‘Pregnancy Begins 2 Weeks Before Conception’ Now The Law In Arizona

(NCRM)   In Arizona, women are now legally pregnant two weeks before conception, according to a new law, the Orwellianly-named, “Women’s Health and Safety Act,” signed yesterday by Republican Governor Jan Brewer. The scientifically, medically, ethically, and intellectually dishonest legislation is designed to reduce the amount of time a woman is allowed to have a legal abortion, and is one of the most draconian bills to become law in America.

The bill was sponsored by extremist Arizona State Rep. Kimberly Yee, (image, right) who last month penned an op-ed titled, “No drug test, no welfare.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer Signs Legislation Permitting Employers to Interrogate Female Employees About Contraception Use

 

(RAW STORY)   A month or so ago, I wrote about a bill in Arizona (HB 2625) that would permit employers to opt-out of the so-called birth control mandate and interrogate their female employees about their sexual practices, all in the name of “religious freedom”:

You see, if a female employee seeks a medical prescription for contraception, an employer will be permitted to ask that employee for proof that she doesn’t plan to use the contraception for slutty fuck-making.  Using it for medical reasons is ok —  that’s medicine.

So, if you’re one of those women who uses slutpills for non-slutty reasons, then you’re ok.  You’ll get to keep your job.  Enjoy your ovarian cancer or your acne or whatever, but make sure you put that red cover on your TPS reports or the boss’ll have your head.

But if you’re running around like some sort of whore-nympho, then you better keep that shit on the down-low, because if The Man finds out you might-could get fired:

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 6-2 Monday to endorse a controversial bill that would allow Arizona employers the right to deny health insurance coverage for contraceptives based on religious objections.

Arizona House Bill 2625, authored by Majority Whip Debbie Lesko, R-Glendale, would permit employers to ask their employees for proof of medical prescription if they seek contraceptives for non-reproductive purposes, such as hormone control or acne treatment.

“I believe we live in America. We don’t live in the  Soviet Union,” Lesko said. “So, government should not be telling the organizations or mom and pop employers to do something against their moral beliefs.”

Lesko said this bill responds to a contraceptive mandate in the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act signed into law March 2010.

“My whole legislation is about our First Amendment rights and freedom of religion,” Lesko said. “All my bill does is that an employer can opt out of the mandate if they have any religious objections.”

Glendale resident Liza Love said the bill would impose on women’s rights to keep their medical records private.

Love spoke to the committee about her struggle with polycystic ovary syndrome and endometriosis, conditions requiring her to use birth control.

“I wouldn’t mind showing my employer my medical records,” Love said. “But there are 10 women behind me that would be ashamed to do so.”
(read the rest)

At the time I wrote the post, I was accused of “vagina fauxrage” by some commenters at a blog that I shan’t name, but which starts with “B” and ends in “alloon Juice.”  In response to those accusations, I relayed a post from Susie Madrak at C&L:

 

Having been accused of vagina “fauxrage” in response to my post yesterday about Arizona’s crazy-ass bill which would permit employers to fire women for being slutty birth control users, I feel compelled to make a counterargument.

Actually, I’ll let Susie Madrak at Crooks & Liars make that counterargument for me:

 When I was 18, I worked for a publishing company that was a little bit strange. The female department head was a fundamentalist Christian and a member of Jews for Jesus who used to hold Tuesday morning prayer meetings before work. It was well known that if you never did attend a prayer meeting, you could forget about ever getting a raise.

My immediate supervisor was a young woman named Janice. One morning, while Janice was in the restroom, the department head went rummaging in her purse and found her birth control pills. Instead of talking to her, she called all the editorial clerks and assistants into her department and announced that we were no longer permitted to socialize with the editors, and that we were nothing more than “Jezebels, sluts and whores of Babylon”. (I found this particularly ironic since one of my co-workers graduated from a genteel and well-known Southern women’s Christian college. She’d confided in me that both her father and grandfather—church elders—had raped her. The father raped her shortly after she tearfully confided in him that she’d been raped by her grandfather. “The family that prays together”, etc. …)

The department head also announced that if it was discovered that anyone was using birth control pills, she would be fired immediately. And that if anyone didn’t like it, well, she could just resign.

