"At what point must a female senator raise her hand or voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room?" demanded an exasperated Sen. Leticia van de Putte, who had come from her father's funeral and was trying to prevent the filibuster from being dismantled on procedural grounds. Her words were what did it. Minutes to the deadline for the end of the special session, Senate Republicans seemed to be calling a vote, and shouting was all that was left.

For years, observers have said the enthusiasm and mobilization is on the antiabortion side, but not that night. It was still a game of defense, but pro-choice politicians and activists were pushing back harder than ever seen before.

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After some confusion, the counselor replies inaccurately, “It sounds like the morning after pill. If you have intercourse and then take this pill and it causes a period to come on or something, or bleeding. It’s like having kind of an abortion.” She adds, “That could harm you. It really could harm you ... You could hemorrhage from anything like that.”

“Kate” is Katie Stack, a 24-year-old pro-choice activist and patients’ advocate at an Ohio abortion clinic, though she gave the counselor a different last name. Stack is also a founder of the Crisis Project, which films undercover video at crisis pregnancy centers like Cleveland’s Womankind and records the often medically suspect advice given there. And Womankind is one of thousands of clinics across the country that seek to dissuade women from having abortions. Unlike many of those centers, which gauzily gloss over whether they're actually clinics, it actually offers prenatal care from medical professionals, but that doesn't mean it dispenses accurate information.

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The decisions in Vance v. Ball State University (authored by Justice Samuel Alito) and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar (authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy) each watered down the ability for employees to sue under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of "race, color, religion, sex or national origin." The first case, in which a kitchen employee of Ball State University said her co-workers had harassed her because she is black, narrowed the definition of a "supervisor" in determining whether an employer is responsible for harassment. (The central question was whether the harasser counted as a supervisor if he or she could assign responsibilities but not hire or fire someone.) The second, in which a doctor said he had been discriminated against for being of Middle Eastern descent and subsequently retaliated against, set a near-impossible standard for what constitutes retaliation after an employee complains he or she has been discriminated against.

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Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International, Inc., the so-called anti-prostitution pledge case, is a victory for groups who said that the restrictions prevented them from effectively reducing the spread of HIV by policing how they interacted with sex workers overseas. The decision was hailed by human rights groups from the ACLU to the Center for Health and Gender Equity. But the two conservative justices seem to have a long game in mind that could conflict with major progressive goals.

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Until recently, you could have reasonably thought House Republicans had declared a temporary cease-fire on the barrage of bills limiting access to birth control and abortion. Even before the trouncing of Todd Akin -- native son of this very uterus-concerned House -- and Richard Mourdock, John Boehner had set up a 20-week abortion ban for the District of Columbia to fail, with a two-thirds vote threshold.

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“At 23, she was clean. She followed the rules society had for her; she said, ‘I’m going to change my life,’” said Deon Haywood, the executive director of Women With a Vision, a grass-roots community nonprofit in New Orleans.

But being branded as a sex offender, the legacy of an archaic law that branded the sale of oral or anal sex as a “crime against nature,” was only going to stand in her way. Thanks to a groundbreaking legal settlement this week, spearheaded by Haywood’s organization and a team of civil rights attorneys, that’s about to change, with 700 people convicted under the law about to be removed from the registry.

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Poitras is still in Hong Kong, where she is filming the story behind the story -- including her co-author on the Guardian story and former Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald -- for her forthcoming documentary on whistle-blowers and leaks. In a wide-ranging interview, she explained how she first made contact with Snowden, her reaction to the possible future investigation into his leaks, and why Snowden didn't go to the New York Times. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.

So how did this all begin?

I was originally contacted in January, anonymously.

By Edward Snowden?

Well, I didn't know who it was.

What was the format?

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Despite the customary competition between news sources -- heightened, in this case, by differing accounts of how the story was reported -- Poitras achieved the unusual distinction of sharing a byline both with Barton Gellman on the June 6 Washington Post story on PRISM and with Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill on the June 8 Guardian story naming Edward Snowden as a source. In the accompanying video interview of Snowden, Greenwald is credited as “interviewer” and Poitras as “filmmaker.” Greenwald wrote in a tweet this morning, “The reality is that Laura Poitras and I have been working with [Snowden] since February, long before anyone spoke to Bart Gellman.”

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Military sexual assault presents a terrible conundrum for an elected Republican. One has to agree that rape is bad, especially after what happened to Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. One has to concede that we should work toward the safety of our service members. And mostly, Republicans in Congress managed this incredible feat, even while generally rejecting the remedy that advocates for service member survivors recommend, taking serious crimes out of the chain of command. But there were eruptions: Saxby Chambliss became instantly notorious (again) for blurting out, “Gee whiz, the hormone level created by nature sets in place the possibility for these types of things to occur.”

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Neither had the inmates: “I have had inmates tell me that this is the only joint they have been in where they ‘let inmates jack off on women,’” another Coleman employee, Eva Ryals, wrote in a legal complaint against the facility.

That’s because, according to a rare class-action lawsuit filed by White and over 200 of her fellow correctional officers, management wasn’t particularly interested in putting a stop to it. When female correctional officers would file complaints about, for example, an inmate masturbating in front of them or making rape threats, the complaints would either get downgraded to a lesser charge or actually shredded. In at least one case, a captain told a woman she had filed too many complaints.

A Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman did not respond to Salon's request for comment, and has previously cited the pending litigation in declining comment.

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And now, with eight states handing down felony charges for prostitution -- where nonviolent, mostly female prostitution offenders are serving in state prison – a battle to lessen criminal penalties has been joined by an unlikely ally. Conservative lawmakers, looking at price tags, are also receptive to changing the way we see – and treat -- people working in prostitution.

The latest example of this shift to view people in prostitution as victims rather than criminals is last week’s passage of a bill removing the felony penalty in Illinois -- which has some of the harshest prostitution laws in the country. The legislation sailed through the Illinois Legislature, after a decade of work by End Demand Illinois, a coalition that wants to see prostitution eliminated. The highest penalty for selling sex in the state will now be a Class A misdemeanor.

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How ironic is this cocktail of pseudo-feminism and American exceptionalism? Deeply, given that Barto, an Arizona state senator, was explaining two years ago why the state needed a ban on race and sex-selective abortions (the race and sex being that of the fetus) -- a law the ACLU, the Maricopa County NAACP, and the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum challenged in court this week in an unprecedented fashion. In other words, a law explicitly targeting and trying to limit the choices of women of color was being sold as their redemption.

In the two years since the law was passed, no one has ever been charged under it. That’s because the point was always to try to seize back the feminist mantle for the antiabortion side, and to tar abortion with both racism and sexism. (They even named it after Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass.) While sex-selective abortions are a real phenomenon in Asian countries with heavy son preference, the U.S. in general and Arizona in particular don’t have a problem with them. The complaint notes, “ The state's own statistics show no difference in birth ratio of boys and girls to Asian women as compared to other women.”

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And one question for the men: Guys, are you even reading this?

If you've spent any time reading about the radical but incomplete changes in family life in the United States in recent years, you could be forgiven for thinking they’re a female problem. It's as if women are doing this all by ourselves, a special female problem to be fixed in our lady’s corner -- not for nothing has "work-life balance" been defined as a "women's issue." It’s true that women’s lives have changed the most dramatically. But framing it as only the concern of half the population -- incidentally, the half that collectively has far less political and economic power -- is a recipe for very little change.

Men and women face different circumstances -- including biological ones around pregnancy and childbearing -- but as long as families are made up of both men and women, these are everyone's issues, and men need to step up. The question is how to talk about them without turning it into an angry zero sum game or oppression Olympics.

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Ruemmler is the White House counsel. According to quotes in the first piece, pegged to the controversy over what she did and didn’t tell the president about the IRS inspector general report, she is a “lawyer’s lawyer,” “very deliberate” and “one of the most cool-headed people in the entire White House.” There is also room in the first piece for Ruemmler’s “legendary” shoe habit -- in 2006, she wore pink stilettos while prosecuting Enron! -- but two paragraphs were simply not enough. Hence the second story, dated five days later, devoted entirely to divulging that Ruemmler owns one pair of shoes characterized by “a jeweled paisley pattern; another is black and strappy.” Guys, there is a regular Carrie Bradshaw in the White House.

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Compton’s ex-husband, Joshua, who had once been charged with stalking her (he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge) had asked for enforcement of a "morality clause" in the couple’s original divorce decree, which bars overnight guests who aren’t related by blood or marriage while the children are there. Of course, as a lesbian couple in Texas, they can’t be married. Never mind the fact that their children “are all happy and well adjusted,” according to Price.

Faced with the choice between Compton's children and sharing a home, the couple has said they will reluctantly follow the order, though they believe it to be unconstitutional.

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The implication was that House Republicans had decided that the lesson of the bruising 2012 election was to back off on anything that Democrats could tar as a war on women. (In the meantime, their allies in the states could push through real changes in abortion and contraception access, with very few political barriers.) But that fragile detente may be over, both nationally and in this year’s key state races. The question is whether it's a battle Republicans even want to fight.

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Last week, that opposition went right to the top, when Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said, “It is my strong belief — and I think others on Capitol Hill and within our institution — the ultimate authority has to remain within the command structure.” He was saying that, of course, while unveiling an annual report showing the number of sexual assaults within the Army had actually gone up in the past year. But on Monday the Pentagon press secretary backed away somewhat, saying the secretary was “open to all options.”

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That, of course, was the phrase famously used by Washington Post reporter Sarah Kliff to respond to questions about why she hadn't covered the case. She was widely pilloried by the right for it, and she later said, "I was clearly wrong." But she wasn't.

There are, of course, national implications to the case because policy shapes so many aspects of our lives, including how we access healthcare and under what terms. And Gosnell's dangerous clinic was inexcusably allowed to continue operating despite numerous complaints to state authorities. But if you're horrified by what Gosnell did -- along with the major pro-choice organizations, according to their statements today -- you should be satisfied that the criminal justice system did its job. He broke the law, and he is being punished. (Quite possibly with the death penalty, which one self-identified pro-life scholar, at least, opposes for Gosnell out of a sense of consistency.) In the meantime, there is no reason to think the case has changed much about the world outside Gosnell's.

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