Afternoon Roundup: Speaker Boehner as Pro-Life Superhero?

Speaker John Boehner is like a super-hero to the anti-choice crowd but will he really be the "most pro-life Speaker in history"?; UN Chief leaves half the world's population out of his end-of-the-year wrap up.

Speaker John Boehner is like a super-hero to the anti-choice crowd but will he really be the “most pro-life Speaker in history”?; UN Chief leaves half the world’s population out of his end-of-the-year wrap up.

  • The Hill reports on the anti-choice organization, The Susan B. Anthony List, and its plans for mobilizing “280,000 grassroots activists” to support their super-hero, “the most pro-life Speaker in history” Speaker Boehner. Boehner has pledged to repeal the health reform law, and push for passage of the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act.
  • On the flip side? NARAL Pro-Choice America is telling Americans to StandUpToBoehner(.org). The organization’s new web site says that Boehner’s attempts to repeal the health reform law is not the only weapon in his arsenal, he plans on pushing a “Stupak on Steroids” bill to ban coverage of abortion in the health reform bill. 
  • IPS says UN Chief Ban Ki-Moon left women entirely out of his year-end wrap-up of UN activities, in a recent op-ed published in an Australian newspaper. Writing of the Millennium Development Goals (of which there are eight), Ban Ki-Moon discussed those related to poverty, human rights, climate change and more. The only goal he conspicuously left out? The one related to women’s health and rights. As well, and most notably, the newest UN agency, UN Women, created to promote gender empowerment was utterly absent from the piece.