So I went back to my desk and typed up a resignation letter. I also took another piece of paper, drew a swastika and taped it to the department head’s door. (What can I say? I was young.)

This was my introduction to the fact that there are these kinds of people in the world. And now the modern Republican party has adopted the untrammeled craziness that was my former department head.

Fauxrage? I don’t think so.  Is the bill unconstitutional? Yes.  Are there remedies available for women who get trapped by this craptastic bill?  Yes.  Is that the point? NO.

Whelp, guess what campers?  Jan Brewer just signed this monstrosity into law yesterday.  In fact, the version which she signed is actually worse than the originally-introduced version.  The amended version attempts to address the concerns that the bill violates a woman’s privacy by off-handedly stating that the bill does not authorize the “religiously-affiliated employer” to obtain an employee’s protected health information or to violate HIPAA.

Pffft.

Setting aside the fact that this bill contravenes President Obama’s birth control mandate, and that all women should have access to birth control coverage, how else is a female employee supposed to attest that she seeks contraception coverage for purposes unrelated to birth control without providing her employer private medical information?  It’s not possible.  Simply tossing in boilerplate language to the legislation does nothing to undo the damage and the grave privacy concerns that this bill poses.  Moreover, while the bill makes its way through the Courts, untold number of women will be affected by this horrible legislation.  This legislation puts women in the position of choosing either employment or lack of preventive healthcare services.  It is nothing short of outrageous.

And finally there’s this: The bill’s sponsor, Debbie Lesko, is the ALEC Arizona Public Sector Chair, a role which requires “working to introduce model legislation.”  Funny, that.

But I’m sure I’m just one of the untold internet bullies harassing poor wittle ALEC, right?

Stop the planet.  I want to get off.

UPDATE: I must admit that the title is alarmist. Given the seriousness of the topic — and my tendency towards the snark and hyperbolic notwithstanding — it’s the responsible thing to do.  Similarly, I retract my claim that it would be “impossible” for a female employee to seek contraception coverage without providing medical information to her employer. I think “unlikely” is a more appropriate word. Nonetheless, I encourage you to read my summary of the bill at TeamU Wiki and my comments to this post here and here.  That information combined with Susie Madrak’s post should explain why I am not going to change the title of this post, despite my acknowledgment that it is alarmist.

 

Holy Shit! Jan Brewer actually signed it. Life now begins 2 weeks before conception in Arizona

(DEMOCRATIC UNDERGROUND)   That’s right, boys and girls. In Arizona Mr. Sperm doesn’t even have to encounter Ms. Egg in order for Arizona lawmakers to insert themselves into a woman’s reproductive process. According to the law that Brewer signed, gestational age now is deemed to have begun on the first day of the last menstrual period of a pregnant woman. Abso-fucking-lutely IMPOSSIBLE, you say? Nope. In Arizona if you become pregnant, then by law it happened two weeks before you actually had intercourse.
You can’t make this shit up.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002555544

Fired For Using Birth Control? It Could Be Possible In Arizona

 

(Wendy Gittleson)    A proposed law in Arizona could give employers the right to fire women who use birth control. The bill, which sailed right through the state’s Senate Judiciary Committee, grants employers the right to ask for proof that contraceptives are being taken for non-contraceptive reasons.

Arizona House Bill 2625, authored by Majority Whip Debbie Lesko, R-Glendale, would permit employers to ask their employees for proof of medical prescription if they seek contraceptives for non-reproductive purposes, such as hormone control or acne treatment.

“I believe we live in America. We don’t live in the Soviet Union,” Lesko said. “So, government should not be telling the organizations or mom and pop employers to do something against their moral beliefs.”

