Power

The Sound of Silence: Where Is the Anti-Choice Outcry Over North Carolina’s Forced Sterilization of Women of Color?

From the early 1900s up until the 1970’s, over 30 states had formal eugenics programs, that enforced compulsory sterilization of individuals deemed to be “unfit” and “promiscuous.” States sterilized people that were disabled, poor, people of color, and immigrants. North Carolina had a particularly aggressive program. Yet the silence from anti-choice groups on the issue is deafening.

Redefining Chutzpah: More Bad Ideas to Burden Women

What's chutzpah? Until December 2011, I would have deferred to the classic definition in Leo Rosten's The Joys of Yiddish: chutzpah is a man who kills his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court as a lonely orphan. But at the end of the year, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) introduced a bill to teach the world the real meaning of chutzpah: the "Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act of 2011."