Formed originally to repeal abortion bans before Roe, NARAL is now most closely associated with lobbying on the federal and state level, and for its close ties to the Democratic Party. Keenan's departure after eight years follows an election cycle when Democrats didn't apologize for being pro-choice -- and won.

This last election year also featured unprecedented public mobilization, across generations, on issues around abortion, birth control and rape. Two men, Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, most closely associated with a total abortion ban lost Senate bids they'd seemed poised to win. Akin, too, came from a House of Representatives where antiabortion and anti-family planning legislating had seemed like a full-time job, but whose actual legislative victories have been few.

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Anti-abortion activists and legislators can’t enact an outright ban on abortion-inducing drugs like mifepristone (formerly known as RU-486). Instead, they have sought to force doctors to strictly adhere to U.S. Food and Drug Administration guidelines that appear to be significantly out of step with the current scientific understanding of how the medications should be used.

Lawmakers have passed abortion drug restrictions in Arizona and Ohio, overcoming legal challenges. The Oklahoma Supreme Court recently ruled that similar legislation in that state was unconstitutional. A North Dakota bill is currently tied up in litigation.

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It began after Planned Parenthood posted a video called "How to look your best the morning after" on one of its Facebook pages. The video, produced by a London-based domestic abuse hotline, features a woman giving tips on how to cover up bruises and other signs of domestic abuse. At the end, it says:

65% of women who suffer domestic violence keep it hidden.

Don't cover it up.

Share this and help someone speak out.

But following an article called "Is Planned Parenthood Showing Teens How to Hide a Beating With Makeup?" that appeared on the anti-abortion site LifeNews.com, right-wing activists accused Planned Parenthood of advising women to hide abuse.

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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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The pamphlet does not contain a position statement. Quite the opposite, in fact. From the beginning, the authors explain that such an agreement is impossible: "Clearly there is no Christian position on abortion, for here real values conflict with each other, and Christian persons who seek honestly to be open to God’s call still find themselves disagreeing profoundly."

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Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old dentist living in Galway, was 17 weeks pregnant when she appeared at her University Hospital on Oct. 21, complaining of pain. Doctors there determined that she was miscarrying, but would not remove the fetus because it still had a heartbeat. Her husband, Praveen Halappanavar, told reporters this week that the hospital staff informed the couple that "This is a Catholic country." Mr. Praveen who came to Ireland from India, told the staff, "I am neither Irish nor Catholic," but they said they couldn't do anything. 

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After years of public-relations and legislative wins, the anti-choice movement is sounding unusually defensive lately. All indications are that they've driven a lot of women into the Obama camp, further widening the much-discussed gender gap, and adopting the movement's aims has possibly cost Republicans the Senate.

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Todd Akin claims that women can't really get pregnant from a legitimate rape because the body secretes hormones. Now I can't even finish this sentence without getting dumber; it's making me dumber when I say it—but it's something about the body not being able to get pregnant when it's under physical stress. Mr. Akin, I think you are confusing the phrase 'legitimate rape' with the phrase 'competitive gymnastics.'"

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Here's what's important to know about the right's plan for Roe: It will be slow, and it will be indirect -- to avoid a backlash -- but the inexorable goal is to overturn it and ban abortion wherever possible. With an eye toward the court's oldest member, women's rights pioneer Ruth Bader Ginsburg, antiabortion activists would be counting on a President Romney to appoint one or more justices who would upset the fragile 5-4 balance that currently maintains the federal right to an abortion. In the meantime, they've been working hard to lay the groundwork to get a case before the Court that would allow justices to revisit, and possibly overturn, Roe.

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At the ultrasound eight weeks later, we laughed when we found out the baby was a girl. Her older sister was vibrating in anticipation of learning her sibling’s gender and entirely unprepared to accept the possibility of a little brother. The ultrasound technician found nothing troubling when she scanned the baby’s anatomy. Turning her attention to my ovaries, though, she saw a black circle that she couldn’t interpret. When they told me I could get dressed before the doctor came to talk to us, my spouse and I exchanged an anxious look: They never let you put your pants back on. The cyst on my ovary had grown significantly, it seemed, and now they thought they saw another growth on the other ovary, developments that could put my health and the baby’s at risk.

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The doctor, an avuncular, silver-haired man who's been providing abortions, in the words of one colleague, “pretty much since Roe v. Wade,” turns the screen toward her and traces the outline of her uterus and the embryo, while the girl looks on blankly. He plays the heartbeat, which rises from the machine in a loud, shrill electronic pulse. The ritual, which is repeated several times a day at this Planned Parenthood in Houston and in clinics across the state, is mandated by a new Texas law designed to intensify the experience of abortion — to impress upon a woman, with images and sounds, the sense that she's about to terminate a living thing.

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And Romney? He had "binders full of women" that became an instant meme for Obama's re-energized voting base, and he blamed single parents -- women, really -- for gun violence.

The inevitable question about women came, somewhat surprisingly, in the form of a query about the wage gap. Obama was asked by an "undecided voter," "What new ways do you intend to rectify the inequalities in the workplace, specifically regarding females making only 72 percent of what their male counterparts earn?" (Voters who care about inequality are historically torn!) That gave him the chance to talk, more energetically than he did in the last debate, about his grandmother and the discrimination she suffered, and of signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

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This is not how it was supposed to work for the Colorado-based movement behind the Personhood push, which has been defeated twice in its home state and a third time in Mississippi. At the time that a petition drive succeeded in Mississippi for the 2011 ballot, there was reason to believe that the most conservative state in the union would start making Personhood look like a viable strategy for banning abortion, state by state, and somehow forcing the Supreme Court to consider a new abortion-rights paradigm. That didn't happen. After a campaign that brought grass-roots and national mobilization, focusing on "unintended consequences" involving birth control and infertility, 58 percent of Mississippi voters rejected the measure. This year, the Personhood movement hasn't even been able to get on the ballot in its own state, because so many of its signatures were disqualified. (Antiabortion forces are fighting that call in court, but Colorado's ballots have already been printed.)

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Look, it’s time to stop being polite and start asking, “What the f*ck do you think you are trying to pull here?”

It is time to ask, “Why the f*ck are men and women who are inexcusably incompetent continually being elected into statehouses, governorships and THE UNITED STATES CONGRESS? And how the f*ck is it that this asshole serves on THE SCIENCE COMMITTEE of The House of Representatives?!

ENOUGH.

This morning, she launched Lady Parts Justice (presumably a reference to the controversial e-card that went viral from the Obama campaign's Tumblr), an advocacy site and PSA that encourages fans of women to vote:

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Mila Means hadn't even begun to actually provide abortions in Wichita, Kan., when Angel Dillard sent her that letter last year, claiming in court that its writing was both "divinely inspired" and protected by the First Amendment. But according to a new study in Contraception co-authored by an abortion provider in California, Kansas' draconian state laws around reproductive rights may have encouraged Dillard.

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"We'll get into playing their game," said Burkhart from Wichita, which has been ground zero for the abortion battle since the 1991 Summer of Mercy, when the antiabortion group Operation Rescue set up camp there. "Women cannot be intimidated or bullied to the point where we're going to go off and be these good little girls and sit in the corner and wait until our name is called. Women have a right to this healthcare, and so I think that we do have to stand up to people who are small-minded and want to oppress us."

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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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