Amazing American Resource for Finding the Best Birth Control for You

Bedsider.org

Babies are great…when you’re ready for them. We think in the meantime women should have the right to a healthy, happy sex life without having to worry about unplanned pregnancy. For that to happen, women need to take an active role in their own reproductive health. We want to help with that.

Bedsider.org (Bedsider) is a free support network for birth control for women 18-29 operated byThe National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. Launched in beta form in 2010, our goal is to help women find the method of birth control that’s right for them and learn how to use it consistently and effectively.

Right now, seven in 10 pregnancies among unmarried women 18-29 are described by women themselves as unplanned. That sounds like a lot to us. We hope that Bedsider will be a useful tool for women to learn about their birth control options, better manage their birth control, and in the process avoid getting pregnant until they’re ready.

Article: The State War on Planned Parenthood Heats Up

Taken from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/14/defund-planned-parenthood-birth-control_n_899334.html

When 21-year old Christina Martel would renew her birth control prescription at Planned Parenthood, it was usually a relatively simple affair. But this summer, getting her prescription became significantly more difficult.

Martel, who is uninsured and makes less than $1000 a month at her part-time job, said she can't afford to go to a regular gynecologist to get her prescription adjusted, so she asked her new Indianapolis Planned Parenthood clinic about their sliding-pay scale for low-income patients this past June.

The clinic told Martel she would have to pay full price to meet with a physician because they had just been defunded by the state government, so she decided to wait until she returned to her home-state New Hampshire last week to have a doctor's appointment. Not only had Planned Parenthood been defunded there as well, she found out, but their license to dispense birth control and antibiotics had also been taken away.

"I was shocked to learn that they were no longer able to dispense medication on-site, and enraged when I realized this meant that I would have to pay triple the cost to get it filled at a pharmacy," she told HuffPost in an email.

Martel had paid $12 for a month's worth of birth control pills at Planned Parenthood. She now has to pay $33 a month at the regular pharmacy, which she said really starts to add up.

"I'm just an average broke college student with loans coming out my ears, and I don't want to shell out $33 every month for a prescription that I take first and foremost as a relief to the discomfort I experience on a monthly basis due to painful menstrual symptoms, and secondarily as a means of not getting pregnant," she said.

GOP lawmakers in four states so far -- Indiana, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Kansas -- have defunded Planned Parenthood in their 2011 legislative sessions because some of the organization's clinics provide abortions. A council of five men in New Hampshire voted to stop the flow of Title X family planning funds to Planned Parenthood and cancel a state contract that allowed it to dispense low-cost birth control and antibiotics on site. Texas passed a bill that puts Planned Parenthood at the bottom of the priority list for state funds, and an Ohio lawmaker floated a "Dear Colleague" letter on Wednesday announcing his intention to defund the health provider.

Article: Idaho Mother Charged With "Unlawful Abortion", Turned in by Anti-Choice Advocate

Taken from: http://www.care2.com/causes/womens-rights/blog/idaho-woman-charged-with/


Unable to afford the doctors visits and medical bills associated with an actual medical abortion, Jennie L. McCormack of Idaho instead had her sister purchase drugs online to ingest in order to cause a miscarriage. McCormack, who is the mother of three, is now being charged with "unlawful abortion" according to the Associated Press.

If McCormack is found guilty, she could be subject to a $5000 penalty as well as up to five years in prison.

McCormack's case is a sign of the true desperation of women in this country. She said she believed she was only 14 weeks along, although the examination of the remains concluded it was more likely 20-25. She is already a mother of more than one child, one still a toddler. But financially she was cut off from any choice she wanted to make about how many people she wanted in her family, unable to procure an abortion she couldn't afford, and now facing criminal penalties for taking the only option left to her.

According to the report, McCormack was turned into the police by the sister of on of her friends, a woman who stated "There's other things she could have done. She could have asked for some type of help."

But it's obvious that the only "help" that was acceptable in this situation, according to the tipster, was to have the baby, and that the woman who contacted the police did it solely to punish McCormack. "I'm a grandmother myself. And the love and the compassion I have for my grandkids? They're my life. And I felt that if somebody didn't speak up for this baby, who would? It doesn't have a voice anymore," Carnahan said.

Idaho has recently passed a 20 week abortion ban, making any abortion after that point a criminal activity. How many more women will take it into their own hands to try and self-abort due to the lack of ability to obtain a doctor who can perform the procedure safely? And how many women are conservatives willing to throw in jail for the crime of not wanting to add another mouth to feed to their families?

Article - Texas Gang Rape Coverage Continues to Appall

Taken from: http://jezebel.com/#!5780291/texas-gang-rape-coverage-continues-to-appall


It's not just The New York Times coverage of the gang rape of an 11-year-old girl that's like a blueprint about how not to report on rape. Today, TV got in on the act.

The Houston Chronicle reporter who appears to have done the most in-depth coverage of the case (including an egregious analysis of the child's Facebook page) was on CNN today. We understand that it can be awkward or unsettling to talk about horrible things on live TV and the reporter was trying to burnish what few details are known, but was it really necessary to go on at length about how the basketball team in the town is third-ranked but lost this week after some of its players were charged with the rape of a child?

Article - Doctor Gets Court Order to Confine Pregnant Woman Against Her Will

Taken from: http://news.change.org/stories/doctor-gets-court-order-to-confine-pregnant-woman-against-her-will


With issues like the Stupak Amendment and Nevada's Personhood Initiative in the national spotlight, I am aware that a woman's right to choose whether or not to carry a fetus to full-term is under attack.

What I didn't realize, perhaps naively, is that her right to choose how to carry a fetus is also under fire. Last March, Florida resident Samantha Burton was in week 25 of her pregnancy when she paid a visit to her doctor. Burton was showing signs of potential miscarriage, so her physician ordered bed rest. Burton explained that, as a working mother of two toddlers, bed rest simply wasn't a viable option and then proceeded to ask for a second medical opinion. Seems reasonable, right?