NWLC’s Weekly Roundup: November 21-23

Happy Frid—er, Wednesday! Since the NWLC office will be closed for the rest of the week, we have an early roundup for you. Consider it our Thanksgiving treat! This short week, we have stories on an OFCCP victory, the return of fetal personhood, and contraceptive and reproductive freedom rights under attack in America and abroad.

First up: we heard of a big win for OFCCP (that’s the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs) this week. In this blog post by Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, she details a November court ruling that ordered a federal contractor – United Space Alliance – to make its compensation data available to OFCCP. As Secretary Solis outlines, “When businesses sign contracts with the federal government, they agree to follow certain rules. For example, they agree to pay their employees equally, regardless of their sex, race, color, religion, national origin, disability or status as a protected veteran.” United Space Alliance provided OFCCP with some of the pay data requested, but refused other records OFCCP requested in order to complete their annual compliance review of the contractor.

Why does OFCCP need to see this data? It’s to help ensure that no employees are being paid unfairly – that the contractors are following the rules they agreed to when signing the contract with the government. In the recent court decision, United Space Alliance was asked to provide the requested information to OFCCP by November 28. For more, you can also read the Department of Labor’s press release on this issue here. 

Over at Ms. Magazine blog, Meghan Shalvoy has a good recap of why it’s so important for all women to have access to comprehensive preventive services, regardless of who they work for. Even though we scored a big victory for contraceptives over the summer, some opponents of contraception are pressuring President Obama to deny this critical benefit to more than a million more women. As Shalvoy reminds us, 71 percent of American voters support birth control coverage without co-pay. Denying women access to contraception and other preventive services can also be incredibly harmful. If you haven’t yet, please make sure to tell President Obama that all women need affordable birth control.

This just in, take two: Personhood USA is at it again! Their defeats in Colorado in 2008 and 2010 and recent defeat in Mississippi notwithstanding, they’re launching yet another campaign in Colorado to once again try to affirm that, in their belief, “every human being is a person from their earliest moments.”

To them of course, their most recent loss – when 55% of Mississippi voters voted against their personhood amendment, Initiative 26 – isn’t because voters don’t agree with them. According to Personhood USA, it’s because groups like Planned Parenthood deliberately misled voters. So, how are they going to stop that from happening this time around? Well, in Colorado their new amendment “will include some extra information that will hopefully prohibit lies of our opponents.”

In addition to Colorado, Personhood USA plans to work on personhood amendments in Montana and Oregon during the 2012 cycle. So, ladies and gents – it’s never too early to fight back against these measures! And hopefully come Wednesday, November 7, 2012, at least three more invasive personhood amendments will be defeated.

Lastly, while we talk a lot about the right to choose in the context of being able to access prescription contraceptives, abortion services, and attacks on a woman’s bodily autonomy like described above, we often don’t talk about the flip side: women who want children and are being denied that right.

Unfortunately, forced sterilization is an issue people all over the world and from all walks of life deal with, as Marianne Møllmann of Amnesty International details in a new blog post for RH Reality Check. After delving into how forced sterilization – and even forced castration – is such a harmful policy for many groups of women, she brings up this point, which I find especially interesting:

As a human rights issue, coerced sterilization and castration are in many ways no different from other limitations on individual reproductive choice: they violate a number of fundamental rights, including the rights to health, privacy, and physical integrity. Additionally, they make discrimination and public contempt visible and as such can help target policy interventions to alleviate abuse.

But a more interesting aspect of the practice of coerced sterilization is that it crystallizes the hypocrisy of the limitations to reproductive rights. When I did research on access to abortion in Mexico in 2005, for example, I found that rape victims routinely were denied services they, by law, were entitled to, whereas sex workers and women living with HIV who were applying to the same hospitals for the same services were offered abortions they did not need and that would technically have been illegal.

And at the end of it all, I’d like to echo what Møllmann has to say: that all forceful choices made regarding reproductive health are damaging and that we all “must be allowed to make individual and responsible decisions about parenting and procreation.”

Enjoy your Thanksgiving! By the way, have you checked out our neat new cheat sheet, Talking Turkey About The Super-Committee? Might come in handy if your Thanksgiving mealtime conversation shifts to politics! If there’s something interesting you’ve read this week and would like to share, remember to leave a link in the comments!