Betty Dodson with Carlin Ross

Better Orgasms. Better World.

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Bill Clinton was on the Daily Show last night.  Love the magenta tie with the white hair.  AND I REALLY LOVE that his main focus is on improving the lives of women and girls because, and I quote, "the number 1 thing you can do to slow population growth and increase income is to get all the girls of the world in school and access to the labor market."

I watched Dateline's piece on Mukhtar Mai last night and I was overwhelmed.  One woman can make a difference. 

Here's the story: she was interceding on her brother's behalf with their village council and they decided that she should pay for his crime so they gang-raped her.  Now it's customary in Pakistan to encourage rape victims to kill themselves to shield their families from such dishonor.

Not only didn't she kill herself but she fought to have the men who raped her prosecuted criminally (they were sentenced to death), sued them civilly for $8,000, and then used the monies to start a school for girls in view of the area where she was raped.  Glamour magazine heard her story and donated $20,000 to her school and the donations are pouring in.  It was so inspiring to see how one woman's tragedy could be turned around and heal so many other women.

Women are the future. Always were and always will be. Michelle Goldberg has put out a new book, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World about the global battle over reproductive rights, which pits feminists and family planning advocates against an international alliance of Christian, Mormon and Muslim religious fundamentalists.

To write it, she spent two years traveling the world, reporting on issues like population control, abortion, female circumcision, Asia's missing girls and Europe's birth dearth to show how the battle over women's bodies has been globalized.

Betty and I predicted this during our podcast. We're going back to coat hangers and kitchen tables like Betty endured. And this is a two punch proposal: give doctors the right to refuse to give "abortions" and then define contraception as abortion.

The Bush administration on Thursday proposed stronger job protections for doctors and other health care workers who refuse to participate in abortions because of religious or moral objections. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt said that health care professionals should not face retaliation from employers or from medical societies because they object to abortion.

I was waiting for this...for Hillary Clinton to take off the gloves and go for one more round. What better way to go back to public life than with a public denouncement of the Bush Administration's lame attempt to define contraception as abortion:

"The Bush
Administration is up to its old tricks again, quietly putting ideology before
science and women's health. The U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services is poised to put in place new barriers to accessing common forms of
contraception like birth control pills, emergency contraception and IUDs by
labeling them "abortion."

The New York Times reports that the Bush Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services is drafting a rule that would place new restrictions on domestic family planning programs.

While current law allows health care providers and professionals to refuse to provide abortions based on their religious beliefs, this provision would threaten the funding of organizations and health facilities if they do not hire people who would refuse to provide birth control and defines abortion so broadly that it would include many types of birth control, including oral contraception.