Last night a painfully shy woman came to the door to ask for contributions to the Women's Choice Clinic in Oakland, CA. She looked absolutely miserable, could not maintain eye contact, and did not make a particularly articulate case for the fiscal crisis organizations like this one are facing under the advance of Bush's War on Women. But I believe in the cause, and I also know how hard it is to canvass for a living -- having tried it myself for about 2 and a half evenings -- so I wrote a check. The visit was particularly timely, since I'd just read an article in Prevention Magazine called "Access Denied" - about the growing numbers of doctors and pharmacists who are refusing to provide hormonal contraception on the grounds that it causes "silent abortions." Since (according to the Prevention article) 95% of American women use some form of birth control during their childbearing years, it's hard to imagine this trend spreading wildly without a fight. But that doesn't make it any less devastating for those women stuck with few other healthcare provider choices in parts of the country where one of these doctors or pharmacists has adopted this outrageous and untenable position. What kind of "science" is informing their medicine, anyway? As Molly Ivins has pithily observed, "approximately one fourth of all fertilized eggs are swept out on the menstrual tide before they even get near to implanting themselves in the uterine wall, and we do not hold funerals over Kotex or Tampax."

By the way, I started reading that new Molly Ivins collection, Who Let The Dogs In?, on the flight home yesterday. It's a retrospective (which she says makes her feel "slightly dead") of some of her columns about particularly memorable political figures and their foibles. The introduction includes this terrific little podium-pounder:

You have more political power than 99 percent of all the people who have ever lived on this planet. You can not only vote, you can register other people to vote, round up your friends, get out and do political education, talk to people, laugh with people, call the radio, write the paper, write your elected representative, use your e-mail list, put up signs, march, volunteer, and raise hell. All your life, no matter what else you do - butcher, baker, beggarman, thief/doctor, lawyer, Indian chief - you have another job, another responsibility: You are a citizen. It is an obligation that requires attention and effort. And on top of that, you should make it into a hell of a lot of fun.

Amen.

As usual, Krugman is worth reading. Too bad our "journalists" won't rise to the occasion.