Lady lawyers strategizing after Hobby Lobby

Today's longread: The Road Ahead: Gender Equality after Hobby Lobby (PDF) from The Alliance: State Advocates for Women's Rights & Gender Equality.

We offer this Report and state strategies agenda as a resource for allies in the movements for reproductive rights, health and justice, for LGBTQ equality, and for other progressive change across the country. We invite allies throughout the progressive community to join us in adapting and evolving these and other state strategies as we continue forging a powerful joint effort to combat gender discrimination in all its forms, and to protect women’s and LGBTQ rights, health and dignity -- now and into the future.

Local participant in the Alliance is the Women's Law Project.

Voter ID, the death of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the 19th Amendment

The Pennsylvania voter ID trial begins today. I still think voter ID laws are a 19th Amendment issue.

Who changes their names after marriages and divorces? Women.

Who has to run the paperwork gantlet to get a new driver license or passport, digging up marriage certificates, divorce decrees, and birth certificates or sending away to out-of-state agencies for proof that they're who they say they are, only to risk being turned down by a DMV functionary who orders them to transfer the title of their home into their maiden name (PDF)? Women.

Who are disproportionately represented in the Pennsylvania anti-voter ID case? Women (PDF).

And I'll go there. You think the prisoners fasting for Ramadan in Gitmo, or the 29,000 prisoners in California, are the first to go on hunger strikes for their cause? They're only the latest. Who was force-fed during their struggle for the right to vote? Women.



A hundred years ago, Emily Davison was about my age when she was killed attempting a theatrical gesture for women's suffrage. A 7-minute doc includes a film clip and calls her "a radicalized woman with nothing to lose" (4:10). Though she probably wasn't a suicide and never intended to be a martyr, she had a hero's funeral.

You can roll back the business end of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and implement anti-voting measures right away, but it can't end well. The little old ladies with no driver licenses will die off. Those of us born before all the birth records were digitized or originated on the computer will get our acts together and get the right ID. And people my daughter's age, who were in the computer from the get-go, won't have a problem getting their voter ID. Requiring state-issued ID and then making it hard to obtain is not a sustainable strategy. And it won't be too long now before that daughter of mine is voting.

Since, after all, your grandfathers and great-grandfathers were so gracious to vote for the 19th Amendment.

Media starting to notice Pennsylvania's little mass disenfranchisement problem

Today's Daily News offers up an unsigned editorial warning that over three quarters of a million registered, otherwise eligible voters will be disenfranchised in November if the courts decline to block the Commonwealth's voter ID law. The editorial goes on to assert that this was almost undoubtedly the GOP's plan from the get-go:

According to figures released a few hours before the July 4 holiday, 758,939 registered Pennsylvania voters don't have a Pennsylvania driver's license or alternative PennDOT identification. That's 9.2 percent of Pennsylvania's 8.2 million voters. In urban Philadelphia, a full 18 percent of registered voters -- 186,830 -- do not have PennDOT-issued ID.

[ ... ] Compare that to the claim by Secretary of the Commonwealth Carol Aichele, repeated without documentation for months before and after the passage of the law, that just 1 percent of Pennsylvania voters (a not-insignificant 82,000 citizens) do not already have acceptable ID.

[ ... ] Aichele and [Governor Tom] Corbett also have long ignored the fact that there is no hard, or even soft, evidence of a need for a law preventing voter impersonation in this state or others. In fact, a group of Republican lawyers could document only 400 voter-fraud cases in the entire country over a decade, less than one case per state per year.

[ ... ] A couple weeks ago, [Pennsylvania House majority leader Mike] Turzai [R-PA 28] let the truth slip out. In bragging about the law to the state Republican committee, he crowed that it "is going to allow . . . [Mitt] Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania."

I'm blogging infrequently and I'm a voice in the wilderness, but I told you so. And when I was telling you so, why wasn't the Daily News demanding proof from Aichele? Her statements were like a live-action Wikipedia [citation needed]. November is going to be horrible.

Cutting childcare subsidies costs money in the short- and long-term, California edition

[Former employee of a non-profit organization Clarissa] Doutherd, who lives in Oakland, Calif., with her 4-year old son Xavier, had been able to cover the nearly $1,000 monthly child care bill thanks to a state subsidy that helps lower-income working parents. The support disappeared after budget cutbacks last year.

