Video Link: Dr. Laura Berman Shares Ways to Explore Contraceptive Options

Video is here. It loads small so click the button to make it full screen if you want to see it better.

Book Recommendation

I just finished reading this amazing book by Meg Hickling - "The New Speaking of Sex: What Your Children Need to Know and When They Need to Know It" (2005).

I cannot recommend this book enough, even if you don't have children. I consider it my "Bible" for the work I want to do in schools with youth, and I know I will be using it for reference with my future work.

Added a new link - the blog ReelGirl, which rates movies based on how appropriate they are for kids.

The blogger in her own words:

About Reel Girl:

Reel Girl was founded in December 2009 and is crossposted on SFGate. Reel Girl posts have also been featured, written about, or linked to major sites around the web including The Week (best opinion), Jezebel, Blogher (Spotlight Blogger),Forbes.com, Wall Street Journal, Adweek, Ms., Common Sense Media, and many more.

Reel Girl’s mission is to imagine gender equality in the fantasy world.

More about Reel Girl:

ReelGirl’s mission started out to be a resource for parents to rate and exchange information about media, toys, and products on how empowering they are for girls. But as I blogged, issues came up:

(1) When kids learn through cartoons, books, and toys, that boys are more important than girls, and radically different from them, BOTH genders are negatively affected.

(2) I write more than I rate

So I changed ReelGirl’s tagline. Here’s my blog post about Reel Girl’s newly described mission:

I started Reel Girl because I wanted to create a resource for parents on the internet where they could go to find great stories, movies, and toys that support girl empowerment. I’m the mom of three young daughters, and I wasn’t able to find the kind of information I was looking for in one place.

I also wanted to recognize how messed up our movie rating system is– and the values associated with that rating system. So many G movies perpetuate the absolute worst kinds of gender stereotypes, yet they are supposedly “for kids.” In my opinion, this kind of repetitive imagery is way more dangerous for children than hearing the word “shit.”

So ReelGirl’s rating system is S for stereotype and G for girlpower, 1- 3 possible.

Here’s the problem: I’m a ranter, not a rater. I’m not organized enough to pull this off. I need logos, to go through all the movies, books, and toys out there, and I don’t have the time. Any free moment I get, I usually have something new I want to write about. So while I will continue to rate media and products, I’m going to recognize that mostly, I haven’t been.

I’m changing ReelGirl’s tagline from “Rating kids media and products for girl empowerment” to “Imagining gender equality in the fantasy world.” That’s mostly what ReelGirl is about. My hope is that ReelGirl supports and encourages real imagination (ha ha) instead of the same old recycled stories.

Since having these three kids, I really get how fantasy creates reality and reality creates fantasy in an endless loop. That’s pretty much what this blog is about, fantasizing gender equality in the real world.

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: Faith in Hiding - Are There Secular Grounds for Banning Abortion?

The full article can be found on Tumblr here.

Summer and Fall Updates

I'm back, after several months. At long last eh? I didn't mean to let this blog die for a bit, I just got caught up with moving and working on employment stuff and looking for work, plus some of my own work on the side.

Summer - I moved, got told (politely) that my resume sucked, and so I spent all of August and part of September fixing it. In the meantime I unpacked and worked on some of my volunteering on the side. For example, my guild on Gaia Online is now on Twitter and on Youtube. I run both accounts myself, so uploads are slower than I'd like to be, but it's getting there.

Fall - Finished up my resume and started looking for work. After about 2.5 weeks, I found a cashier position at a big name grocery store. It doesn't use my degree of course, but at this point I need the money badly and anything will do. I start tomorrow, and I'm nervous but looking forward to it.

On a personal stuff, the family drama crap hasn't gotten much better. On the plus side though, my partner is moving back in mid-Nov. once his working season is over, so I'm looking forward to that!

Hope you all are well.

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.

Here's a Question for all the Conservatives and Republicans

Updates on My Life

So what's been going on with me? Well, I graduate in 6 days, for one thing! Finally, at long last! I'm excited about the big day finally being here, and I'm hoping everything will go smoothly.

I also have something big coming up that I'm not posting online yet, but will reveal in a couple of weeks.

Everything is, as usual, tained by family drama and family BS. I cannot wait for the end of the month, to put it mildly. *le sigh* But what else is new.

6 more days, 6 more days!

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?