Women & Politics: 9 Lies Republicans Tell About Women’s Bodies

Women & Politics: 9 Lies Republicans Tell About Women’s Bodies

Inspirational Of A Space Legend: Sally Ride, first U.S. woman in space, dies at 61

Inspirational Of A Space Legend: Sally Ride, first U.S. woman in space, dies at 61

Inspirational Woman Of The Day: Indira Gandhi

Inspirational Woman Of The Day: Indira Gandhi

A Message From The Creator

A Message From The Creator

Inspirational Woman Of The Day: Indira Gandhi

Indira Gandhi, born in 1917, was made the third prime minister of India after her father’s successor abruptly died. She served four terms as head of state. A controversial figure, Gandhi was imprisoned twice on charges of corruption. She infamously ordered her national army to attack a holy Sikh shrine, an event that led to 450 fatalities. Gandhi was assassinated by two of her bodyguards in 1984.

Early Life

The only child of Jawaharlal Nehru and the first prime minister of independent India, Indira Gandhi was born on November 19, 1917. A stubborn and highly intelligent young woman, she enjoyed an excellent education in Swiss schools and at Somerville College, Oxford.

After her mother died, in 1936, Gandhi became something of her father’s hostess, learning to navigate complex relationships of diplomacy with some of the great leaders of the world.

Political career

Gandhi was elected president of the Indian National Congress in 1960. After her father’s death, Gandhi was appointed minister of information and broadcasting. When her father’s successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, died abruptly in 1966, India’s congress appointed her to the post of prime minister.

She surprised her father’s old colleagues when she led with a strong hand, sacking some of highest-ranking officials. Gandhi subsequently brought about great change in agricultural programs that improved the lot of her country’s poor. For a time, she was hailed as a hero.

Diplomatic success

In 1971, the Pakistan army conducted violent acts against the people of East Pakistan. Nearly 10 million people fled to India. Gandhi invited the Pakistani president to Shimla for a weeklong summit.

The two leaders eventually signed the Shimla Agreement, agreeing to resolve the dispute of Kashmir by peaceful means. Her work eventually led to the creation of the new and independent nation of Bangladesh.

Gandhi also led a movement that became known as the Green Revolution. In an effort to address the chronic food shortages that mainly affected the extremely poor Sikh farmers of the Punjab region, Gandhi decided to increase crop diversification and food exports as a way out of the problem, creating new jobs as well as food for her countrymen.

Authoritarian leanings and imprisonment

Despite these advancements, Gandhi ruled with an authoritarian hand, and corruption boiled within her congress and her national and state governments. In 1977, the high courts found her guilty of a minor infraction during the year’s elections and called for her resignation. Gandhi responded by requesting that the president call for a state of emergency. He did, but

Gandhi lost the next election and was later imprisoned. In 1980, the country responded differently and she won by a landslide majority. That same year, her only son died in a plane crash.

Assassination

During the 1980s, a Sikh separatist movement developed in India, which Gandhi attempted to repress. Sikh extremists held a campaign inside the Golden Temple, and Gandhi ordered some 70,000 soldiers to purge the sacred space. More than 450 people died.

On October 31, 1924, a trusted bodyguard, who was a Sikh, pulled out a .38 revolver and shot her point-blank. Another bodyguard, also a Sikh, then took out an automatic weapon and shot 30 rounds into her body. Gandhi died on the way to the hospital.

A Message From The Creator

 

 

The Smile Virus

Smiling is infectious,
you catch it like the flu,
When someone smiled at me today,
I started smiling too.

I passed around the corner
and someone saw my grin
When he smiled I realized
I’d passed it on to him .

I thought about that smile
then I realized its worth,
A single smile, just like mine
could travel round the earth.

So, if you feel a smile begin,
don’t leave it undetected
Let’s start an epidemic quick,
and get the world infected!

Inspirational Of A Space Legend: Sally Ride, first U.S. woman in space, dies at 61

I just want to take a moment and pay tribute to a Space Legend. RIP, Astronaut Sally Ride.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – Sally Ride, the first U.S. woman to travel into space, died on Monday after a 17-month battle with pancreatic cancer, according to her organization, Sally Ride Science. She was 61.

Ride broke new ground for American women in 1983 when at the age of 32 she and four crewmates blasted off aboard space shuttle Challenger. She returned to space for a second mission a year later.

““Sally Ride broke barriers with grace and professionalism – and literally changed the face of America’s space program,” NASAadministrator Charles Bolden, a former astronaut, said in a statement.

““She will be missed, but her star will always shine brightly,” Bolden said.

Ride grew up in Los Angeles and attended Stanford University, where she earned degrees in physics and English. She joined NASA’s astronaut corps in 1978.

She was assigned to a third shuttle flight, but training for the mission was cut off after the fatal 1986 Challenger accident that claimed the lives of six colleagues and a schoolteacher.

Ride served as a member of the presidential commission that investigated the accident, then assisted the agency as an administrator with long-range and strategic planning.

She left NASA in 1989 and joined Stanford as a professor. Ride’s interest in education extended to younger students, particularly women whom she targeted with her science education startup Sally Ride Science in San Diego.