"In June, I had to quit my full-time job," after her salary was insufficient to cover her child care costs, she said. "I was on the brink of being able to pay the full cost, just another raise away from being completely self-sufficient" (MSNBC).

I love a good cliché, and the one that works best here is "penny-wise, pound-foolish." How much money is the state of California saving by cutting childcare subsidies? Better to ask, how much income is the state losing? Now that California forced Ms. Doutherd to quit a full-time job where she was expecting a raise, the state treasury is no longer receiving from her . . .

• Income tax, which would likely have gone up with her raise
• Sales tax, to the tune of 8.75% minus Oakland's cut, on purchases other than groceries, medicines, etc.
• Tolls, which finance road construction and seismic retrofitting of bridges

I don't know exactly how much her subsidy was, but it was something less than $1,000 per month. Clearly, she probably wasn't paying $1,000 per month in taxes. But let's say that she was, or that the state was actually spending that full amount, while keeping in mind that a 4-year-old kid won't require full-time daycare for much longer. For $1,000 per month, the state of California was helping her earn, save, and spend money, keeping it moving around and working for her and for the businesses and services she used. It was allowing her to maintain and even build her skills, and spend time with her colleagues and professional peers. It was helping her "bank" time at her job so that she'd get seniority and earn a raise. The other side of that coin: the non-profit organization employer was guarding some institutional memory, and thus was better able to use its state tax-exempt status to the benefit of its constituents in the state, by avoiding turnover in her accounting job. And the state was moving money to the federal government in the form of income and social security taxes -- the federal government loses some taxes now, and Ms. Doutherd will have a number of months or years where she won't be putting money into her own social security for later. And more, the state was helping Xavier get pre-school enrichment and socialization outside of the home that will help him when he enters kindergarten or first grade, particularly if the program he was in was something like Head Start (PDF), (PDF).

How long will Ms. Doutherd's household make it before she needs to apply for food stamps, utilities aid, subsidized housing, or some other assistance? Luckily for her, the article appears to state, she has just the one kid, and at age 4 he'll be in full-time school sometime soon. Until then, the household will be treading water and doing absolutely nothing to rebuild the state or national economy, all to save the state under $1,000 a month, on the back of a single mother. Great job, California!

And again with the voter ID issue

Did you notice that all but one of the plaintiffs in ACLU-PA's lawsuit against Pennsylvania's voter ID law are women?

If you are an otherwise voting-eligible woman in Pennsylvania, check your wallet. Does the name on your poll-acceptable ID match the name under which you're registered to vote? There is a one in three chance that it does not. If not, start the ball rolling now to fix the situation. Either change your voter registration to match your driver's license exactly, or get a new driver's license so that it matches your voter registration exactly. If you need a birth certificate to get a new driver's license, request one immediately. It can take 14 weeks (not a typo) to get it, and that's even if the state complies with the request: ACLU-PA's petition includes a plaintiff who has been requesting a birth certificate multiple times over several years but hasn't gotten an answer.

This is a 19th Amendment problem because it disenfranchises women overwhelmingly, denying them at a rate of potentially one in three their right to vote -- to the obvious satisfaction of Governor Corbett and the state GOP. This is a 19th Amendment problem that none of the civil liberties lawyers groups is addressing as such. It's up to you.

GOP to women: You can pay your student loans, or you can have pap smears

The House will vote Friday to extend current rates on federally funded college loans for one year, Speaker John Boehner announced on Wednesday in what is seen as an attempt to blunt President Barack Obama's momentum on an issue popular with young voters.

Boehner said the extension will be paid for with funds from the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration's signature health-care law. [...]

The Republican proposal [...] covers the $5.9 billion cost by dipping into a fund in the Affordable Care Act called The Prevention and Public Health Fund. According to health.gov, the fund is intended to promote wellness, prevent disease and protect against public health emergencies (CNN).

Specifically, the GOP proposal uses funds earmarked for cervical and breast cancer screenings to pay for extending the lowered rates. Got that, college-educated women? This is what the GOP thinks of you. They beg the question that money for the extension has to come out of the Affordable Care Act to begin with, as opposed to any other government program or billionaires' tax loophole. And then after deciding that the ACA is totally the best place out of the federal budget to seek funding, they zero in and go directly after what they call a "slush fund" for women's preventive healthcare.

My "portfolio" of law school loans includes one federally subsidized loan. Doubling the interest rate on that loan would increase my monthly payment by about $25, for an added $300 per year. At least the GOP's math is right: that's about the same cost as one pap smear and one mammogram.

