Pema Levy

In December, Monica predicted that newly controlled Republican legislatures would slash anti-poverty programs. According to a new report from CLASP, several states are looking at a particularly inefficient, costly, and likely unconstitutional way of doing this: drug testing of recipients of government aid. At least 12 states have proposed bills mandating that people in a […]

Yesterday, news broke that the GOP-controlled Congress, rather than waste their time trying to keep Title X family-planning funds from going to Planned Parenthood, will go ahead and just eliminate family-planning funding across the board. In a draft of a continuing resolution to fund the government for the rest of fiscal year 2011, the House […]

With all the talk over the individual mandate and health-care reform, oral argument in Shelby County v. Holder yesterday in the D.C. federal court got little attention. The Alabama county of Shelby is challenging the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires designated local and state governments to get approval from […]

As predicted, after a dozen strange visits to Planned Parenthood clinics across the country, the anti-abortion group Live Action yesterday released a video (then an unedited version) that purports to catch a Planned Parenthood staffer at a New Jersey clinic aiding a child sex trafficker. As I wrote on Monday, the video release is well-timed […]

Left out of my piece on the Equal Rights Amendment — a proposed constitutional amendment that would explicitly ban sex-based discrimination — today is the interesting question of whether it would, down the road, protect the rights of LGBT Americans as well as women. The text of the 14th Amendment hasn’t changed, but contra Justice […]

Still reeling from the arrest of Philadelphia late-term abortionist Kermit Gosnell, William Saletan challenged pro-choice writers to answer the following question: Contraception or abstinence is best, emergency contraception is next best, early abortion is next best, and we should make these options more accessible, not less. But we’ll still be left with some women who, […]

Tomorrow, Citizens United, which opened elections to unlimited third-party spending on ads — often without disclosing their donors — turns 1 year old. The case originally came from the Citizens United group’s attempt to air a movie about Hillary Clinton despite bans on third parties’ “electioneering communications” within a certain number of days before an […]