Arizona, like nearly half the rest of the country, is an at-will employment state. “At will” simply means that an employee can be fired without cause. Not only would the bill grant employers the right to pry into a woman’s (and only a woman’s) medical history, it would give them opportunity to fire women for simply having a sex life. Imagine this conversation:

EMPLOYER: Um, Lisa, I see here that you have a prescription for a birth control pill.

LISA: What?

EMPLOYER: That’s right, a birth control pill. Why are you on birth control pills?

LISA: Excuse me?

EMPLOYER: Why are you on birth control?

LISA: I’m sorry, sir, but that’s personal.

EMPLOYER: No, it’s not. I believe that birth control is a sin and I’ll need to see proof that you aren’t using it so you can have unlimited sex.

LISA: What?????

EMPLOYER: Lisa, you seem rather tongue tied on the subject. Should I take that to mean that you, an unmarried woman, are using birth control only for sex?

LISA (red-faced and nearly in tears): But…I get really bad cramps. That’s why the doctor gave them to me. Plus, I don’t want to get pregnant.

EMPLOYER: So you’re admitting you have sex.

LISA: No…no. I’m not admitting anything. Isn’t that my business?

EMPLOYER: No. I need to know that I am not paying for sin. I need proof that you are using birth control for non-sexual purposes. Take the rest of the day off and go to your doctor. You can come back when you have a note from him saying that the pills aren’t for sex.

LISA: But it comes out of my insurance. I pay for that out of every paycheck.

EMPLOYER: You only pay for half the insurance. I pay for the other half. I need to make sure that you aren’t violating my First Amendment rights.

Shaking and in tears, Lisa leaves for her doctor. The doctor, also a Catholic, (the largest religious bloc) refuses to write the note. Lisa is never allowed to return to work.

Arizona currently has a law on the books prohibiting insurance companies from this sort of discrimination. HB 2625, if passed, could supersede that law by allowing the employer, and not the insurance company, to discriminate. I am not the only person raising concerns that women could lose their jobs. So is the ACLU.

The original version of the bill, on page 26, made it illegal for an employer to discriminate against women who purchased their own contraception, without employer health coverage. That protection was removed, presumably making it just fine for an employer to fire a woman for simply having pills in her purse.

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/03/13/fired-for-using-birth-control-it-could-be-possible-in-arizona/

Liberals in southern Arizona seek to form new state

(Reuters)   A long-simmering movement by liberal stalwarts in southern Arizona to break away from the rest of the largely conservative state is at a boiling point as secession backers press to bring their longshot ambition to the forefront of Arizona politics.

A group of lawyers from the Democratic stronghold of Tucson and surrounding Pima County have launched a petition drive seeking support for a November 2012 ballot question on whether the 48th state should be divided in two.

The ultimate goal of the newly formed political action committee Start our State is to split Pima County off into what would become the nation’s 51st state, tentatively dubbed Baja Arizona.

Backers have until July 5 next year to collect the 48,000 signatures required to qualify for a spot on the ballot. If they succeed, it would mark only the first hurdle in a long, circuitous process that even the most determined of supporters readily acknowledge has little chance of bearing fruit.

“We at least need to get it on the ballot, as a nonbinding resolution, to ask the people of Pima County if they want to be a part of Arizona,” Tucson attorney Paul Eckerstrom, a former Pima County Democratic chairman who launched the campaign, told Reuters. “All the stars would have to align for this to happen, but it could conceivably happen by the fall of 2013.”

U.S. history is replete with efforts to carve one state from another — from the creation of Kentucky and Tennessee in the 1790s to more modern misfires like proposals to partition Long Island from New York or to split California in half.

The last successful intrastate secession movement was the formation of West Virginia during the Civil War.

SIZE MATTERS

Although Baja Arizona would be created from just a single county, it would hardly rank as the smallest territory to be granted statehood. Pima County exceeds Rhode Island, Delaware, Connecticut and New Jersey in land mass and surpasses several other states in population, including Alaska, Montana, Wyoming or the Dakotas, according to the U.S. Census.