The company creates science programs and publications for elementary and middle school students and educators.

Ride also authored five science books for children and served on dozens of NASA, space and technology advisory panels, including the board that investigated the second fatal space shuttleaccident in 2003.

Ride, who was also a science writer, is survived by her mother, her partner, Tam O’Shaughnessy, a sister, a niece and a nephew.

Women & Politics: 9 Lies Republicans Tell About Women’s Bodies

Hey everyone, I would love to here your opinions on this story. Thanks, Kim.

By Katy Hall

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) apologized Tuesday to Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.)for accusing her of lying about the gender breakdown of a contraception hearing panel, but plenty of real lies remain in the debate over women’s health. Some are promoted by Republican lawmakers as they push legislation that limits reproductive rights, and others come from GOP presidential candidates and their surrogates.

1. Birth Control Causes Prostate Cancer.

Last month a New Hampshire lawmaker came up with a new reason the government should not require health insurance companies to provide contraception.

“As a man, would it interest you to know that Dr. Brownstein just published an article that links the pill to prostate cancer?” state Rep. Jeanine Notter (R) asked a male representative at the hearing, the Merrimack Patch reports.

“In the children that are born from these women?” he asked. Notter could not clearly explain the study or how the pill results in prostate cancer.

The study described in the newsletter of Dr. David Brownstein, a physician and holistic practitioner in Michigan, suggests men may ingest estrogen through environmental contamination, not in utero from mothers taking birth control. An author of the study told ABC News, “This is just a hypothesis-generating idea. Women should not be throwing away the pill because of this.”

2. Abortion Causes Breast Cancer.

The New Hampshire House recently passed a bill that would require doctors to tell women seeking abortions that the procedure can cause breast cancer. Here is an excerpt from the bill, sponsored by Notter:

Materials that inform the pregnant woman that there is a direct link between abortion and breast cancer. It is scientifically undisputed that full-term pregnancy reduces a woman’s lifetime risk of breast cancer. It is also undisputed that the earlier a woman has a first full-term pregnancy, the lower her risk of breast cancer becomes, because following a full-term pregnancy the breast tissue exposed to estrogen through the menstrual cycle is more mature and cancer resistant. In fact, for each year that a woman’s first full-term pregnancy is delayed, her risk of breast cancer rises 3.5 percent. The theory that there is a direct link between abortion and breast cancer builds upon this undisputed foundation. During the first and second trimesters of pregnancy the breasts develop merely by duplicating immature tissues. Once a woman passes the thirty-second week of pregnancy (third trimester), the immature cells develop into mature cancer resistant cells. When an abortion ends a normal pregnancy, the woman is left with more immature breast tissue than she had before she was pregnant.

There is no link between abortions and breast cancer, according to the World Health Organization, the American Cancer Society and other major health organizations. Similar provisions requiring doctors to make the abortion-breast cancer connection remain on the books in other state laws. Alaska, Kansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Texas all inaccurately assert a risk in written counseling materials, according to theGuttmacher Institute, a New York-based reproductive health research organization.

3. Birth Control Is A Sex Pill.

Rush Limbaugh showed he has no understanding of how birth control pills work when he attacked Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown law student barred from testifying as a Democratic witness at a congressional hearing about the Obama administration’s contraception policy. Limbaugh called Fluke a “slut” for needing lots of birth control to manage her sex life.

“She wants to be paid to have sex,” Limbaugh said. “She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex.”

Rick Santorum has also said that contraception encourages a bad kind of sex. Last year, in an interview with the Evangelical blog Caffeinated Thoughts, Santorum warned of the “dangers of contraception:”

“It’s not OK because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be. They’re supposed to be within marriage, they are supposed to be for purposes that are, yes, conjugal, but also [inaudible], but also procreative. That’s the perfect way that a sexual union should happen. We take any part of that out, we diminish the act.”

Most women who have had sex have used contraception. Birth control pills — which are taken daily, regardless of how frequently a woman has sex — may also be taken to manage endometriosis, ovarian cysts, acne or other health problems. A recent bill in Arizona proposed penalizing women who use the pill for non-medical reasons.

4. Abortion Industry Is “Selling Abortions.”

A Republican state legislator in Arizona last week wrote in an email to a constituentthat she wanted to force women seeking abortions to watch the procedure first.

“Personally I’d like to make a law that mandates a woman watch an abortion being performed prior to having a ‘surgical procedure,'” state Rep. Terri Proud (R) wrote. The constituent responded by email that she was “speechless” and after a baffling exchange with Proud, released the emails to the media. Facing national outrage, Proud issued a statement:

For too long, Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry have placed selling abortions above the health and safety of women. My message to a constituent last week emphasized my concerns with how abortion providers have not been honest with women about the realities of abortion, and the short and long-term risks of this dangerous surgical procedure.

The notion that Planned Parenthood baits women into unwanted pregnancies by providing ineffective contraception then profits off the abortions is nothing new, but it’s as outrageous as it sounds. Abortions constitute 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s services, and the organization estimates it prevents more than 220,000 abortions each year by providing contraception. Because Planned Parenthood is not allowed to use federal funds for abortions, defunding the program may limit contraception services and result in more abortions.