Women will be disenfranchised this November

Have been keeping myself busy with non-paying work, a couple of trips up and down the Northeast Corridor, and academic politics. My most recent stabs at employment in a venue where someone else would cut my paychecks have gotten nowhere. I've been advised by a very interested party to simply take the J.D. off my resumé. However, as the advice did not include any correlating advice as to what to do with the 3 school years and 2+ underemployed years that would then go "missing" off the resumé, I've so far declined to follow it.

In the meantime, we appear to have a definite GOP nominee for president. Bizarrely, some polls are putting him at a dead heat against President Obama. Did the poll-takers not speak to any women at all?

Speaking of which, women voters in photo-ID states need to beware, and they need to beware fast. Fully one third of American women over 18 do not possess a valid photo ID, one that the pollworkers will accept, reflecting their legal name (3-page PDF), mostly for marriage or divorce reasons. Pennsylvania just enacted a voter ID law that will permit ID-less voters at the primary election next week, but will disenfranchise people without photo ID in November. The process can take weeks because of documentation requirements, and the rule in November will be strict.

This is going to be huge. You think the ACORN debacle was stupid? Do you want to take a stab at what the 2-digit percentage will be of women across the country who won't be allowed to vote for president in November?

Who signed it?

Looking at the credentials I've hung on my wall -- B.A. diploma, J.D. diploma, certificate admitting me to the bar of Pennsylvania -- I see that every last signature on them is that of an older white man. My other credentials, too; everything going back to my high-school diploma and all the academic awards between is signed by only older white men. It makes me feel that I've earned my credentials not because of those signatures but in spite of them.

Doesn't help that, last night, after I dispensed about $300 worth of legal advice and business counseling to a non-profit organization, an older white man took me aside and gave me spontaneous, unsolicited advice on how to drum up business.

Anyway, as to the anti-SOPA website blackouts -- you know President Obama said two days ago that he won't sign the SOPA bill, right?

Brooklyn needs a new Rosa Parks

The B110 bus, which runs between [New York City neighborhoods] Williamsburg and Borough Park, has been run by Private Transportation Corporation since 1973, under a franchise with the city. [...] Even though a private operator runs the bus, it was awarded the route through a public and competitive bidding process.

But women sit in the back while men sit in the front. The only females allowed in the front are very young girls who happen to be traveling with a male caregiver. And not because the rule is merely an unspoken tradition:

Guidelines, posted in the front and the back, said that "when boarding a crowded bus with standing passengers in the front, women should board the back door after paying the driver in the front" and that "when the bus is crowded, passengers should stand in their designated areas."

Because this bus is part of the public transit system (it is run under some kind of franchise arrangement with MTA), this gender segregation is a civil rights problem.[1] Kudos to Mayor Bloomberg for calling the operators out on it:

[T]he mayor said that segregating men and women was "obviously not permitted" on public buses. "Private people: you can have a private bus," he added. "Go rent a bus, and do what you want on it" (NYT via MSNBC).

To paraphrase a departed Philadelphia local who was no hero of mine, this is America. When riding the bus, you can sit wherever you damn well please.

It's a slippery slope. One day it's a community saying that it offends their religion for women and men to sit together on the bus because it's immodest, and the next day it's a community calling little girls "sluts" for going to school and vandalizing the facility.

It's also a constitutional problem for this bus to operate with its MTA-looking number. If your god requires your congregation to gender-segregate itself in public, that's fine. Who am I to challenge what your god has told you? Just don't look to the government for financial help or recourse though the courts to facilitate and enforce that segregation. This informal -- and really, it's not very informal -- gender segregation on quasi-private buses should be nipped in the bud.

---

[1] Though at least nobody's being denied service or having their fares confiscated because the bus operator doesn't think they conform to the gender sticker on their transit pass.

Girls need sports. It's really not that hard a concept to grasp

Gah, my custody schedule changed, my daughter's school year and fall sports schedule began, and now I don't know where I'm going or what time I need to leave to get there. Thank christ for my desk calendar and my watch. Who needs Outlook and google calendars? Not this underemployed yet over-obligated lawyer. And don't get me started about this horrible kludgey third-party solution for my daughter's online school sports calendar.

