The Obama administration's decision to appeal comes despite a recommendation from the Food and Drug Administration to lift age restrictions and other scientific research saying the drug is safe and effective for all ages.

As the New York Times reports:

The appeal reaffirms an election-year decision by Mr. Obama’s administration to block the drug’s maker from selling it without a prescription or consideration of age, and puts the White House back into the politically charged issue of access to emergency contraception...

By appealing the judge’s ruling, Mr. Obama’s Justice Department is essentially renewing the objections that [secretary of health and human services Kathleen Sebelius] — backed by the president — had more than a year ago. In recent weeks, conservative groups had urged the Justice Department to appeal the judge’s ruling so that the contraception would not be available to very young girls.

On Wednesday, a Justice Department official said the appeal would concentrate on the two areas where the department believes the judge overstepped his legal authority. The official also said the White House had not been involved in the decision of whether to appeal Judge Korman’s ruling.

Reproductive rights advocates have criticized the administration's position on emergency contraception as overtly political and having little to do with science or women's health.

“Age barriers to emergency contraception are not supported by science, and they should be eliminated,” Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement on Wednesday.

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Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe had vetoed the extreme measure in March, citing concerns that it violated Roe v. Wade and that subsequent legal challenges would prove "very costly to the taxpayers of our state" as the "costs and fees [of defending an unconstitutional law] can be significant." The Legislature overrode Beebe's veto in March.

The suit seeks a preliminary injunction against the law, which is set to take effect in July.

“This law is one of the most dangerous assaults on women’s health that we’ve seen in decades,” said Rita Sklar, executive director of the ACLU of Arkansas. “We may not all agree about abortion, but we can all agree that this complex and personal decision should be made by a woman, her family, and her doctor, not politicians.”

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What is gateway sexual activity? Lawmakers borrowed from Ohio criminal code to define it as “any touching of an erogenous zone of another, including without limitation the thigh, genitals, buttock, pubic region, or, if the person is a female, a breast, for the purpose of sexually arousing or gratifying either person.” So, basically, anything upwards of and including second base. If a student receives such an education, a parent can sue for damages and the school could be liable for up to $5,000 in fines.

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The church, a multicolored brick building with stained glass windows that look like rolling waves, is flanked on one side by a domed Greek Orthodox church, and on the other by a field stretching out to a subdivision. Just inside its doors in 2009, 67-year-old Dr. George Tiller, one of the few late-term abortion providers in the United States and an usher at his longtime church, was shot and killed by a man named Scott Roeder.

To abortion rights advocates, the murder was the tragic culmination of a decades-long campaign by abortion opponents who had stalked Dr. Tiller; barraged him with nuisance lawsuits; blockaded and bombed his clinic; shot him in both arms in a previous, failed assassination attempt; and helped inspire Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly to begin a nightly television harangue against the doctor he condemned as “Tiller the Killer.”

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Jon Stewart has a field day:

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A state Legislature actually wants to strengthen women's access to abortion -- and it's not even April Fools' Day!

The Reproductive Parity Act passed the Democrat-controlled statehouse in February, with a religious conscience exemption for employers and insurance carriers that oppose abortion. Supporters are optimistic that they will have the votes to pass the measure if it reaches the floor, but Democrats have a very narrow majority in the state Senate and a yes vote could prove tricky.

Democrats have 26 seats to the Republicans' 23, but as the New York Times notes:

The Republican minority was joined in December by two Democrats, creating a bipartisan ruling group. The coalition’s majority leader, Senator Rodney Tom, a Democrat, supports abortion rights, but many of the members of the coalition he leads go the other way. That means that if the bill reaches the floor, passage would require a flip side of the leadership coalition — Democrats leading the yes votes, presumably with Senator Tom back among his old caucus.

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In March, the Arkansas Legislature overrode a veto by Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe to pass a law criminalizing abortion after 12 weeks. Later that month in North Dakota, with the support of Republican Gov. Jack Dalrymple, lawmakers passed a "fetal heartbeat" law that banned the procedure at five to six weeks. Abortion rights and reproductive health advocates contend both laws violate a woman's constitutionally protected right to an abortion as set out by Roe v. Wade, which defines fetal viability between 22 and 24 weeks.

"I think they're going to be blocked immediately by the courts — they are so far outside the clear bounds of what the Supreme Court has said for 40 years," Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, told USA Today.

Lawyers from the center and the American Civil Liberties Union will lead the court challenges, and expect victories that would require both states to pay their attorneys' fees.

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Unfortunately, she may be right.

According to a report from MSNBC, a non-profit conservative litigation group has offered to defend the state ban completely free of charge. Liberty Counsel chairman Mat Stavers extended his organization's pro-bono support through a public statement this week:

Cost should not be a part of Gov. Jack Dalrymple’s decision to sign or veto bills... Liberty Counsel will defend these laws pro bono. No rights are more fundamental than the right to life. Without life, all other rights are irrelevant.

