It is entirely appropriate that we focus on data privacy in the context of sex scandals, and this points to something crucially important for privacy activists. The combination of concern about sexual autonomy and about technologically-enabled surveillance has been a crucial driver in privacy law.
In a recent television interview, Rep. Todd Akin, a member of the House Committee on Science, the Republican candidate for Senate from Missouri, said that rape does not result in pregnancy because “if it’s a legitimate rape the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” [...]
Hercules Industries, a Denver company that provides heating and air conditioning equipment recently won a preliminary injunction against the imposition of the preventive care requirement adopted pursuant to the Affordable Care Act. Predictably, conservatives lauded the decision as a victory for religious freedom, because, at least for the moment, this family-owned business that employs around 300 people has the religious freedom to tell their employees they’re on their own to pay for reproductive health services. Don’t expect it to last.
What is truly frightening about this story is that Virginia legislators thought that restricting women’s access to abortion was important enough to force almost every woman seeking the procedure in the Commonwealth to become a victim of sexual assault, and force doctors to become perpetrators.
The Obama administration’s regulations concerning access to oral contraception through employer-provided health insurance allow each person to follow the precepts of his or her religion within the confines of one’s home and body – and protects those of us who choose to follow different precepts than those of religious Conservatives
The United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on January 10 upheld a Texas law requiring doctors to show sonograms to patients seeking abortions. The decision functions as an unfortunate emblem of the court’s tendency to treat abortions as quasi-criminal acts rather than a legal medical procedures and improperly infringes upon the privacy and autonomy of patients’ and doctors’. Two key ideas underlie the court’s reasoning in this case: 1) the unborn are citizens of the state, and 2) legislation of this kind is reasonably calculated and reasonably necessary to ensure mature and informed decisions by would-be mothers.
The rule, which the foundation enacted “to fulfill [its] fiduciary duty” to donors, stipulates that it will not give funds to an organization under investigation. However, this particular decision to stop funding seems so closely connected to the political situation and to the perception of Planned Parenthood as a provider of abortion services, that it was almost divorced from public health considerations.
In the upcoming weeks, the legislators of my home state of North Carolina will be faced with a dilemma: how does a government compensate victims of a historical atrocity that was deemed legal at the time? At the national level, this question is often asked in the context of slavery [...]
On Tuesday, Mississippi voters will decide whether to amend their state constitution to define a person as “every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the functional equivalent thereof.” The ballot initiative is the result of efforts by the anti-choice movement to ban abortion in the state and [...]
Many studies have demonstrated a strong correlation between the number of women in any given legislature or policy-making body and the extent to which that body takes up issues deemed important for women. On Sunday, the newly-formed United Nations entity, UN Women, announced that it was accepting applications for grants, with a focus on projects seeking to empower women in Arab countries transitioning to democracy. It’s only where real action occurs that women start to be empowered and involved in a way that strengthens a country’s democracy, making it responsive to the needs of all its population, not just the men.
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