And, no, she's not a cheerleader. But ooh, look, there's been some movement on the Title IX issue at Quinnipiac University. I'd given the school the benefit of the doubt when I wrote about the problem in July, 2010, but a trial court decided that I shouldn't have: the finding was that they really were trying to weasel out of Title IX requirements when they ditched their volleyball team in favor of a cheerleading squad.

Have you been following the case better than I have? Do you have a daughter (or niece or whatever) who plays a school sport? Public or private school? Please comment. Thanks!

Ladies' night at the anarchist bookstore

Off to learn about menstrual extraction. Who knew these kinds of women's consciousness-raising and empowerment meetings were still going on?

Heaven forbid women should serve at the highest levels of government

Did you hear the one about the religious zealots who are so upset at women serving at high levels in the national government that they illegally wipe them out of official photographs in which they appear?

Brooklyn's Hasidic newspaper Di Tzeitung printed, on the front page and above the fold, the White House's official photo of President Obama and his security team watching the bin Laden raid. You've seen the photo, I'm sure. But the image you've seen isn't the one the newspaper printed. Rather, they censored it, removing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (who is in an office that is "three chickenbones" away from the Presidency) and national security official Audrey Tomason, Director for Counterterrorism.

Trying to figure out why the newspaper editors cut the two women from the photograph. Tomason's shirt was too low-cut? Both women's heads were unshaved, and uncovered at that? Did the newspaper find that they hadn't yet had their post-menstrual mikveh and their panties checked? (BTW, that second link there makes for some fantastic lunch break reading. Start at page 1 of 9.) That is to say, presumably, the newspaper wiped them from the photo for religious woman-hating reasons. But isn't there also a religious admonition against deceit?

So here's the censored photo, via Failed Messiah, the blog that I understand to have first broken this story. I can't seem to find the Di Tzeitung newspaper online (because the Internet is too contaminated by all the immodest, unclean women who use it?) EDIT: because everybody misspelled it, and differently, so I couldn't successfully Google it the day I wrote this post:



And here's the original, which a few people have pointed out was released with the express instruction from the government that it not be "manipulated in any way":



And here's one that's been making the rounds, proscription on manipulation be damned:



But my point, and I do have one, is this. Imagine if women had not been oppressed for the past 5,000 years. And I don't mean to say that there is zero oppression of women any more; for just the latest example, see Indiana's plan to cut off its federal family planning dollars nose to spite its face, or recent figures of the ratio of men to women in engineering education (some 20%). But just imagine. If girls and women had been allowed into schools of philosophy, medicine, sciences, and engineering over the centuries, how far along in technology would the world be now? Would we still be spinning our wheels with fossil fuels? How many problems, challenges, wars could have been resolved more quickly, and intellectual advances been made sooner, if half the world's population had not been barred from participating on account of their sex?

Take that Audrey Tomason, for instance. I don't know what a Director for Counterterrorism does, or even exactly what agency or office her directorship is in. But I assume that she was the most qualified individual for the job. And something about her job and her expertise won her a ticket to be in that room to watch the live video of Navy SEALs popping terrorists. My guess is that she, or the people she directs, were indispensable for the operation to succeed, or actually probably simply to take place. What if she were barred from her job merely because she's a woman? What if the next most qualified person were also a woman? In other words, what if the most qualified man for the job had gotten the directorship over Tomason and who knows how many other women due solely to his sex, even though he wasn't as well qualified for the work as Tomason? The President stated that the mission had barely more than even odds of succeeding. Who wants to make the odds worse by not allowing the best people to fill the highest posts in the government?

Religious zealots, that's who.

Di Tzeitung published the doctored photo on Friday. Will any mainstream news outlets call them out on their front-page lies, or will it just be low-level bloggers like me? Oh, and the New York Daily News.

Anti-choice lawmaking, gang rape in Texas

The state legislature in Texas has passed, and Gov. Perry appears ready to sign into law, a bill that requires women to get an ultrasound, view and listen to a description of what the ultrasound reveals, and then wait 24 hours before undergoing the termination procedure (CNN). It's like Oklahoma's law (currently enjoined), except that one of the versions of the Texas law allows a woman to opt out of seeing the images or listening to sounds if if the fetus has a condition that is incompatible with life after childbirth, or if the pregnancy is the result of incest or rape.

Speaking of rape in Texas, police have arrested 18 people (13 adults, 5 kids) for gang-raping an 11-year-old girl (CNN). But hey, at least if she becomes pregnant and decides to terminate the pregnancy, she won't be further punished or "subject to a penalty" if she "avert[s] her eyes from the ultrasound images" during her state-ordered preliminaries to the abortion.

