Afternoon Roundup: Personhood in Florida, Margaret Cho on Bristol Palin, Zimbabwe’s Women’s Health Activists Speak Up!

Amie Newman

Florida is (unsuccessfully) attempting to get a Personhood measure on the ballot, New York's domestic workers are finally guaranteed one day off a week and paid leave, anti-choice advocates succesfully interject anti-choice language into a law about women veterans access to health care and Margaret Cho speaks out about Bristol Palin?

It’s World AIDS Day today and Rewire has done a wonderful job of highlighting the many critical topics of conversation and issues we need to address both domestically and globally in order to curb the epidemic. But I did want to let readers know about Amplify’s wonderful World AIDS Day roundup of posts and actions around the web in case you missed it!

For non-World AIDS Day related news, check out the highlights below.

  • New York State’s Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights took effect this week providing women and men who work as nannys, housekeepers and in other labor positions with greater employment protections including paid leave, overtime pay and at least one paid day off per week. No, they were not guaranteed any of those things before this law passed.  
  • Remember the “Women Veterans’ Bill of Rights” I wrote about yesterday? The Housed voted on and backed a bill last night to ensure that female veterans were made aware of their right to quality health care (very radical, I know) including access to coordinated, comprehensive primary care; gender-specific care and equity in care. But anti-choice legislators threatened to block a vote unless a provision was added that expressly stated that abortion would not be included in this care (even though abortion is not included in health care provided by Veteran Affairs health facilities). The National Right to Life Committee strong-armed the Democratic, pro-choice sponsor into adding a line, according to Veterans Today Journal, stating, “As “amended before consideration, the measure specifically states that nothing in the act ‘shall be construed to establish a right to any service excluded’ under the current law concerning veterans’ medical benefits that excludes abortions and abortion counseling.”
  • The Personhood Movement is focusing its sites on Florida, working on a persohhood amendment in that state. According to Florida Independent, Planned Parenthood is calling the push to confer legal rights upon embryos  “bad public policy” which has soundly failed in other states but, um, so far the initiative has a total of zero signatures. 
  • Entertainment sites are reporting that comedienne (and Queen of Universal Badassness) Margaret Cho reveals much about her Dancing with the Stars challenger, Bristol Palin, on her blog. It’s being reported that Cho says that Palin was forced on the show by her lovely mother, Sarah Palin, who “blames Bristol” for her election loss in 2008. However, searching for Cho’s blog post revealed only a cached version of the post and I can’t verify the accuracy.