The group bemoaned the FDA's decision, falsely labeling Plan B an "abortion pill" (for more on how Plan B works please see here) and announced a theory that increased access to birth control will somehow "cover up rapes." This line of argument is not based in reality: forensic investigations do not require a pregnancy to confirm an assault and women's bodies are not incubators for evidence in rape cases.

After all of that, Greg Gutfeld chimed in that the FDA's decision is a "boon for creepy uncles."

Let's see if you can follow his logic:

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This time, despite claiming he wouldn't talk to me, he stayed on the phone for 20 minutes to discuss, alternately angrily and resignedly, the massive backlash among his liberal customer base to his decision to sue the Obama administration over contraceptive coverage.

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It was Michael Potter, the Eden Foods founder and CEO. He was calling to respond to my Salon report from last week, which revealed that his organic food company -- which markets itself to a crunchy, liberal crowd -- was quietly suing the Obama administration over its requirement that his company's employee health plan cover birth control. Mostly, he said in the most amiable, avowedly Midwestern way imaginable -- at one point he called himself "a pretty simple guy, a Midwestern homemade-soup guy" -- he was calling to apologize to me.

It wasn't that he was upset about my reporting or what his company was doing. He was just sorry my request for comment had gone unanswered due to an oversight. I accepted the apology, and asked why he said he didn't care about birth control, since he filed a suit about it and all.

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That is, Eden Foods -- an organic food company with no shortage of liberal customers -- has quietly pursued a decidedly right-wing agenda, suing the Obama administration for exemption from the mandate to cover contraception for its employees under the Affordable Care Act. In court filings, Eden Foods, represented by the conservative Thomas More Law Center, alleges that its rights have been violated under the First Amendment, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.

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Exactly two years ago my mother died. I went to the hometown to take care of things and then my girlfriend joined me for the funeral. She acted her part great, but there was something in the air.

After the ceremony we went home, and as I got undressed and lay on the bed I was thinking, "Now I can fall apart, and cry and mourn." In that exact moment, my girlfriend approached me and said that when she was preparing for travel to the funeral, she found an opened box of condoms. She was on the pill; I used them for hygienic purposes in our lovemaking that she didn't know about, and she expects me to explain it.

The next three hours is a blur. I finally managed to ease her concerns, but the moment for mourning was lost. And I can't get over it.

My relationship with my mother was a difficult one. Lately I had thought of her as the always demanding monster who took away the best years of my life. And in the moment the monster died, when I was to be free at last, another one took its place and presented her demands.

I didn't cheat on my girlfriend, but it was this moment I felt that that sacrifice on my part was wasted.

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So-called en banc hearings normally signal that a majority of the justices disagree with the original ruling, which in this case was the December 2012 court decision to reject Hobby Lobby's claim that constitutionally defined religious liberty empowers private employers to restrict their employee's access to birth control. On top of that, most of the appointees to the federal 10th Circuit are conservatives, which doesn't bode well for employee rights or access to birth control, Millhiser contends.

As Millhiser writes:

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Women with reliable access to contraception tend to delay and space out when they have babies. And according to a new Guttmacher Institute review of more than 66 studies conducted over three decades, a woman's ability to control her fertility affects much more than just if and when she'll start a family; contraception plays a big a role in the financial, professional and emotional lives of American women, too.

In fact, access to contraception was found to be related to all sorts of positive outcomes in family, mental health, children's well-being and general life satisfaction.

According to Adam Sonfield, lead author of the review:

The scientific evidence strongly confirms what has long been obvious to women. Contraceptive use, and the ensuing ability to decide whether and when to have children, is linked to a host of benefits for themselves, the quality of their relationships, and the well-being of their children.

But, he went on to say, access to birth control remains uneven and unequal in the United States, which means that women who are economically disadvantaged or otherwise marginalized don't share in these benefits. Recommendations from Sonfield and the literature call for policies that ground "unintended pregnancy prevention efforts... in broader antipoverty and social justice efforts."

Read the research for a more in-depth analysis, but here's the short version: Women controlling their own fertility is a really, really good thing for the world.

Major takeaways from the review, according to the Institute:

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But here is a life experience Portman already has: He is married to a woman. He has a daughter. So do lots of people who oppose safe and legal abortion and better access to contraception. Some of them are even women. When it comes to reproductive rights, it appears, social empathy goes only so far.

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February has been a banner month for truly silly and anti-intellectual bills in state capitals across the country. Well, mostly across the South and Midwest. Some of these bills are based on the idea that birth control is poison, and that students should not fail for arguing in biology class that dinosaurs and humans coexisted. Others would stop gun control efforts by making it a felony to try to enact gun control.

This is not the Onion: Here are some of the actual proposals.

1. Let corporations vote!

In Montana, state Rep. Steve Lavin introduced a bill that would allow corporations to vote in local elections, taking the idea that "corporations are people" to new heights.

Think Progress reports that the bill was tabled earlier this month. But under the proposal, "if a firm, partnership, company, or corporation owns real property within the municipality, the president, vice president, secretary, or other designee of the entity is eligible to vote."

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Even as wisdom often comes from the mouths of babes, so does it often come from the mouths of old people. The golden rule is to test everything in the light of reason and experience, no matter from whom it comes.