Happy International Women's Day!

Free birth control for women improves women's health

From the NYT, Science:

[C]ontraceptives fit any reasonable definition of preventive health care because they avert[] unintended pregnancies and allow[] women to control the timing, number and spacing of births. This, in turn, improves maternal and child health by reducing infant mortality, complications of pregnancy and even birth defects[.]

Church:

Pregnancy is not a disease to be prevented, nor is fertility a pathological condition[. ...] So birth control is not preventive care, and it should not be mandated.

One, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists did not call pregnancy a disease. What pregnancy does is to increase health risks. Pregnancy, as compared to non-pregnancy, is a condition with an increased risk of illness, permanent disability, and death. Preventing pregnancy (or, of course, terminating a pregnancy) prevents (or ends) those risks.

Second, no one is trying to "mandate" birth control for anyone, as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is implying here. In fact, the "mandate" is for health insurance companies to cover birth control in a woman's basic plan, without charging extra fees in the form of co-pays or increased rates or deductibles for women who just happen to be in their childbearing years. This is because birth control is an integral part of women's preventive health care. The speaker for the bishops here is misleading her audience by deliberately twisting both the content of the health insurance law and the position of the ACOG.

Women are not fully in control of their health, lives, and destinies unless they can control their reproduction. When women do not have a full say in when and how often they bring a pregnancy to term, they cannot fully realize their potential. The ACOG recognizes this. The Catholic church -- and anyone else who would deny that family planning is preventive health care -- does not.

Three pieces of bad news for women this week

It's been an unhappy week in women's news at the Glomarization homestead.

First, though the lame-duck Senate had nothing to lose, they killed the Paycheck Fairness Act anyway. It wouldn't have made anything newly illegal, but it would have uncapped punitive and compensatory damages against employers who were proven to engage in sex-based wage discrimination, and it would have limited the number of excuses legal defenses an employer could use in a lawsuit. When I say "uncapped compensatory damages," that means just what it sounds like it means: if you prove that you were underpaid because of sex discrimination on account of you're a woman, you may not necessarily win back all the pay that you were otherwise rightfully owed, because there's a cap on compensatory damages. Never mind that there should or should not be a cap on extra, punitive awards over and above the actual deficit in what you were owed -- but as the law is, you can't always get even what the employer should have been fairly writing on your paycheck. This bill would have fixed that unfairness in the damages equation. Here's some context: there have been equal pay laws in place in England since 1970 and France since 1972, but here in the U.S. all the real or imaginary extensions to the deadline to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment expired in 1982, three-state strategy notwithstanding.

Second, there's a serial woman-killer on the loose in Kensington. Over on Phawker, Jeff Deeney calls a spade a spade and says that the police are letting the women have their just deserts for getting addicted and then streetwalking to pay for it. And if that isn't a reasonable social solution to the problem, then what is? Oh, yeah: drug addiction prevention and treatment, equal pay for equal work, and, you know, investigating and prosecuting sex crimes, no matter who the victims are.

And finally, in South Africa, the kind of thing that's at the bottom of the slippery slope of societal devaluing of women. At the top, paying women less than men for doing the same work; in the middle, not bothering to go after the rapists and killers of prostitutes; at the bottom: criminal charges of underage sex against a 15-year-old girl who was gang-raped at school (BBC). This is the one where the boys spiked her drink and then other kids videoed the attack with their mobile phones. Within hours, the video was on sale on the Internet, but only after the teachers had had a chance to view it and laugh at it.

Is it Friday yet? Is it time for armed all-women rebellion yet?

Police slow to respond to possible serial killer of women in Philly

There is unanimous agreement among the women working the [Kensington Avenue prostitutes'] stroll that the police feel that sexual violence is simply an occupational hazard that women who choose this way of life should cope with on their own. That a serial killer would view the stroll as fertile territory for finding easy kills among disposable women, to them, only seems a logical outcome of the long standing unwritten police policies that condone the violence against them.

Jeff Deeney at The Newsweek Daily Beast on how the police have been slow to react to an apparent serial killer in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, because he targets prostitutes.

Anyway, here's a composite sketch of the suspect:



Is that an iPod?

Driberally tonight

Drinking Liberally is a weekly social gathering where progressives talk politics and get to know one another. In Center City Philadelphia, we meet on Tuesday nights at José Pistola's upstairs bar, where there are drink specials from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. And the more we tip the bartender, the more frequently he hands out free dishes of chips and dips. I hope to see you there!

