Miscarriage, oops, I mean “prenatal murder” in Georgia; Choose Life plates in North Carolina; and according to a new study mothers who work outside the home are actually making our children sick!

• Georgia Repubican Representative Bobby Franklin, the man who set off a firestorm after proposing a bill that would re-classify rape and stalking victims, in a court of law, as “accusers” (but, curiously, all other crime victims would retain the same classification), is onto his next assault on women and girls. His new bill? HB 1: “Prenatal murder” or making it a crime for the female human body to end a pregnancy, if the government cannot determine a cause for the pregnancy termination. In other words, if I suffer a miscarriage (which I have) and can’t “prove” that I know what the cause was (which, even now in my case, who the hell really knows?), then I can be prosecuted for murder. A longer post is coming because there are too many words needed to describe how offensive and repugnant this is. 

• Former Kansas Attorney General, Phil Kline, is in front of a panel today on ethics charges. Kline is best known for his campaign against Dr. George Tiller and Planned Parenthood, pursuing a host of criminal charges leveled at both. 

• “Choose Life” specialty license plates are again being proposed, in a new bill, in the North Carolina legislature. Similar bills have been proposed many times over the years in the state but have never passed. Money from the sale of these plates would go to crisis pregnancy centers – something Planned Parenthood Action Fund for Central North Carolina says is wrong given the misinformation and outright lies many centers disseminate to women who visit.

• Because I really am just desperate for one more study or article which “proves” that mothers should not dare work outside the home, a new study out of North Carolina shows that children of working mothers are “sicker.” I have not ready the entire paper and even the news release states that there are studies which show just the opposite – that “Previous studies have shown that, on average, children have better health outcomes when the mother works. Those findings have been attributed to factors such as increased income, availability of health insurance and an increase in the mother’s self-esteem.” Still, my favorite two paragraphs below are from the Vancouver Sun article on the study (because, apparently, either fathers or male or female partners cannot possibly prepare healthy meals or clean the house???),

Dr. Melinda Morrill, the N.C. State economics professor who authored the study, warned against making sweeping moral judgments against moms who work outside the home. But she notes that parenting choices involve trade-offs that must be acknowledged.

“Maternal employment imposes a burden on a mother’s time and may result in the poorer supervision or care of her children,” Morrill’s study says. “A child’s health is at least partially a function of time-intensive activities such as healthy meal preparation and house cleaning.”