Partisan tensions have long been a fact of life between left-leaning Pima County and a Phoenix-based political establishment that has produced such conservative giants as Barry Goldwater and John McCain.

But the rift was heightened during the past two years as Republican Governor Jan Brewer and her allies in control of the statehouse pursued a political agenda Democrats saw as extreme, including a crackdown on illegal immigration and proposals, ultimately unsuccessful, to nullify some federal laws.

State lawmaker Ted Vogt, a Republican who represents about one-fifth of Pima County residents, dismissed the breakaway movement as posturing by disgruntled Democrats who see themselves losing clout in state politics.

The county’s three mostly rural, Republican-leaning House districts are growing, and so is their influence, Vogt said.

“I don’t think a majority of Pima County residents want to leave Arizona,” he told Reuters.

Even Tucson’s best-known Democrat, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, had to fight tooth and nail to fend of a Republican challenge in her bid for a third term in November.

The ballot measure sought by Arizona secession backers is a nonbinding measure asking Pima County voters if they support petitioning state lawmakers for permission to break away.

Before secession could occur, it would have to be approved separately by the Legislature, and by a second, binding referendum by residents of the proposed state.

If the Legislature refused, organizers could try to sidestep lawmakers with a statewide referendum. If both the Legislature and Pima County voters agreed, then it would be up to the U.S. Congress to grant Baja Arizona formal statehood.

The modern concept of Baja Arizona dates back to 1965, according to Hugh Holub, a local attorney widely credited with coining the term that year during anti-war protests at the University of Arizona. He supports the current effort.

“It sure sends a message to the rest of the world that we aren’t like the folks in Maricopa (County),” he said, referring to the state’s population center and capital.

But a more historical precedent can be found in Arizona’s origins as a U.S. territory, more than half a century before statehood was granted in 1912. The northern bulk of Arizona was ceded by Mexico to the United States in 1848, six years before the lower portion of the territory, south of the Gila River, was separately acquired in 1854 under the Gadsden Purchase.

“It should have been its own state from the get-go,” Holub said.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/liberals-southern-arizona-seek-form-state-130257516.html

Marc Stevens: The Voluntary Society

Ernest Hancock: Freedom Summit 2010

Stefan Molyneux: Going on the Offensive

REALITY REPORT #73 – Attention Wal-Mart Shoppers

APS wants to control customer thermostats

(Ryan Randazzo)   Would you let your electric company take control of your air-conditioner if it saved you money?

Arizona Public Service Co. will try to answer that question with a test project that will put customers’ thermostats into the utility’s hands.
The plan is one of several energy-saving strategies APS and other utilities are rolling out across the country to reduce peak energy demand, when utilities have to fire up extra power plants to supply electricity to customers.

By offering lower bills, utilities hope to entice enough customers into energy-saving programs to significantly reduce power demand.

APS is seeking ways to be more efficient during the hottest days of summer, when surges in demand from air-conditioners put the biggest strain on the power grid, stretch plants to production capacity and pose a threat of power disruptions.

If regulators approve the plan, APS will invite about 300 customers to volunteer in the air-conditioning load-control test and other pilot projects starting in fall 2010.

During hot afternoons the following summer, or when there is a problem on the power grid such as a downed transmission line, APS will be able to turn up their thermostats remotely or run their air-conditioners in 20-minute intervals, alternating with other people on the plan.

Alternating when air-conditioners run ensures that not every unit is running at once, reducing the peak demand.

Customers would be able to override the controls in case they didn’t want to participate that day.

The program will have a limited number of days APS can take control of thermostats and a restriction on how many hours per day they will do so, according to its application with the Arizona Corporation Commission.Participants in the trial will be offered free home-energy audits, but APS could offer customers $25 or so per summer for participating if the program becomes a permanent option for its 1.1 million customers, officials said.

APS also wants to test several other energy-saving tactics, such as in-home displays that would show homeowners how much power they are using and sending customers information about their power usage to cellphones.

The utility also has two new “time of use” rate plans recently approved by regulators that charge more for on-peak power and provide savings for off-peak usage.

