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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In Michigan, Rick Snyder signed a bill passed by the lame-duck Senate -- the same one whose anti-union legislating dominated headlines in recent weeks -- requiring clinics that perform more than 120 abortions a year to become surgical outpatient facilities, a level of licensing intended to be onerous and put clinics out of business. He also approved a bill that purports to screen for women being coerced into abortions.

Snyder did veto another bill limiting insurance coverage in private employee plans, which would have required purchase of a separate abortion rider. He objected to that on the grounds that rape victims would have to pay out of pocket if they didn't buy the rider, and because, "As a practical matter, I believe this type of policy is an overreach of government into the private market." Overreach of government into other realms, of course, is another matter entirely. (According to Michigan resident Emily Magner, one legislator interrupted her to cry, "THIS ISN’T ABOUT WOMEN! THIS IS ABOUT PROTECTING FETUSES!”)

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Such testing tends to happen at the discretion of the hospital. "Private hospitals in rich neighborhoods rarely test new mothers for drugs, whereas hospitals serving primarily low-income moms make those tests routine and sometimes mandatory," concludes The News' Oren Yaniv. This is true more broadly. According to the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, "More than eighteen states now address the issue of pregnant women’s drug use in their civil child neglect laws, and a growing number of these states make it possible to remove a child based on nothing more than a single positive drug test."

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Senor's main implication was that Barack Obama was suddenly showing his true anti-Israel cards by having "dug in" on someone he hasn't even nominated yet. The secondary suggestion, what with the mention of "highly qualified" along with the fact that both Susan Rice and former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy are female, seemed to be trying to beat Obama with a stick his campaign successfully wielded against Romney's: Diversity.

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White male Republicans in redder regions are still the base for untrammeled gun rights, even if they're not the only ones. But when it comes to women, that number had been slowly moving in the NRA's favor -- and it's all part of a plan.

Four years ago, 30 percent of women told Pew that gun rights were more important to them than controlling gun ownership. This April, that number was 39 percent -- still less than the 60 percent of men who favored gun rights, but a dramatic rise nonetheless. And these women were likelier to be white; in the same poll, 57 percent of whites picked gun rights over gun control. African Americans and Latinos overwhelmingly told pollsters they preferred gun control.

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Republicans used to love the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit, because they incentivized paid labor and used the tax code instead of cash assistance or programs to help low-income parents, most visibly single mothers. But that was before the cry against the 47 percent, a substantial portion of whom didn’t pay taxes because of such credits.

In the Washington Post, Jamelle Bouie points to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities showing that the two tax credits for low-income families will be slashed under Plan B: “A mother with two children who works full time at the minimum wage of $7.25 and earns $14,500 a year would lose $1,560 of her Child Tax Credit, which would plummet from $1,725 to $165.”

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Blame Obamacare and abortion. We heard, early out of the gate, from Mike Huckabee, who didn’t wait for the funerals to start blaming the liberal banishment of God from schools and government, including “tax-funded abortion pills,” by which the Personhood proponent meant birth control. “We dismiss the notion of natural law and the notion that there are moral absolutes and seemed amazed when some kids make it their own morality to kill innocent children. We diminish and even hold in contempt the natural family of a father and mother creating and then responsibly raising the next generation and then express dismay that kids feel no real connection to their families or even the concept of a family.”

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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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That case had the benefit of a vocal and angry person to speak on the dead woman's behalf -- her husband, Praveen. He has said she requested a termination that may have saved her life -- but was told, "This is a Catholic country." (An official inquiry by the hospital has yet to be released, and Praveen Halapannavar is appealing to the European Court of Human Rights.) But for every Savita, there are thousands of women whose names we don't know, women who aren't even counted.

The most commonly cited statistic suggests that complications from unsafe abortions led to approximately 13 percent of maternal deaths worldwide. That's a World Health Organization figure first arrived at in 2000, which hasn't been re-evaluated. Every year, when WHO says how many women have died from unsafe abortions, they're simply taking the same percentage of the global maternal mortality figure -- 56,000 in 2003, or 47,000 in 2008. But one epidemiologist, Caitlin Gerdts, wondered if that number wasn't a potentially vast understatement.

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Asetoyer was talking about the loophole that prevents tribal authorities, who have jurisdiction over crimes committed on Indian territory by Indians, from having any authority over non-Indian male abusers. That's despite the fact that non-Indian men account for an estimated 80 percent of rapes of Indian women, and that the astronomical rate of abuse of Indian women is well documented by the federal government.

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As the last of the post-election data sifts and behind-the-scenes campaign reveals trickle out and the political class tries to figure out the new normal, it’s a good time to take stock.

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Obama said it again this week: "What the country needs … is an acknowledgment that folks like me can afford to pay a little bit higher rate," he told Bloomberg News. He's been saying it at least since April 2011, when he was pushing the "Buffett rule":  "I don't need another tax cut," he said. "Warren Buffett doesn't need another tax cut."

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Of course, when New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat filed his Sunday column warning of the coming American demographic winter, he was too smart to so openly blame women's choices and feminism that way, or talk about women much at all. He knows the audience he's trying to persuade, which doesn't openly blame such things but does worry, in polite terms, about the U.S.'s toppling from its "global perch."

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This week, Ohio's Republican Senate president, Tom Niehaus, explicitly took President Obama's win as a referendum on abortion rights, saying he'd told supporters that he would only allow a vote on the bill in the event of a Romney victory. He also said the bill's proponents were incredibly annoying, including to people ostensibly on their side.

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Just take your pick from being a nanny, housekeeper or elder caregiver, the jobs included in a groundbreaking new study on domestic labor released this week, which surveyed over 2,000 domestic workers from around the country (and in nine different languages). Such jobs grew almost 10 percent between 2004 and 2010, according to census data, which didn't include related categories like cooks and chauffeurs. Ninety-five percent of such workers are female; they are overwhelmingly women of color and immigrants. (An actual, grim bonus: You can't be outsourced.)

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I doubt McCain is done being an angry, bitter man who still hasn't forgiven Rice for her attack on him during the 2008 presidential campaign. But someone must have told him that trashing an accomplished, relatively young woman of color who wasn't even remotely responsible for what happened in Benghazi is just not a good look these days. Maybe McCain underestimated how many people had Rice's back, from the Congressional Black Caucus to the president himself -- just as his fellow party members had underestimated the power of the voting bloc they commanded on Nov. 6.

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Two days after Latino voters broadly rejected the Republican Party, Charles Krauthammer saw reason for optimism. Latinos, he said, "should be a natural Republican constituency: striving immigrant community, religious, Catholic, family-oriented and socially conservative (on abortion, for example.)"  George W. Bush and Karl Rove found a way to approach 40 percent of the Latino vote; Romney barely netted half that. So Republicans, facing a demographic time bomb as their base of white men ages, have comforted themselves by thinking all they really need to do is perform as well as Bush did among Latinos to get near the White House again.

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After all, by then President Obama had already repeated that feminist mantra rejecting a hierarchy of rape: In August, he'd announced that "Rape is rape" in response to Todd Akin's blithe invocation of "legitimate rape." Three days after the words appeared on the Capitol, Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock's talk of rape and God's gifts gave the president occasion to say it again. Rape is rape. You could complain that this was still being debated in 2012, and many did, but why would profound disruption come fast or easy? No, it was an urgent dividing point, and the president himself had chosen a side.

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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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