By Eleanor J. Bader, cross-posted from On The Issues Magazine . Ramona, 32, mother of a four-year-old daughter, is dropped off at the Summit Women’s Center in Bridgeport, Connecticut at 8 a.m. on a frigid December Saturday. As she gets out of the car to walk the thirty feet to the clinic, she notices a dozen people holding weathered [...]

By Nick van der Graaf, cross-posted from On The Issues Magazine . Currently, Canada is the only country in the world where there are no criminal laws pertaining to abortion. Combined with our publicly-funded universal health care system, this means abortion is available on demand, period. Many in the United States don’t know that, or how that right was [...]

By Mahnaz Rezaie, cross-posted from On The Issues Magazine . I am from Afghanistan. I am now an undergraduate student on scholarship at an American college. I was on campus last Sunday when I read – and agonized over – an article on the front page of The New York Times about the attempted “honor killing” of an Afghan teenager. [...]

By Mary E. Plouffe, cross-posted from On The Issues Magazine . Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs tells us that basic needs (food, shelter, safety) must be satisfied before higher level needs (social relationships, self-esteem, self-actualization) can be given much attention. A University of Illinois study published in 2011 challenges this assumption. In fact, even in countries where survival is a daily battle, [...]

By Jamie J. Hagen, cross-posted from On The Issues Magazine . The world may be concentrating on General Petraeus’ dalliance. But the real story of sexual misbehavior in the military is far broader – and far more serious and damaging to so many of our women and men who serve. SWAN, the Service Women’s Action Network, is one organization [...]

By Sheila Parks,  cross-posted from  On The Issues Magazine . Yes, my side won. So, the argument could be made that I was wrong when it comes to election fraud. The real story is more complicated. I believe that my side – your side, the women’s side – won in part becausevoting rights activists were vigilant. They kept Americans [...]

By Merle Hoffman, cross-posted at On The Issues Magazine . Congressman Joe Walsh says abortions never save women’s lives . He’s wrong. Here’s one story out of many: This happened in 1989. Very publicly. Nancy Klein , a pregnant Long Island woman rendered comatose by a car accident, was finally given an abortion, woke up, and once again was able to recognize [...]

By Merle Hoffman, cross-posted at On The Issues Magazine After debating every major “right-to-life” leader in this country- including Jerry Falwell – I didn’t need to watch the debate tonight to know that no matter who the pundits say won, it is women who are losing. In the meager segment set aside to discuss health care in [...]

By Barbara Fischkin, cross-posted from On The Issues Magazine . It was 1992 and the presidential race between incumbent George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ross Perot was in full steam. Five days before the second debate, ABC’s Carole Simpson was named the first woman-and first African American-moderator. It was also the first time a television debate would include [...]

By Barbara Fischkin, cross-posted from On The Issues Magazine It was a memorial service – and a call to action. Shulamith Firestone, the brilliant, troubled feminist author, artist and activist who died in late August, was remembered at a sad but energized Manhattan memorial service Sunday night at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery. “The only box Shulie [...]

By Susan F. Feiner, cross-posted from On The Issues Magazine . President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his fourth and final  State of the Union Address in 1944 . Because the defeat of fascism in Europe was in sight, FDR could frame a peacetime vision for the nation. He saw that the full realization of political freedom depended upon the elimination [...]

By Bill Baird, cross-posted from On The Issues Magazine . My wife Joni and I were  the only ones  protesting in front of the National Right to Life Committee’s annual convention this year, from June 29-July 1 in Washington, D.C. I’d just turned 80, and this year’s event was the 37th time I had been there to greet [...]

By Janet Mason, cross-posted from On The Issues Magazine . As the Affordable Care Act worked its way through the courts in the past three years, I began to reflect on how it might have affected my own life and that of my mother, who died of cancer in 1994. The Supreme Court is reportedly due to issue [...]

By Cindy Cooper, cross-posted at On The Issues Magazine . In 1892, suffragist and temperance leader Frances Elizabeth Willard had a truly wild idea: she would learn to ride a bicycle. Willard made this brave decision, in her words, “at the ripe age of fifty three.” She later explained it was “an act of grace,” emerging from the [...]

These days anti-abortion ingénue Lila Rose needs no introduction. In advertisements for this year’s Values Voter Summit, an annual conservative Christian confab, Rose was a headline attraction. While former Attorney General Edwin Meese required a note of background, Rose, like fellow speaker and antifeminist icon Phyllis Schlafly, was advertised [...]

By the On The Issues Editors, cross-posted at OTI Magazine A new study puts another face on women’s reproductive decision-making during an economic downturn. It indicates that low-income women increasingly are being forced to “choose” abortions out of economic need.

Condicted by independent researcher Robin H. Pugh Yi, Ph.D., president of Akeso [...]

By Carole Joffe, cross-posted at On The Issues Magazine What about abortion gives it staying power as the central issue in domestic politics, even in the period of the worst economic situation since the Great Depression of the 1930s? This is a question well worth pursuing. I sounded a much more hopeful note in my recent book, Dispatches [...]

By Carolyn Gage, cross-posted at On The Issues Magazine The emergence of the Occupy Wall Street movement would not have been a surprise to one woman activist born over a century ago. Mary Harriman Rumsey was the partner of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, who was the first woman to occupy a [...]

By Loretta Ross, cross-posted from On The Issues Magazine In Mississippi, we are witnessing the intersection of race and gender politics in two ballot initiatives on which African American voters are the critical constituents on voting day on November 8, 2011. The 2011 Mississippi ballot Initiative 26 on Personhood and Initiative 27 on Voter ID exclusions may [...]

By Rosalyn Baxandall, cross-posted at On The Issues Magazine At last the 99 percent are shaming them: “This is not a Recession; It’s Robbery,” one sign read in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Usually U.S. social movements occur every 30 years: the 1900s, the 1930s, the 1960s. Even with the longest war in history against Afghanistan, and [...]