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Despite the terrible loss this week for LGBT civil rights in several states including California, women’s reproductive rights made much progress. A major tactic of the right wing has been to chip away at the access to reproductive health care for women and girls. The last 8 years of a Bush administration extremely hostile to women’s reproductive health created the perfect climate for such efforts. But it also seems to have helped usher in a backlash from pro-choicers. Here in California, for the third time, anti-choice advocates placed a measure on the ballot to limit the rights of pregnant teens, and for the third time, they failed. In Colorado a measure to grant rights to embryos from the moment of fertilization failed, and in South Dakota, a sweeping ban on abortion, with few exceptions, also failed. Even the defeat of the Republican candidate for President was a victory for pro-choice activists: McCain and Palin’s records on women’s health has been abysmal.

GUEST: Kate Michelman, former President of NARAL Pro-Choice America, author of “Protecting the Right to Choose”