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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That’s the key finding of a newly published study that suggests sexual mores remain stubbornly stable. It concludes that, more than a half-century after the introduction of the birth control pill, the sexual double standard is alive and well and still influencing women’s everyday behavior.

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It was considerate of the American Academy of Pediatrics, then, to wait until after the Thanksgiving weekend to release a policy brief recommending that physicians pre-prescribe emergency contraception—known as Plan B or Next Choice—to teenage patients, in order to ensure their ability to obtain it when needed. Onerous federal laws discourage teens from using so-called “morning-after pills,” despite the enormous human and financial costs of an unplanned pregnancy, and according to the AAP, physicians might remedy the problem by writing high schoolers a script for Plan B long before the morning after.

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The court ordered the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals to reevaluate the case on the merits, after it had initially rejected Liberty's lawsuit on technical grounds.

From the Washington Post:

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The surprise opinion this week from these gatekeepers of contraception could boost longtime efforts by women’s advocates to make the pill more accessible.

But no one expects the pill to be sold without a prescription any time soon: A company would have to seek government permission first, and it’s not clear if any are considering it. Plus there are big questions about what such a move would mean for many women’s wallets if it were no longer covered by insurance.

Still, momentum may be building.

Already, anyone 17 or older doesn’t need to see a doctor before buying the morning-after pill — a higher-dose version of regular birth control that can prevent pregnancy if taken shortly after unprotected sex. Earlier this year, the Food and Drug Administration held a meeting to gather ideas about how to sell regular oral contraceptives without a prescription, too.

Now the influential American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists is declaring it’s safe to sell the pill that way.

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Since Noonan has a sizable platform and this apparently needs to be said roughly once a week, a quick review: Controlling one's fertility is an economic issue. So is the overall cost and provision of healthcare through private insurance -- paid for by "other people's" money, your money, your employer's, in a pool to lower risk, which is how it largely works in this country. Unintended pregnancy (and ovarian cysts, in the case of Fluke's testimony) still costs that pool far more than preventing that unintended pregnancy.  (As for "a nation in existential doubt as to its standing and purpose," such doubt must hit home for the ever-rambling Noonan.)

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Writing in Bloomberg View, Margaret Carlson demands to know why the Democrats have "removed the sentence 'Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare' from its platform? It was in the 2004 document but not in 2008’s or this year’s. Can’t Democrats just throw a crumb to the many millions who are pro-choice but not pro-abortion?" She doesn't define what "pro-abortion" is, but presumably it means that you think women should be able to terminate pregnancies without first submitting to a regime that wants to determine whether they deserve it enough and then makes them jump through hoops intended to make abortion really, really uncomfortable.

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The theory was that by inserting the wire through the cervix, moving it around a bit and then removing it, an infection would result and the pregnancy would be aborted. It worked. It was March 1967.

Afterward, after I watched the 'doctor' wash his hands with one of those little soaps wrapped in white paper, after he tilted the bedside lamp just so and after he said, "That should do it," I got dressed, left the motel with the flashing vacancy sign, made my way to the bus station in downtown Detroit, and rode in the dark in the eerie silence of a mostly empty Greyhound all the way back to Mt. Pleasant, the tiny Michigan town where I was a freshman in college. Curled up next to the window under my black pea coat, I wondered how long it would take, whether it would be on the bus or later. I worried that something a lot worse than being pregnant would happen to me because of what happened in the motel room, that I'd get sick or bleed to death. I wondered if I would ever feel right about what I had done and if there had been choices that I hadn't considered. I remember feeling like a mouse that had found the tiniest hole for escape while a giant tomcat loomed. I was distraught, empty and alone on that bus. Back in my dorm room, Jane, my roommate, held both of my hands in hers and said, "It will be OK. You'll see. You'll have lots of children when the time is right." It was a gesture of kindness and compassion that even now brings tears to my eyes.

