President Obama & Obama Administration

Today the Obama Administration proposed new regulations that would provide federal minimum wage and overtime protections to nearly two million low-wage home-care workers.

Who are these workers? They are nearly all women and disproportionately women of color. They provide a lifeline for the elderly and disabled, yet their stressful and physically demanding jobs come without the basic protections of the federal minimum wage and overtime law. The typical home health care worker employed on a full-time, full-year basis earns just $21,000 a year.

They are women like Pauline Beck, a home-care worker that then Senator Obama spent the day with in 2007. Read more »

We were disappointed by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ decision to overrule the evidence-based decision reached by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to remove the age restriction on emergency contraception. So it didn’t really come as a surprise when President Obama voiced his support for Sebelius’ decision (watch it here).

But that doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt. Even worse was how Obama defended Sebelius’ decision – speaking as a father about his daughters. Emily Douglas from The Nation and Rebecca Traister from Salon nailed it when they wrote about Obama’s paternalism.

If President Obama and Secretary Sebelius are concerned about 11 and 12 year old girls accessing emergency contraception without fully understanding how to use it, perhaps they should consider investing in comprehensive sex education programs. Not making emergency contraception readily available, unfortunately, doesn’t mean that young girls won’t need it, it just means that when they do, they will face significant hurdles in obtaining it. And unfortunately that means, these girls may face an even bigger challenge – unintended pregnancy. Read more »

August brought with it a victory for women’s health. It was announced that all new health insurance plans would be required to coverage preventive services such as contraceptive coverage. However, in not so great news, the mandate included language that would allow religious employers to deny such coverage on the basis of religious or moral beliefs; also known as a “refusal clause.” Today, many religious institutions are pushing to expand the language, creating the opportunity to deny more woman necessary preventive services.

Needless to say I’m having a difficult time grasping what this so-called, “conscience clause” actually means. Call me silly, but it actually seems immoral to deprive a woman of contraception if those pills are necessary for her to maintain her health. It seems quite immoral to make a woman choose between receiving adequate health care coverage and her job. Do we honestly think it’s fair to deny contraceptive coverage to a teacher at a Catholic school or university even though she may not be Catholic herself? Read more »

In 2008 when then Senator Barack Obama was still campaigning for the presidency and there were notions that the Bush administration would offer a parting shot to women’s groups and the reproductive health community, Obama’s take on the proposed regulation to expand religious restrictions was clear –

“We need to restore integrity to our public health programs, not create backdoor efforts to weaken them. I am committed to ensuring that the health and reproductive rights of women are protected.”

But now, here we are three years later, and under President Obama, we are still having a very similar fight. Read more »

As you may have heard, the Catholic Bishops are urging the Obama administration to expand the religious refusal clause concerning contraceptives. This could allow religiously affiliated institutions that are not churches – such as hospitals, universities, Catholic Charities, and others – to refuse to cover birth control without co-pays for their students and employees. That’s even though birth control constitutes “preventive care” under the Affordable Care Act, which is mandatorily covered at no cost by insurance plans. And as we’ve been telling you, denying contraceptive coverage is harmful to women.

In response, today the HERvotes coalition is banding together for another blog carnival to fight the Catholic bishops’ push to expand the religious exemption for employer birth control coverage. After the jump, we have links to some of the posts in today’s blog carnival to get you started reading. While you’re at it, please make sure to take a moment to tell President Obama that all women need affordable birth control. For more information about contraceptive coverage and for more resources and blogs from the NWLC, please visit our contraceptive coverage overview page.

What a night! Last night we hosted our 2011 Annual Awards Dinner, our most successful dinner to date, thanks to supporters like you. We were all so excited for President Obama’s keynote address.

We’ve got a full-length video of his speech below, and if you weren’t able to attend or watch the live stream, please take a look! The President delivered an inspiring speech during which he praised the work of the Freedom Riders, spoke of the need to continue advancing women’s rights, and celebrated being “surrounded by so many powerful and accomplished women.”

Read more »

As you might have heard, tonight is the National Women’s Law Center’s 2011 Annual Awards Dinner! We are so excited to have NPR’s Michel Martin, the women Freedom Riders, and President Barack Obama joining us tonight – and we want to make sure you can join us, too! Read more »

Well, you don’t see a picture like this every day.  So it’s worth taking a minute to celebrate it – and read the article. And there’s one more. Since women have made up about half of law school classes for nearly twenty years, pictures like these are rarer than they should be.  Law firm partners? Courts? Law school faculty?  Whose picture will be next? Read more »

As we’ve mentioned before, President Obama’s nominees to the federal bench demonstrate his concerted effort to increase the diversity of the federal judiciary.  As a number of articles today highlight, almost half of the nominees are women, and significant percentages are African-American or Latino, such that 70 percent of the President’s nominees are “nontraditional”.  In addition, there have been a number of openly gay nominees. Read more »

The story goes that the recession ended in June 2009, meaning that we have been in recovery for over two years. The reality for women has felt like anything but a recovery. NWLC research shows that while job growth has begun – albeit slowly, with only 639,000 jobs added between June 2009 and August 2011 – women have actually lost 345,000 jobs since the start of the recovery. Women’s unemployment has been on the rise (increasing from 7.7 percent in June 2009 to 8.0 percent in August 2011), and nearly half of all jobless women are among the long-term unemployed who have been seeking work for more than six months.

Recognizing some of these realities, the President included provisions to ensure that women share in the benefits of the job creation plan he unveiled last night. Read more »