I want to discuss the subject of birth control by contraceptives. It is dinned into one’s ears that gratification of the sex urge is a solemn obligation, like the obligation of discharging debts lawfully incurred, and that not to do so would involve the penalty of intellectual decay. This sex urge has been isolated from the desire for progeny, and it is said by protagonists of the use of contraceptives that conception is an accident to be prevented except when the parties desire to have children.

I venture to suggest that this is a most dangerous doctrine to preach anywhere, much more so in a country like India, where the middle-class male population has become imbecile through abuse of the creative function.

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They are being born into a world of confusion and chaos. They are confronted on all sides by misery, poverty, insecurity, crime. Dictators whip up class hatred, race hatreds, national hatreds among their slaves, most of whom were born of men and women close to the starvation point and themselves were undernourished children. It has been well said that starving men are always angry men. Even more menacing to the established order is a generation of undernourished children. Such a background becomes the soil out of which dictators emerge. Is it any wonder therefore that the younger generations can no longer revere the wisdom of those who have permitted international chaos to become worldwide?

We advocate birth control by means of contraception, not to encourage reckless sex gratification but to place in the hands of young and responsible married couples a scientific instrument by means of which they may fulfill their duties to their children. To their children already born and to those who come.

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In an effort to standardize pharmacies' procedures for filling prescriptions for birth control, Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-NJ) and Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) have reintroduced the “Access to Birth Control (ABC) Act." It's the same bill the politicians tried to get through previous legislative sessions, but these two are clearly Charlie-Brown-and-the-football types, and are optimistically giving it another shot.

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This is bad news for Teen Mom producers, but probably good news for everyone else.

Women in their 20s were also less likely to have babies than in previous years, and the birthrate among women in their their late 30s and early 40s actually increased, according to the report.

Researchers say that women in their 20s delaying motherhood, and the parallel trend of more women having kids in their 30s and 40s could be the result of a long-struggling economy. "The economy has declined, and that certainly is a factor that goes into people's decisions about having a child," CDC statistician Brady Hamilton, lead author of the new report, told Reuters Health.

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The government's new regulation attempts to create a barrier between religious groups and contraception coverage, through insurers or a third party, that would still give women free access to contraception. It wasn't immediately clear whether religious leaders would accept the new approach, or whether it would stem the tide of lawsuits by Roman Catholic charities and other faith-affiliated nonprofits nationwide challenging the requirement to provide such coverage.

The Catholic Health Association, a trade group for hospitals, and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops separately had no immediate reaction, saying they were studying the regulations. Policy analyst Sarah Lipton-Lubet of the American Civil Liberties Union said the rule appeared to meet the ACLU's goal of providing "seamless coverage" of birth control for the affected women.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement the compromise would provide "women across the nation with coverage of recommended preventive care at no cost, while respecting religious concerns."

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As reported by Jessica Mason Pieklo at RH Reality Check:

House Bill 649, introduced by Rep. Jonathan Stickland (R-Bedford) would give for-profit businesses like Hobby Lobby a state tax break if they chose not to comply with the birth control benefit in Obamacare. Under the rule businesses that refuse to comply with the mandate face up to a $100 penalty fine per employee per day. Stickland's bill would allow those businesses to claim a state tax break for the amount it must pay in penalties, up to the total the business owes in its total state tax bill. In other words, Texans would subsidize for-profit businesses seeking to break the law.

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Health Ministry Director General Prof. Ron Gamzu acknowledged the practice -- without directly conceding coercion was involved -- in a letter to Israeli health maintenance organizations, instructing gynecologists in the HMOs "not to renew prescriptions for Depo-Provera for women of Ethiopian origin if for any reason there is concern that they might not understand the ramifications of the treatment.”

Depo-Provera is a hormonal form of birth control that is injected every three months.

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This year, only a few days into 2013, a Republican has spouted off about women lying about rape and our bodies shutting down pregnancy. States are at it again, and the House has kicked off the legislative session by trying to defund Planned Parenthood.

Happy new year, everyone: The  GOP soul-searching is over, and Republicans are back to square one on reproductive rights.

Today's congressman seeing to add his name to the illustrious rape-explaining pantheon is Georgia Republican Phil Gingrey, one of several antiabortion gynecologists serving in the House. “Part of the reason the Dems still control the Senate is because of comments made in Missouri by Todd Akin and Indiana by Mourdock were considered a little bit over the top,” Gingrey explained at a recent breakfast.

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Seizing on recommendations from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists that some hormonal birth control be available over the counter, the Louisiana governor and presumed presidential hopeful seeks to play them against the Affordable Care Act. He claims that Obama's big government is actually making it harder for women to access birth control, despite the fact that the ACOG recommendations would work best in tandem with the Affordable Care Act birth control provisions, not instead of them.

Making birth control more accessible in any way possible is generally a good idea. But in Jindal's haste to find "the end of birth control politics," he ignores some crucial benefits of the Affordable Care Act as well as the deep-seated opposition to many forms of birth control, not just insurance coverage of it, among his own allies.

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In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Jindal tried to put an anti-big-government spin on his position, while also moving away from the social conservative wing of the party and addressing a gender gap which hurt Mitt Romney and likely cost Republicans Senate seats in Indiana and Missouri.

Jindal wrote that Republicans have been "stupid to let the Democrats demagogue the contraceptives issue," while embracing the  American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists call for over-the-counter sales and seeking to push the issue out of the "political arena.

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