José Pistola's is at 263 South 15th Street (15th and Spruce) in Center City, near the Kimmel Center and the Academy of Music. There's a parking garage across the street, but as filthy liberal hippies naturally we suggest public transit; both SEPTA and PATCO will get you there in two shakes of a lamb's tail.

This week's topic: Happy 10th anniversary today to American availability of mifepristone plus misoprostol, the abortion pill! About 1 in 3 American women will have an abortion during their childbearing years; about a million abortions are performed in the U.S. every year; and about 15% of all American abortions are accomplished with mifepristone. Not only do you probably know (or: drink beer with, share a home with, work with, sleep with, send your kids to school to be taught by, sit in church next to) a woman who's had an abortion, but also there's a good chance she used the abortion pill to terminate her pregnancy.

And now Glomarization's friendly regular reminder: when abortions are illegal, or at least devilishly hard to come by, women will still get abortions. If they're candidates for a medical abortion but they can't get the safe two-drug combination, they will often try using Cytotec -- misoprostol -- on its own. It's not as effective as the two-drug combination, and if you think that off-label Cytotec use is only a South and Central American thing that doesn't happen in the U.S., you'd be mistaken.

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"

Competitive cheering does not fall under Title IX

Competitive cheering is not a "college sport" for Title IX purposes, and I don't disagree. Here's what I wrote to a pal who asked me about it.

Am I crazy, or does this sound like a good thing? Universities can't just say "well, we've got ladies in short skirts cheering on our football players, so we've got parity."

Well, on the one hand, competitive cheering is very much an athletic endeavor. The participants have to be very fit. The routines are like a combination of gymnastics and dancing. Your squad can reasonably be called a "team." Also, there are national competitions.

On the other hand, it's not a college sport the way that gymnastics, football, tennis, baseball, track, volleyball, etc., are. (And it's not a fine art, like dance.) There may be men who participate -- the original cheerleaders were, after all, all-male pep squads -- but it's a female ghetto. It's not a game, but then neither is a track and field meet. Now, there's a chicken-and-egg problem there, of course: how can it be a college sport if Title IX doesn't recognize it as such, and how can it get Title IX recognition unless it's a college sport? The answer, I think, is that more colleges need to have cheer squads. Right now, it looks as though there are only 8 schools in that cheer organization, the National Competitive Stunts and Tumbling Association (formed only in January of this year) -- out of how many schools with cheer squads? And out of how many American colleges and universities that fall under Title IX? I think Title IX will be more likely to consider cheering a "college sport" once there are more competitions between schools.

I wonder if NCAA recognition is a touchstone. Even the school that the court ruled against seems to think so. Dig the press release from Quinnipiac University, linked above: it states that "[t]he goal of the NCSTA is to usher stunts and gymnastics into NCAA emerging sports status and eventually, a NCAA fully sanctioned varsity sport with a NCAA sponsored national championship."

I'll give the school the benefit of the doubt and say that it's likely they were happy to have a cheering program on campus as a sports scholarship opportunity for women, and that they weren't trying to weasel out of Title IX requirements by eliminating volleyball over cheering. But I have to agree with the ruling. Until cheering is, say, an Olympic sport, or there are NCAA rules about it, then it's not a "college sport" for Title IX purposes.

Which is not to say that I think it could never be a college sport: if track and field sports and gymnastics are college sports, then cheering could be, too. Cheering requires athleticism, training, and rigorous practice; there are rules; and you score and judge the cheer routines in as objective a way as you can for this kind of thing. Clearly, it's a sport. (In Wisconsin, it's legally a "contact sport" (PDF).) Develop it into more of a national program first (and, yes, Title IX "subsidy" would help that along), and then I'll allow that it's a college sport. It's merely premature now to expect competitive cheering to get Title IX recognition.

Nonsense NYT Op-Ed suggests the Pill should be available over-the-counter

Kelly Blanchard of Ibis Reproductive Health, a women's health research group, has published a ridiculous op-ed piece in the New York Times asserting that the Pill should be available over the counter, without a prescription, because it's safer than acetaminophen. Blanchard explains the problems with requiring a prescription for the Pill:

[The Pill's] usefulness has been limited because it’s available only by prescription. As every woman who has run out of pills on a Sunday or forgotten to take them along on vacation knows, refills are not always easy to come by.

