abortion rights

For many lesbians, the attacks on abortion availability can be background noise. We focus on problems that seem to affect lesbians more directly, such as same-sex marriage, the military’s dismantling of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, or even the newest lesbian celebrity gossip. When we think about our own reproductive rights, it is more often about becoming pregnant and raising our children. To the extent we consider abortion, it may seem an issue exclusively for our heterosexual sisters.

After Catholic leaders at The Vatican have condemned American nuns for caring too much about poverty and social justice, and not fighting against abortion or marriage equality rights, a group representing thousands of religious women are considering how to strike back.

A Massachusetts Catholic college has scrapped plans to have Victoria Kennedy, Ted Kennedy’s widow, deliver its commencement address, citing her support for marriage equality and abortion rights. Robert J. McManus, the bishop of Worcester, Mass., pressured Anna Maria College in Paxton to cancel Kennedy’s speaking engagement and an honorary degree the college was to give her, Religion News Service reports

Pat Robertson has come up with a new theory as to why liberals support abortion rights — it’s because they want to put lesbians and straight women on “a level playing field.” On a recent episode of The 700 Club, discussing the battle over federal funding for Planned Parenthood, Robertson says President Obama supports the organization because of what the antigay minister calls the Left’s “culture of death.” Then Robertson says to cohost Terry Meeuwsen, “If a woman is a lesbian, what advantage does she have over a married woman? Or what deficiency does she have?”

The assault on a woman's right to choose runs parallel to right-wing efforts to roll back queer rights.

While the LGBT community marches justly onward in our fight for marriage equality, women’s reproductive rights are facing a critical blow in that political hotspot breeding so much turmoil of late, Ohio.

LGBT history overflows with stories of women who have come to the aide of gay men: the concerned mother who founded PFLAG, the doctor who proved that homosexuality was not a pathological illness, the popular 1960s communist who wrote that gays and lesbians were born that way and should be true to themselves in order to find happiness, and the countless number of lesbians who, after years of feeling excluded from the gay liberation movement by their gay brothers, put aside their frustrations to care for them at the height of the AIDS epidemic when hospitals wouldn’t.

Stand with women.

This month a fight broke out across the blogosphere. Conservatives complained that the so-called liberal media had ignored the case of illegal abortion provider Dr. Kermit Gosnell prior to his trial, which began in Philadelphia on March 18. The assertion was that there had been a conspiracy of silence.

The GOP's anti-abortion platform hasn't changed—it is identical to that of its 2008 platform, allowing abortions only in cases of rape and incest. The GOP's anti-gay platform also hasn't changed—it is identical to that of its 2008 platform, allowing marriage only between a man and a woman.

The stakes are high as voters rushed to the polls in Massachusetts Tuesday in a special election for U.S. Senate between Democrat Martha Coakley, who supports gay and lesbian rights and Republican Scott Brown. The race is down to the wire to fill the seat of the late U.S. senator Ted Kennedy.