A bill advancing in Kansas would mandate reporting for miscarriages at any stage in pregnancy, the first step along the path to criminalizing pregnant women’s bodies. Under an amendment attached to HB 2613 – which was originally intended to update the state’s procedure for issuing birth certificates for stillborn babies – doctors would be required to report all of their patients’ miscarriages to the state health department.

HB 2613 initially sought to provide an alternative to the state’s current stillbirth certificate, which some parents believe over-emphasizes their child’s death in an emotionally painful way. Sen. Mary Pilcher-Cook (R), one of the most ardent abortion opponents in Kansas, added the miscarriage reporting requirement last week. Now, the bill’s original author is withdrawing his support from his own legislation.

‘I can’t support the bill as it was amended,” Kansas Rep. John Doll (R) told ThinkProgress. ‘I think it waters it down and makes it into a political statement. I wanted a bill to help give closure to some families – I didn’t want it to have anything to do with pro-life or pro-choice issues.”

But Pilcher-Cook frequently wades into these issues. The lawmaker has also attempted to outlaw surrogacy, weaken the state’s sex ed requirements, […]

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How many Republicans in Congress, would you guess, believe that corporate shareholders should generally be liable for the debts accrued or crimes committed by that corporation? Working in the other direction, how many free market-loving, conservative donor capitalists believe corporate shareholders or board members ought to be able to tip the playing field by voting said corporation into non-compliance with laws and regulations that apply to competitors?

I’d wager that the number is zero. The impermeability of the corporate veil is central to their beliefs about how the economy should be organized, how the market should promote risk taking, encourage investment and so on.

And yet this week, nearly all of them – whether they’ve thought it through or not – will claim to want to pierce the corporate veil in the latter direction. On Tuesday the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby – a case that will determine whether employers who oppose the use of birth control on religious grounds can deny female workers contraceptive coverage guaranteed to them by the Affordable Care Act.

That’s how the stakes are typically described. The centrality of contraception to the case has united religious conservatives behind Hobby Lobby (a nationwide […]

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Taxpayers in 14 states will bankroll nearly $1 billion this year in tuition for private schools, including hundreds of religious schools that teach Earth is less than 10,000 years old, Adam and Eve strolled the garden with dinosaurs, and much of modern biology, geology and cosmology is a web of lies.

Now a major push to expand these voucher programs is under way from Alaska to New York, a development that seems certain to sharply increase the investment.

Public debate about science education tends to center on bills like one in Missouri, which would allow public school parents to pull their kids from science class whenever the topic of evolution comes up. But the more striking shift in public policy has flown largely under the radar, as a well-funded political campaign has pushed to open the spigot for tax dollars to flow to private schools. Among them are Bible-based schools that train students to reject and rebut the cornerstones of modern science.

Decades of litigation have established that public schools cannot teach creationism or intelligent design. But private schools receiving public subsidies can – and do. A POLITICO review of hundreds of pages of course outlines, textbooks and school websites found that many […]

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Jimmy Carter is making a ‘call to action” over discrimination and violence against women, addressing issues from female genital mutilation to child marriage in a new book out in the US this week.

The 39th US president writes in A Call to Action of his belief that ‘the most serious and unaddressed worldwide challenge is the deprivation and abuse of women and girls”, which he says is ‘largely caused by a false interpretation of carefully selected religious texts and a growing tolerance of violence and warfare, unfortunately following the example set during my lifetime by the United States”.

Out tomorrow from Simon & Schuster in the US, the book is already drawing positive reviews: the Pittsburgh Post Gazette said that it ‘should not only be required reading in America, but should also serve as the template for a complete reinterpretation of the religious views behind our treatment of each other”. The St Louis Post-Dispatch said it ‘reinforces [Carter’s] dedication to wiping out injustice – and his ability to move others to join his cause”.

Simon & Schuster said that Carter, who, with his wife Rosalynn, has visited 145 countries, his charity The Carter Centre active in more than half of them, was ‘encouraged […]

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