
Tara Murtha
Tara Murtha is a writer and also serves as associate director of strategic communications at the Women’s Law Project, Pennsylvania’s only public-interest law center devoted to the rights of women and girls.
Tara Murtha is a writer and also serves as associate director of strategic communications at the Women’s Law Project, Pennsylvania’s only public-interest law center devoted to the rights of women and girls.
Culture & Conversation Abortion
The abortion divide is between people who need and deserve abortion access and the well-funded movement colluding with lawmakers to push it out of reach.
Anti-choice legislators in Pennsylvania recently pulled out all the stops when debating a bill that would be one of the nation's harshest abortion laws if passed. But in the wake of a recent Supreme Court ruling, other state lawmakers are trying to stop that bill and change existing policy.
While pleased that they may no longer have to refer to Pennsylvania as “the island of the uninsured,” advocates still have serious concerns with the Healthy PA plan.
Currently, Pennsylvania has two enacted buffer zones, in Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, and a proposed bill to establish buffer zones across the state. But like the legal fate of buffer zones in the country following the McCullen decision, the bill remains "in limbo."
The state's latest government mandate on doctor's office communications requires doctors to read an as-yet-unwritten script to pregnant patients after delivering the diagnosis of prenatal Down syndrome.
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett has branded himself as willing to risk almost anything to work against the Affordable Care Act. It will be interesting to see if that includes a second term.
The Pennsylvania Women’s Health Caucus is poised to celebrate its first legislative victory: On Wednesday, the state house passed a law criminalizing “revenge porn.”
Even with a disastrous deficit of $1.4 billion, the proposed 2014-15 Pennsylvania budget is pouring more money into an anti-choice crisis pregnancy center network that recently made headlines for "failing to see a single client" in another state, despite a significant government contract there.
The Pennsylvania Department of Health recently asked Planned Parenthood facilities in the state to submit transfer agreement and admitting privileges information, even though the state currently does not require clinics to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. A spokesperson said a department employee was acting on his or her own.
A bill that would amend Pennsylvania law to tighten—but not close—a loophole enabling rapist-fathers to obtain custody and visitation rights over a child conceived in rape unanimously passed the Pennsylvania house.
The exact cause of her death, which, according to the Associated Press, occurred "hours after she surrendered to serve a 48-hour sentence," is unclear.
Coaches and sports officials initiate predatory sexual relationships with the teenagers in their care so often that the Pennsylvania General Assembly created a new crime in order to try to address it as specifically as possible.
While Gov. Tom Corbett insists Pennsylvania can’t afford Medicaid expansion, advocates argue Pennsylvania can’t afford not to expand Medicaid.
State lawmakers unveiled the second wave of bills introduced as part of Pennsylvania’s Agenda for Women’s Health, a pro-active legislative effort designed to address women’s health and economic equality.
Rep. Mike Fleck is navigating uncharted political waters in Pennsylvania. The state's first openly gay GOP lawmaker was defeated in the Republican primary—his first primary challenge since coming out of the closet in 2012—but he won the Democratic primary with a write-in campaign by just 15 votes.
Ten years after Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage, a federal judge announced a decision on same-sex marriage in Pennsylvania on Tuesday.
An investigation reveals that pregnant women incarcerated in Pennsylvania are routinely subjected to wearing leg shackles and handcuffs, including while laboring and giving birth, despite medical dangers and current law that says the practice is illegal in most circumstances.
In the lead-up to the primary for the 13th Congressional district in Pennsylvania, Democratic state Rep. Brendan F. Boyle has been making pro-choice campaign trail promises so contrary to his voting record that it’s inspired NARAL Pro-Choice America and Emily's List to team up to issue what amounts to an anti-endorsement.
In states that didn't expand Medicaid, like Pennsylvania, the number of people left in the coverage gap exceeds the number of newly insured.
With two weeks to go until the May 20 Pennsylvania primary, and with analysts observing that single women are the key to success in this year’s elections, Rep. Brendan F. Boyle is the second Pennsylvania Democrat to stump on a woman’s right to choose despite having recently supported anti-choice legislation.
Two reports in as many weeks have revealed that three big hires at Pennsylvania State University, chosen in part to help the school move past the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse case, are linked to football-centered sexual assault cases at other schools.
Rep. Margo Davidson is campaigning for the upcoming Democratic primary on a pro-choice platform, but she has in the past voted for a bill that shut down abortion clinics in the state as well as for a law banning insurers from selling policies that cover abortion care through the state's insurance exchange.
The Women’s Law Project has filed complaints with the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education against nine of 14 members of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, claiming that the colleges have discriminated against female athletes.
