many women are to be sterilised," says a gynaecologist from the Uzbek capital, Tashkent.

Like all doctors I interviewed, she spoke on a condition of anonymity. Talking to a foreign ( Read more... )

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The advocates of despotism like to see themselves as being in the right. In their own eyes, they are blessed angels who crusade against the hellish assaults upon something they call "life." When a human fetus is not carried to term, they feel a personal blow in the gut from the hand of Satan. When a human embryo is flushed from a uterus by a ( Read more... )

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-16931403

US Catholics have strongly criticised a White House rule that would make Church-linked schools and hospitals give employees access to birth control.

Catholic League head Bill Donohue said it would be fought with lawsuits and "maybe even in the streets".

Okay, here's a crazy idea. If they don 't want ( Read more... )

No, I'm serious, y'all, it really is. Maybe there is something to this "let the market decide" stuff. It surely has worked here (unless you hate Planned Parenthood, as many people do, in which case this is the free market trampling on the heads of little unborn babies, but whatever).

( Read more... )