Saturday News Roundup - 2/17/07

Welcome new readers who came over from Feministing and AlterNet.

Representative Stacey Campfield, in response to discussion of his bill proposing death certificates for abortion at Nashville is Talking, had this to say: ";-)" The wait for a mature, truthful response to questions about the bill continues.

Women's Health News was among the blogs featured in Friday's on-air blog roundup on Nashville's ABC news affiliate, WKRN. [Video on YouTube]

Lindsey at theology&geometry has a post on how she became a feminist, and it's related to hearing the tale of a surviving "comfort woman."

Who wants to take up a collection to help out our sisters in Alabama, where a ban on selling sex toys has been upheld? I'm thinking an "adopt an Alabamian" program would do it - they never said mailing a sex toy as a gift was illegal! Surely there's a web 2.0 application that could be developed for a sex toy version of "Need a penny? Take a penny. - Have a penny? Leave a penny."
(Tidbit: Alabama's state insect is the monarch butterfly. Too bad the state animal isn't a rabbit.)

The CDC has released a report on state-specific data on people living with heart disease, and finds that "Residents of Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia had the highest prevalence of these heart diseases."

Doctors in China are pushing for more c-sections, resulting in a c-section rate over 60% at some hospitals. The fees the physicians receive for c-sections are 3-4 times higher than those for vaginal birth, so pushing this abdominal surgery brings in more money for the docs.

From the New York Times, "Furor on Rush to Require Cervical Cancer Vaccine." According to the piece, "at least 20 states are considering mandatory inoculation of young girls against the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer."

"Scientists Determine How HIV Infects Vagina"

Feministing on Camel's new cigarettes targeted to women. This is not the long way we wanted to come, baby.

Obama targeted for history of pro-reproductive rights votes.

The Guttmacher Institute releases "Laws Affecting Reproductive Health and Rights: Trends in the States 2006," with a state-by-state roundup of laws affecting reproductive rights enacted in 2006 [PDF].

Via Our Bodies, Our Blog, an article in Glamour magazine on father-daughter purity balls.

NARAL Pro-Choice America is running a campaign asking Wal-Mart to fill Plan B prescriptions, mentioning a recent refusal in Springfield. Allegedly, Tashina Byrd visited a Wal-mart pharmacy for Plan B after a condom broke, and the pharmacist shook his head and laughed. Tashina and her boyfriend were told that the pharmacy had the drug in stock, but that nobody would give it to them. Note to pharmacists - if you're going to refuse legal medications to women, you could at least not be mocking a-holes about it.

Catholic leaders oppose New York's condom distribution plan.

Japan's Minister of Health says of women, ""Because the number of birth-giving machines and devices is fixed, all we can ask for is for them to do their best per head." [hat tip to David]