One of the most exciting state house races in Pennsylvania this year is a primary race between two Democrats, Reps. Harry Readshaw and Erin Molchany, for House District 36 in Pittsburgh.
A new survey reveals that 59 percent of Pennsylvanians want Republican Gov. Tom Corbett to accept federal funds to expand Medicaid.
Pennsylvania lawmakers have proposed legislation that experts say would hinder the ACA enrollment process and would be illegal under new federal regulations that are likely to pass in the near future.
A Delaware doctor, Arturo Apolinario, whose license was suspended during the investigation against Kermit Gosnell, may get his license back, even if only to retire.
Many thousands of same-sex couples have gotten married in the United States; as a simple fact of modern life, a good number of them will get divorced. But many couples are finding that they're “wedlocked”—they got married in a state where same-sex marriage is legal, but either live in or moved to a state where the practice is banned, and therefore cannot get a divorce.
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett is poised to sign a bill into law that will enable more sexual assault survivors and young stalking and harassment victims to obtain protection from abuse orders. Under current state law, only a small subset of rape survivors qualify for such orders.
West, a former medical assistant at Kermit Gosnell's "house of horrors" clinic in West Philadelphia, has been sentenced to five to ten years.
Despite the gender-identity nondiscrimination provision of the Affordable Care Act, doctors say some insurance companies are rejecting coverage of basic preventive care.
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett had hoped to make the state the first to tether job-search requirements to Medicaid eligibility.
Judges from York, Monroe, and Lancaster counties have now all written opinions stating that the law fails to take juveniles' greater capacity for reform into account.
In the wake of similar protections recently passed in Philadelphia, Rep. Mark Painter has introduced HB 1892, dubbed the Pennsylvania Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, in the state house.
It's the anti-choice strategy: Coerce women into the black market by reducing the number of legal abortion providers, then leave them to the prosecutors.
For five years, Steven Massof worked with Kermit Gosnell, the rogue abortion doctor who earlier this year was convicted of first-degree murder for killing babies born alive in his West Philadelphia clinic. On Wednesday, Massof was sentenced to six to 12 years for his role in the "house of horrors."
When it comes to childhood sexual assault, there is a heavy thumb on the scales of justice. To trot out “but he wasn’t convicted” as definitive proof of innocence against the backdrop of this system amounts to willful ignorance.
Following the amendment of the Philadelphia Fair Practices Ordinance, city employers are now required to provide “reasonable” workplace accommodations for pregnant employees, such as access to water and bathroom breaks.
What relatively peaceful anti-choice protesters may not understand is that their behavior is relative: They’re a physical representation of threats that have already been made, and in some cases executed, in the past and online.
The biggest disparity among Pennsylvania women with and without health insurance was found regarding access to Pap smears and mammograms.
On Monday, an anti-choice website incorrectly noted that eight abortion clinics in Pennsylvania have closed since 2012, misinformation that was picked up by credible news outlets that in some cases attributed the two closures to Act 122—another misstep.
State Rep. Gordon Denlinger is circulating a co-sponsorship memo seeking support in his effort to amend the state constitution from punishing a person or employer for making any kind of discriminatory decision.
Introduced by the co-chair of the General Assembly’s newly unveiled Women's Health Caucus, the bill frames revenge porn as a form of intimate partner harassment.
Anti-choice advocates and lobbyists are calling the slight decrease in the number of abortions performed in Pennsylvania in 2012 “good news for women.” Is it really?
Little Sisters has been getting a lot of attention as an example of how conservatives' battle against the Affordable Care Act's contraception mandate looks more like culture-war ritual than a good-faith effort to productively resolve the conflict between church and state. But there are many other, more typical cases.
In short, Healthy PA would extend some coverage to Pennsylvanians in the health-care gap, but it doesn’t expand the Medicaid program, and would reduce benefits of current enrollees.
The plan will result in less access to affordable, consistent birth control for the poor working women of Pennsylvania—which, as the federal birth control mandate demonstrates, is counter to the intention of health-care reform.
Gosnell, the rogue abortion doctor who earlier this year was convicted of first-degree murder for killing babies born alive in his West Philadelphia clinic as well as involuntary manslaughter for the death of a patient, was sentenced Monday to 30 years for running a pill mill out of the same building.
A Pennsylvania nurse has been accused of “performing an illegal abortion on a 16-year-old girl,” according to a local report out of Montour county.
Wednesday morning, the Pennsylvania legislature’s Women’s Health Caucus—just established this spring—unveiled its first enterprise: a package of bills that pro-actively address women’s physical health, financial security, and personal safety.