The New York Times reports that the Affordable Care Act might require insurers to provide coverage for birth control and other reproductive health services:

The law says insurers must cover “preventive health services” and cannot charge for them. The administration has asked a panel of outside experts to help identify the specific preventive services that must be covered for women.

Administration officials said they expected the list to include contraception and family planning because a large body of scientific evidence showed the effectiveness of those services.

Predictably, social conservatives are outraged:

Kay Steiger, who is guest-blogging for TAPPED this week, mentioned this below, but I wanted to comment further on the recent legislation in the House redefining rape. I wouldn't say that anything House Republicans could do would surprise me at this point, but this is appalling even by contemporary Republican standards. Nick Baumann:

When I reported last month that states taken over by Republican legislatures in the South were likely to cut critical anti-poverty programs, I imagined that they would instead divert federal anti-poverty funds to programs conservatives like, i.e., marriage promotion, counseling for pregnant women that encourages them not to choose abortions, and other faith-based programs. I hadn't known before I did the reporting that states had a great deal of autonomy in choosing exactly where to send those federal grants, and critical programs like food stamps and early childhood education I thought, for sure, were done for.

Yesterday, police charged abortion provider Dr. Kermit Gosnell of Philadelphia with the murder of one patient and seven infants. For decades, Mr. Gosnell operated in a clinic that, by the description from the grand-jury report, was strewn with dirt, blood, and fetal remains. According to The New York Times, Dr. Gosnell "performed late-term abortions, after 24 weeks, which are illegal, and employed staff members who were not trained medical professionals."

Via Kay Steiger, the Guttmacher Institute rounds up the ways in which states are curbing access to abortion in advance of the establishment of health-care exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act. Many states already restrict the ways in which private insurers can cover abortion, but some states are banning abortion coverage in the exchanges altogether rather than just banning the use of federal subsidies for those plans in ways that would conform with the Hyde Amendment.

Will Saletan recently had a useful roundup of reader responses to the question American anti-choicers can't seem to answer: How can one justify criminalizing abortion without punishing the women who obtain them? In general, conservatives' "principled" answers -- as opposed to those that take into account the practicality of passing legislation to punish women -- fall into two categories. 

The first is that women are not competent moral agents who should be held responsible for their actions:

Voters yesterday in Alaska approved an anti-abortion measure that requires parents to be notified before their teenage daughters can receive abortions. A campaign against the measure argued that it was unnecessary government intervention that dictated communication between families. What it clearly does is curb the rights of teenage girls: most already involve parents, but the chances a teenager will misunderstand this measure and think she can no longer have an abortion is high.