5. Women Can’t Get Pregnant From Rape.

Just before Idaho’s Senate passed a mandatory ultrasound bill last week, bill sponsormade some startling comments about abortion and rape.

“Rape and incest was used as a reason to oppose this,” said state Sen. Chuck Winder (R). “I would hope that when a woman goes in to a physician with a rape issue, that physician will indeed ask her about perhaps her marriage, was this pregnancy caused by normal relations in a marriage or was it truly caused by a rape. I assume that’s part of the counseling that goes on.”

It wasn’t the first time a lawmaker has suggested that women seeking abortions may lie about rape. Some anti-abortion activists actually believe that rape cannot result in pregnancy. Buzzfeed dug up a series of bizarre statements Republicans have made about pregnancy, rape, juices not flowing and more. Here’s one:

The odds that a woman who is raped will get pregnant are “one in millions and millions and millions,” said state Rep. Stephen Freind, R-Delaware County, the Legislature’s leading abortion foe.
The reason, Freind said, is that the traumatic experience of rape causes a woman to “secrete a certain secretion” that tends to kill sperm.

Two Philadelphia doctors specializing in human reproduction characterized Freind’s contention as scientifically baseless.

 

According to Planned Parenthood, about 5 percent of rapes result in pregnancy, and providing all rape victims with emergency contraception could prevent more than 22,000 unwanted pregnancies a year.

6. Prenatal Testing Leads To Abortion.

Rick Santorum made prenatal testing a campaign issue last month when he declaredthe tests are designed to “cull the ranks of the disabled in our society” by encouraging abortions.

“Amniocentesis does, in fact, result more often than not in this country in abortions,”Santorum, who has a severely disabled daughter, said on Face the Nation. “That is a fact.”

In fact, more than 90 percent of amniocenteses tests result in normal diagnoses, and half of fetuses diagnosed with severe abnormalities — about 5 percent of those tested — are aborted, according to PolitiFact.

A campaign spokeswoman for Obama condemned Santorum’s comments as “misinformed and dangerous” and pointed out that the tests help women have safer deliveries and healthier babies.

7. HPV Vaccine Causes Retardation.

Back when Rick Perry was campaigning for president, his rivals attacked him for signing an executive order mandating the human papillomavirus vaccine for young girls, and misinformation quickly spread. Michele Bachmann insinuated that the vaccine causes mental retardation, while Santorum spoke out against “having little girls inoculated at the force and compulsion of the government.”

The vaccine is safe and effective in preventing cervical cancer caused by certain strains of HPV, and Perry’s 2007 executive order, which was overturned by the state legislature, would have allowed parents to opt out of having their daughters vaccinated. Dr. Renata Arrington-Sanders, a professor at Johns Hopkins University medical school, told HuffPost’s Laura Bassett:

“The HPV vaccine has been shown to be safe and well-tolerated based on multiple medical reports that have been submitted through government databases. It’s unfortunate that this particular vaccine is surrounded by a lot of controversy just because it’s been labeled as an STD-prevention vaccine. We have similar vaccines, such as one for hepatitis B, that are also used in a mandated approach and have shown very successful rates with prevention.”

8. Plan B Causes Abortions.

The debate over the Obama administration’s contraception policy has yielded some puzzling claims about birth control and Plan B. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) addressed the House in February, urging his colleagues to reverse Obama’s mandate for health insurance coverage of “abortion-inducing drugs:”

In recent days, Americans of every faith and political persuasion have mobilized in objection to a rule put forward by the Obama administration that constitutes an unambiguous attack on religious freedom in our country. This rule would require faith-based employers –- including Catholic charities, schools, universities, and hospitals -– to provide services they believe are immoral. Those services include sterilization, abortion-inducing drugs and devices, and contraception.

Michele Bachmann called Plan B an abortion pill when she incorrectly criticized Obama for making the drug available over-the-counter — an FDA recommendation the administration and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebeliusrejected last year. “The president can put abortion pills for girls 8 years of age, 11 years of age, on the bubblegum aisle,” Bachmann said at a “pro-life” town hall in December.

Contraceptives, emergency or not, prevent pregnancy. They don’t cause abortions. Plan B works in the same way and with the same ingredients as birth control pills, just at a higher dosage, and does nothing to stop the development of a fetus.

9. Your Fetus Is Just Fine.

The Arizona Senate passed a bill this month to protect doctors from “wrongful birth” lawsuits — effectively allowing them to withhold information that may lead a patient to get an abortion. HuffPost’s John Celock reports:

Sen. Nancy Barto (R-Phoenix) told the Claims Journal that she sponsored the law because she did not want claimants to blame a doctor for a baby born with disabilities. Under the provisions of her bill, a doctor could not be sued for medical malpractice if the doctor withholds information from a mother about a child’s potential health issues that could influence her decision to have an abortion. In addition, a lawsuit could not be filed on the child’s behalf regarding a disability.

Kansas lawmakers have considered similar legislation.