This is not a problem most easily solved by eliminating the need for a prescription. This is a problem most easily solved by women watching their medication supply and double-checking their luggage before they leave the house. Blanchard's message here is not particularly empowering.

The pill meets F.D.A. criteria for over-the-counter medications. Women don’t need a doctor to tell them whether they need the pill — they know when they are sexually active and want to avoid pregnancy. Pill instructions are easy to follow: Take one each day.

Ease of use is not the sole, or maybe even the most important, criterion for whether a medication should be available without a prescription. After all, heavy-duty sleep aids are also once-a-day pills, and some anti-osteoporosis drugs are once-a-month pills. To suggest that their dosing schedule should control their over-the-counter availability is absurd.

It’s true that the pill could be dangerous for women with certain conditions. Women who are 35 or older and smoke, and those with high blood pressure, are at greater risk of a heart attack or stroke if they take oral contraceptives that combine estrogen and progestin. But these are not complicated conditions to identify[.]

Huh? The author checks her blood pressure at home? In fact, there is a lot of undiagnosed hypertension among adult Americans. It's inconceivable to me how Blanchard could advocate letting a drug be sold over the counter to literally millions of women who would then have an increased risk of death or permanent disability.

Blanchard analogizes the Pill to cold remedies and condoms. But drugs that affect sex hormones are way different than antihistamines or barrier contraception. A woman should absolutely see some kind of health practitioner before starting on the Pill, so that they can talk about the options as to dosages and as to which type of hormone or combination she'll use. The health practitioner should check her blood pressure, remind her that the Pill won't protect against STDs, and discuss the risks of blood clots, depression, and negative sexual side effects. There are way too many medical issues with the Pill for me to agree with the suggestion that it should be available over the counter like a cough suppressant or a contraceptive sponge.

[T]here are no special health risks for younger women on the pill[.]

Well, that depends how "special" you think your sex drive is, I guess. I spent a year on the Pill when I was in my mid-20s, and it killed my libido dead. It took me several years and a pregnancy to get it back, and I'm not alone . . . says The New York Times itself, in a 2006 article that notes the lack of a warning about that particular possible side-effect in birth-control paperwork.

The United States has one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the developed world, and better access to the pill is part of the solution to this problem.

I don't disagree. But Blanchard is not a medical doctor; she's a sociologist. Sociological and economic research is an important way to figure out how populations are barred from getting the healthcare they need. And sociological and economic strategies are important ways to try to remove or at least lower barriers to getting needed healthcare. But there are some important medical reasons for requiring a prescription for the Pill, and it's not helpful to the discussion to minimize those reasons by saying the Pill is safer than Tylenol, or to equate a doctor's prescription with "a doctor's permission," as Blanchard inexplicably does in the last paragraph of her op-ed.

A more important barrier to eliminate is that not all health insurance plans cover the Pill. Almost half the states do not require health insurance companies to do so (PDF). (This is one reason why your health insurance company should not be allowed to incorporate in whichever state it darn well pleases.) Let's focus on this real barrier to reproductive equality. It's a straw-man argument to characterize doctors as paternalistic, permission-granting gatekeepers standing between women and their birth control pills. If any entity stands between a woman and the Pill, it's a health insurance company that's choosing to not fully pay for women's healthcare.

Challenge anti-woman religious fundamentalism -- for science!

Remember that krazy kleric who said that female immodesty causes earthquakes? "Many women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray and spread adultery in society which increases earthquakes," says a senior Muslim cleric in Iran, where earthquakes have killed thousands upon thousands of people since the Islamic revolution.

It's woman hate and bad science all wrapped up in one ridiculous comment. So maybe my women readers would be interested in participating in a global event that will either bring on the seismological endtimes or teach a few people about the geology of earthquakes -- or maybe give all our male friends righteous hard-ons: Boobquake!

On Monday, April 26th, I will wear the most cleavage-showing shirt I own. Yes, the one usually reserved for a night on the town. I encourage other female skeptics to join me and embrace the supposed supernatural power of their breasts. Or short shorts, if that's your preferred form of immodesty. With the power of our scandalous bodies combined, we should surely produce an earthquake. If not, I'm sure [krazy kleric] Sedighi can come up with a rational explanation for why the ground didn't rumble. And if we really get through to him, maybe it'll be one involving plate tectonics.

Three cheers to Jen McCreight!