theweaselking | Aug. 1st, 2005

Aug. 1st, 2005

A state lawmaker wants to prohibit clinics serving University of Wisconsin campuses from providing students with birth control pills and devices, contending such services promote promiscuity.

Rep. Daniel LeMahieu, R- Oostburg, said he was outraged when he learned University Health Services, the clinic serving UW-Madison students, had taken out ads in the two campus newspapers suggesting students get advance emergency contraceptive prescriptions before leaving town for spring break.

LeMahieu has begun drafting legislation to prohibit university health centers from promoting or providing the medication, known as the morning after pill. But because the pill is just a higher dose of the contraceptive hormones found in birth control pills, LeMahieu said he also will seek to block the university from prescribing all birth control pills.

Extreme? Not to this father of three college graduates, who maintains the university has no business helping students with family planning. "Sometimes to get somebody's attention, you hit him over the head with a 2 by 4," LeMahieu said. "Here comes the 2 by 4."

It appears to have had the intended effect. Health professionals, women's rights activists and students expressed shock at a proposal that revives what they said was an outmoded notion that denying young people access to birth control will stop them from having sex.

"This is what I'm now calling the stork theory of reproduction that the Republicans are pushing," said Rep. Therese Berceau, D-Madison. "They would prefer to believe that if we just tell people not to have sex, they won't have sex. And maybe people will then also believe that babies come from the stork."

Family Planning Health Services is awarding its first 'Monthly Misconception Award' to LeMahieu, for proposing to ban contraceptives and information from university campuses.

FPHS Executive Director and President of the Wisconsin Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, Lon Newman, said that: "Representative LeMahieu received the tongue-in-cheek award for his legislation because it has no medical basis, no scientific basis, no constitutional basis, no financial basis, and no ethical basis. Undeterred -- even by an advisory opinion by the state attorney general that a law restricting free speech on campuses would be unconstitutional -- State Representative LeMahieu and 48 of his assembly colleagues, voted for the bill anyway." A few members of our state Senate will push ahead and are likely to pass the same bill in that chamber. Governor Doyle has said he will veto the bill.

"Representative LeMahieu's opposition to birth control is consistent," said Newman. "He continuously insists that access to emergency contraception encourages risky and promiscuous behavior and he falsely claims that emergency contraception causes 'a chemical abortion.'"</blockquote

Finally, Why D&D Sucks: #209 in a series.

Writer Terry Pratchett has poked fun at Harry Potter author JK Rowling for saying she did not realise she was writing a fantasy novel. His comments came on Rowling's 40th birthday, also Harry Potter's birthday.

In a recent interview with Time magazine, Rowling said she was "not a huge fan of fantasy" and was trying to "subvert" the genre. The magazine also said Rowling reinvented fantasy fiction, which was previously stuck in "an idealised, romanticised, pseudofeudal world, where knights and ladies morris-dance to Greensleeves".[1]

Pratchett, whose first fantasy novel was published 34 years ago and has since sold more than 40 million books, said in his letter that the genre had always been "edgy and inventive". "Ever since The Lord of the Rings revitalised the genre, writers have played with it, reinvented it, subverted it and bent it to their times," he wrote.

His full response to Rowling's admission that she did not think Harry Potter was fantasy as she was writing it, was:

"I would have thought that the wizards, witches, trolls, unicorns, hidden worlds, jumping chocolate frogs, owl mail, magic food, ghosts, broomsticks and spells would have given her a clue?"
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[1]: Apparently Rowling's been subjected to Starhawk and it's completely burned out parts of her brain. Actually, that might explain the names in Potter.