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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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If you'd been holding your breath hoping for a fresh new bro pope, a younger dude with a marginally less offensive attitude toward some of the most deeply controversial and divisive issues among Catholics today, your ship did not come in on Wednesday. The 76-year-old Argentine Bergoglio, the first pope to hail from the Americas, has reportedly called same-sex marriage "a machination of the Father of Lies that seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God." So that'd be a no. He's not down with abortion under any circumstances, which he says contributes to a "culture of death," and has publicly clashed with Argentina's President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner over the country's plan to distribute free birth control. But according to a report in the Guardian, he is, however, open to contraception as a form of preventing disease. And though he's firmly denied it, he's been accused of complicity in a 1976 kidnapping of two priests during the country's military regime.

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The presence of progressive religious leaders at the Capitol stands in stark contrast to a years-long attack on women's reproductive rights in the state. During the 2011 legislative session, Texas lawmakers cut $73 million from family planning programs, followed by a 2012 decision by Gov. Rick Perry to dissolve the state’s partnership with the federal Women’s Health Program, forfeiting millions in Medicaid funding for low-income women’s healthcare.

As Andrea Grimes reports for RH Reality Check:

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When Jennie Linn McCormack couldn't afford an abortion, she asked her sister to order her abortion-inducing drugs over the Internet, but after inducing miscarriage, learned she was further along than she'd thought -- between 19 and 23 weeks, according to an autopsy. She panicked and hid the fetus, which ended up on her back porch on the shelf of the barbecue, and eventually drew the police's attention. McCormack was even more unlucky to live in Idaho, which like 10 other states, had passed a ban on abortion after 20 weeks.

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Under the Arkansas Human Heartbeat Protection Act, doctors will lose their medical license if they perform an abortion on a woman who is more than 12 weeks pregnant. While the ban has nominal exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother, it remains the most extreme abortion law currently on the books.

Beebe vetoed the bill on Monday, arguing that it is "blatantly unconstitutional" and violates the fetal viability precedent set out by Roe v. Wade.

"In short, because it would impose a ban on a woman's right to choose an elective, nontherapeutic abortion well before viability, Senate Bill 134 blatantly contradicts the United States Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court," Beebe said in his statement. The governor added that such a ban would prove "very costly to the taxpayers of our state," given that "lawsuits challenging unconstitutional laws also result in the losing party -- in this case, the state -- being ordered to pay the costs and attorneys' fees incurred by the litigants who successfully challenge the law. Those costs and fees can be significant."

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The ads have already been harshly criticized for using these statistics to shame teen mothers rather than educating sexually active young people about where they can access condoms and other contraceptive care. But the subway and bus shelter ads aren't actually the worst part.

As reported by Miriam Pérez for RH Reality Check, at the bottom of each ad is the message: “Text ‘NOTNOW’ to 877877 for the real cost of teen pregnancy.” Text the number and you're directed to a choose your own adventure "game," which includes "scenarios about Anaya being ignored by her 'baby daddy' and shunned by her parents," but no information about how not to get pregnant. Instead, the texts use threats of social isolation, the prospect of losing your boyfriend and petty fat-shaming to drive home the message that teenagers who get pregnant are deserving of hardship and ridicule.

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Sadly, you can't make this stuff up. A roundup of these and other proposals that are actually being considered by real, live elected officials this week.

Staying together for the kids

A three-member subcommittee in the Iowa House of Representatives is currently mulling a bill that would outlaw no-fault divorce for the parents of minor children. Rep. Tedd Gassman, a Republican member of the subcommittee, said he’s "concerned about the negative impact divorce has on children," according to Radio Iowa.

The issue isn't just political for Gassman -- it's personal: His daughter and son-in-law recently divorced, putting his "granddaughter at risk," he says.

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But in Texas, Planned Parenthood's women's health clinics were a separate legal and administrative entity from their abortion-care providers, so tax dollars never funded abortions in the first place. Instead, the cuts made it nearly impossible for low-income and working-class women in the state to see a physician for contraception, breast exams, pap smears and other basic care.

And now, Texas lawmakers are learning a little lesson: Take away women's access to contraception and abortion, and they will have more babies. (Them's the breaks when it comes to forced pregnancy, Gov. Perry.)

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The bill makes no medical sense, whatsoever, and is a clear attempt to discourage women from taking RU 486, by adding two unnecessary trips to an abortion clinic and two unnecessary uncomfortable procedures to it. Dr. Anne Davis, the consulting medical director for Physicians for Reproductive Health, explained,

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So what's he doing going on about a constitutional right to privacy -- the very backbone of Roe v. Wade?

As Kalli Joy Gray reported, Grassley was recently asked by a constituent about the government's "plan" to implant microchips in preschoolers starting in 2013. A rather bored looking Grassley replied:

No. First of all, nothing can be done to your body without your permission. It’d be a violation of the constitutional right to privacy if that were to happen.

First, let's address the semantic point that, in a country without legal abortion, forced pregnancy would definitely be something "done to your body without your permission," thankyouverymuch.

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