Three generations of Seattle family women unite together on April 28 Unite Against the War on Women Rally. Image credit: Laura Walker

Daily French Roast

Anne is reading …

Feminism and Leftist Men

Latha Pollitt takes up the much-needed discussion of women and the left for The Nation. At this spring’s Left Forum, only 15 of 440 panels even touched on a feminist issue. The problem is class, say leftist men, not feminism.

Funny. The leftist men of the 70s said exactly the same thing. “Trust us, girls, your boat will rise along with ours. Now be a good girl and get me some coffee. After all, activism is man’s work.”

Reproductive health isn’t a topic that Occupy will take up, writes Pollitt. She argues that with one in three women having an abortion in her lifetime and almost every woman on contraception at some time in her life, reproductive health should be a core concern of the Occupy movement.

And having just attended my first NOW meeting in decades, Occupy Philadelphia got a much more favorable review for being very supportive of “women’s issues” in this town.

A woman’s right to control her fertility is not confined to the ‘culture wars’. There is no issue more statistically associated with a woman’s lifetime earnings and lifestyle than her ability to control her fertility and childbearing years.

In New York, Women Occupying Wall Street is planning a Feminist General Assembly for May 17 at 6:30 pm in Washington Square Park.

Women Voters

Politicoasks if finally this is the year that America’s women voters will determine the election results.

For 220 years, picking the president has remained, at least in terms of statistically provable results despite the 19th Amendment, a man’s prerogative. But this may finally change in 2012.
Meanwhile, the latest polls suggest another important shift: Younger women may be the kingmakers — offsetting Romney’s gain among older white men angry at their fate in this struggling economy.

Will the ‘War On Women’ Make Feminism Fashionable?

Writing for The Washington Post, Rebecca Traister says that Republicans have all but buried the image of the feminist as a mirthless, hirsute, sex-averse succubus — that grotesque stand-in for real women like the three generations of females above, photographed at Seattle’s UniteWomen rally.

More DFR

Heartland Institute

ThinkProgressdirects us to ClimateWire, who published a story last Friday saying that the anti-global warming campaign billboard like the one above — featuring unibomber Ted Kaczynski, mass murderer Charles Manson and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro — came as a surprise to Heartland’s board of directors. However, the board supports the tactics, except for a single resignation.

Yesterday, news broke that Eli Lilly, BB&T and Pepsi will no longer support the Heartland Institute, supporting State Farm, GM and at least 150,000 individuals who have signed petitions condemning Heartland.

Young Adults & Birth Control Knowledge

Guttmacher Institute reports that an astounding 50% of young adults between the ages of 18 and 29 told researchers that contraception doesn’t matter because “when it is your time to get pregnant, it will happen.” This group of women has the highest rate of unintended pregnancies and also abortion rates in America.

The new report is far from the first study to point out the educational gap that is often a consequence of abstinence-only education. While the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported teen pregnancies in 2010 dropped to the lowest rate since 1940, it found that states with abstinence-only policies continue to experience higher rates of teen pregnancies.

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US International Family Planning Assistance

The $35 million designated for the United Nations Population Fund brings contraception to 31.6 million women and couples:

9.4 million unintended pregnancies, including 4.1 million unplanned births, are averted;
4 million induced abortions are averted (3 million of them unsafe);
22,000 maternal deaths are averted;
2.8 million fewer healthy years of life (DALYs) are lost among women; and
96,000 fewer children lose their mothers.