In November the people of Missouri’s 8th district have the chance to send a Progressive to congress. To top it off it’s also Rush Limbaugh’s home district So here’s everything you need to know .

A new report from the Center for Reproductive Rights reviews the losses of women’s rights throughout the states in the aftermath of health reform.

Written by Amie Newman for RHRealityCheck.org – News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.

Why progressives should actually be pleased with the Missouri voters rejection of the individual mandate.

Missouri voters passed Proposition C, seeking to exempt Missourians from the individual mandate of the health insurance reform recently passed, and also the employer mandate. But if Missouri wants to nullify a federal law — what a quaint, pre-civil war notion — they’re going to have to defend it in court.

Fortunately, Missouri has plenty of money in the state coffers to waste it on a frivolous lawsuit.

Or, you know, not.

Today, in what I hope will become the first of a series, Josh Mull and I interviewed a challenger running for federal office who’s rethinking the war in Afghanistan.

Tommy Sowers is the Democratic candidate for Missouri’s 8th district, currently being held by Republican Jo Ann Emerson. He’s a veteran who served in Kosovo and Iraq. Yesterday, he published a widely read op-ed in the Huffington Post entitled “Who Will Pay for the Afghan Military? The Question Congress Must Answer Now.”

Seventeen percent of sexually active teenage girls said they used the rhythm method as a means of birth control in 2008, up from just 11% in 2002, according to the latest report from the CDC. For most of these girls “rhythm method” means guessing the least risky day to have unprotected sex. You and I both know that one in five teenage girls isn’t taking her temperature every day and charting the consistency of her cervical mucus on the calendar.

A bill passed in Missouri shows how ill-informed lawmakers are about state law, how little respect they have for women, and how little they actually know about real women’s lives.

Written by Pamela Merritt for RHRealityCheck.org – News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.

The Missouri Senate opened debate Thursday on a bill to replace the state’s income tax with a higher and broader sales tax. It’s an idiotic idea all around.

Women of color are not children unable to make decisions and our children are not “on the brink of extinction” through an organized genocidal plot. Justice is found when a people are empowered by medically accurate knowledge rather than dogma.

Written by Pamela Merritt for RHRealityCheck.org – News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.