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The controversy mostly went away. McDonnell wasn't named Mitt Romney's vice president, as had been rumored, but he was named the Republican Party's platform chairman and introduced Paul Ryan when Romney named him to the ticket. Meanwhile, women in Virginia are still being subject to a medically unnecessary procedure intended to shame them out of their decisions.

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It’s been in the making for months, but this week clinched it: Both sides of the presidential election are running hard on “women’s rights” versus “religious liberty,” and that’s not going away. Romney was once reluctant to get drawn into this particular fold, before the continued presence of Rick Santorum in the primary essentially forced his hand. But now, in an apparent sign that he hasn’t closed the deal with his own base, he’s back on the cause of allowing employers – even private, non-religiously affiliated ones – to deny their employees coverage for contraception and what is falsely termed “abortion-inducing drugs.”

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Colorado, a state containing multitudes -- both Boulder and Focus on the Family -- is also the headquarters of the Personhood movement. Its doggedness is matched only by its uninterrupted failure. This year alone, the movement has tried and failed to get on the ballot in eight other states. Last year, Personhood got on Mississippi's ballot and was trounced. And there's strong indication that the movement is actually hurting its own cause, most recently when Colorado elected Democrat Michael Bennet in the 2010 Senate race after his opponent, Ken Buck, briefly endorsed Personhood.

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“I plan to become the guinea pig and test this products effect on myself and my sperm,” he wrote recently. “I will take 1 pill daily and record how I feel everyday. After 30 days, I will see my doctor and have my sperm tested to see if it was effected by the supplement.” Earlier this week, Smalls’ plan ran into a hitch when the first doctor he saw refused to cooperate. (Smalls did not respond to interview requests, though he did agree to friend this reporter on Facebook.)

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“This lawsuit is about one of America’s most cherished freedoms: the freedom to practice one’s religion without government interference,” opens the Notre Dame suit, which was filed Monday. “It is not about whether people have a right to abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization and contraception.”

Because the words “abortifacient” or “abortion inducing” sound so scary, the Notre Dame lawsuit makes sure to claim over and over again that, despite a political compromise and executive order specifically exempting abortion coverage from Affordable Care Act provisions, they are being forced to pay for abortion. It claims that “many contraceptives approved by the FDA that qualify under these guidelines cause abortions,” which is false on multiple levels: Even if you believe, as Catholic doctrine does but medical professionals do not, that fertilization, not implantation, constitutes pregnancy, the latest scientific research shows that there’s no evidence that emergency contraception prevents implantation.

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“Our concern is for the privacy of these women and for their health and safety, for which Central Family Planning has shown very little regard,” said Operation Rescue’s Troy Newman – while posting photographs of the documents, partially redacted in black marker, online.

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It was, of course, a lie. Romney was conflating two different pills: emergency contraception, known as the morning-after pill, which prevents a pregnancy; and chemical abortion, or mifepristone, which ends a pregnancy of up to seven weeks' gestation and isn’t covered under the new guidelines. Since both pills were marketed in the U.S. around the same time, even some pro-choicers have gotten confused. But Colorado happens to be the epicenter of people confusing them on purpose. It’s the birthplace of the Personhood movement and home to Focus on the Family, both of which have strategically called emergency contraception "abortion" on the scientifically unproven basis that they could block a fertilized egg from implanting.

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In case you didn't catch on, the sex strike is tongue-in-cheek. Annette Maxberry-Carrara, founder of Liberal Ladies Who Lunch -- the group that proposed the "Access Denied" protest -- tells me with a laugh, “We're not looking at it as a literal strike." But they are making a serious political statement. The event's tagline reads, "If our reproductive choices are denied, so are yours."

You would have to be profoundly tone deaf to not recognize the satire in recent bills proposed by female lawmakers that proclaim "every sperm is sacred" and restrict access to the blue pill. Last month, Oklahoma state Sen. Constance Johnson offered a bill in response to Senate Bill 1433 -- which seriously and nonsatirically holds that a fetus at “every stage of development” has “all the rights, privileges and immunities available to other persons, citizens and residents of this state.” Her proposal states, “[A]ny action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child.”

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