Those plans charge as much as 49 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity used from 3 to 6 p.m., while charging as little as 5 cents a kilowatt-hour off-peak.

The hope is that customers will respond to the price signals, saving power by turning up their thermostats and waiting to do chores like washing clothes until 8 p.m. or later.

“We do think there is going to be interest across the spectrum of offerings we have,” said Barbara Lockwood, director of smart-grid programs for APS. “We are exploring techniques that will allow customers to understand their consumption more and help manage their costs.”

Smart-grid programs use new technology to allow the utility to communicate electronically with meters and customers to reduce energy consumption.

APS and Salt River Project both import power in the summer to meet peak electricity demand, which is about double peak winter demand.

The price the utilities pay for that power on the market depends on demand across the West. They contract for most of the power ahead of time and pass the cost directly to their customers.

APS officials hope the data from the pilot project during the 2011 and 2012 summers will allow them to offer the programs to all customers.

“We also will be monitoring how our customers feel about the technology,” Lockwood said. “If their thermostat is adjusted up 2 degrees, did that really have an affect on their comfort or not?”

APS could test different changes to thermostats and other details, such as the length of time they can control thermostats.

Participants in the test program would benefit by using less electricity and having lower bills, and as an incentive, APS also would provide them with a free home-energy audit worth about $100 to find where else they can save energy and money.

APS and SRP already have time-of-use rate plans, but the APS test project is the latest move to increase their focus on energy efficiency.

Both Phoenix-area utilities also offer businesses similar “load control” programs that allow the utilities to cut power to customers and pay them cash to cut their power during certain peak-demand events.

It’s more common to target big businesses for such programs because they can shed power quickly by shutting down large pieces of equipment or even turning off alternating rows of lights.

Household “demand response” programs have been used or tested in a number of states, including Idaho, Florida, Texas and Colorado. A program in Fort Collins, Colo., pays participants $20 over five months to allow the utility to cycle their air-conditioners.

“I’ve seen studies where customers were not even aware if they were in a demand-response event or not,” said John Sterling, an APS consultant for smart-grid programs.

Environmental groups that have been asking Arizona utilities to implement stronger efficiency programs to curb the need for new power plants and transmission lines welcomed the project.

“What customers are accepting is a small amount of utility control on certain hot days in exchange for whatever the utility offers you,” said Jeff Schlegel, the Arizona representative for the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project.

“It works particularly well where it’s a balanced deal between the utility and the customer, if the customer discomfort is not too much and the credit or money seems reasonable to the customer.”

Schlegel said customers likely would object to such a plan if it were mandatory, but because giving the utility control of thermostats is voluntary, the plan shouldn’t be controversial.

“Not everyone will participate,” he said.

Last year, SWEEP won a victory when the Arizona Corporation Commission required APS to reduce 22 percent of the energy it is projected to sell by 2020 through efficiency measures, including demand-response programs.

The new project should help the utility meet that goal. APS pays for efficiency projects with a tariff that averages $1.94 a month for residential customers.

Generally, this type of surcharge, and the conservation it encourages, is less expensive for the utility and its customers than the costs of building power plants and transmission lines.

To meet peak summer demand, U.S. utilities often call on power plants that might run only 20 hours a year. The new APS programs are designed to eliminate the need to build new backup plants and pay for the fuel they burn, or buy backup power on the market.

APS believes it could sign up enough households for its air-conditioning program by 2016 to reduce peak demand by as much as 150 megawatts. That could reduce the need to run about three natural-gas-burning generators at backup plants during those hours.

“Demand response is very similar to a combustion turbine (burning natural gas),” Sterling said. “We call on it during certain hours in the summer when we need it the most.”

Even if the programs cut customers’ energy demand only 2 to 3 percent, the timing of those savings is key, said Jim Owen, a spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, which represents shareholder-owned utilities.

“It could be the piece that allows the (electrical) system to be stable,” he said. “It can also save the utility significant money because of the price they pay for energy during those peaks.”

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