Women’s Roles Set Off Debate Along the Trail
Published: April 12, 2012
[...]

“I’m not a Mitt Romney supporter, but I think the comments about his wife were petty and unfair,” said Beth Shelton, 33, a property manager and mother who described herself as a moderate independent voter. “I was a stay-at-home mom for nine years. Working at home is hard. Working at an office is hard. There’s no way to say what’s easier. That’s not the point.”

Ms. Shelton continued: “There are a lot of real issues right now with Republicans and women, things having to do with birth control and women’s health care. There are more important things to be talking about having to do with supporting families, from a woman’s perspective.”

Other women echoed those sentiments.

Charlotte Udziela, a retired community college instructor in Beaverton, Ore., who supports Mr. Obama, said she wished both campaigns would address the issues of work, home economics and family balancing with more gusto. There is a “huge divide,” she said, between wealthy women like Mrs. Romney and women of more modest means who would like to stay home to raise children, but cannot afford to.

If Ms. Rosen “had chosen her words differently,” said Ms. Udziela, a grandmother of five, “this might have been a more useful discussion, something we should be talking about.”

[...]
...Appearing on Fox News on Thursday, Mrs. Romney stressed that she, too, had known struggles. But given that Mr. Romney’s wealth is estimated at $250 million, she acknowledged that her struggles had not been financial.

[...]

In this case, Mr. Romney’s campaign has used the controversy to raise money. In an e-mail titled “War on Moms,” Beth Myers, Mr. Romney’s former chief of staff, asked for $6 in exchange for a “Moms Drive the Economy” bumper sticker. “If you’re a stay-at-home mom, the Democrats have a message for you: you’ve never worked a day in your life,” the e-mail said. “America deserves a president who will bring us together — not pit us against each other.”

Mr. Obama’s top political advisers moved rapidly to distance him from Ms. Rosen, noting that she is not a paid adviser to the campaign or to the Democratic National Committee. Mr. Obama’s most senior campaign aides posted on Twitter their outrage at Ms. Rosen’s comments moments after she made them.

“I could not disagree with Hilary Rosen any more strongly,” said Jim Messina, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager. “Her comments were wrong and family should be off limits. She should apologize.”

[...]

There has already been a huge post about this....

This specific item isnt about the war on women , so dont even try to lump it in with that. Its simply an overbearing adversarial liberal doing what they do best - being adversarial & indiscriminately potshotting their sworn enemies. Limbaugh got nuttin' on those goons.

Rosen obviously doesnt have a problem with Democrat stay-at-home moms, or women with disabilities in general, unless they are from the other party & in the spotlight it seems. Typical blame-gaming loudmouth adversarial liberal .

I had a transvaginal ultrasound: My perspective on the mandate that touched off 2012′s War On Women
By Megan Carpentier
Tuesday, April 17, 2012 15:37 EDT

Though Texas, Oklahoma and North Carolina all managed to get away with passing transvaginal ultrasound mandates for women seeking abortions with little national attention, it took my former home state of Virginia’s effort to do the same to bring people’s undivided attention to the anti-abortion movement’s long fight to make abortion as humiliating, expensive, difficult and unobtainable as constitutionally permissible. And not only did all that attention kill the Virginia bill (and a similar one in Pennsylvania), it touched off what some have taken to calling the GOP’s War On Women, though I’d argue these efforts started long before the election cycle.

But while many people weighed in on the mandate and its emotional weight for women forced to endure it, few women — with the notable exception of Carolyn Jones, who wrote about her encounters with the mandatory ultrasound law in Texas — wrote about what it’s like to go through one. Rather, quietly, woman after woman told me about having a transvaginal ultrasounds in other, medically-necessary contexts: to identify ovarian cysts, to help explain painful menstrual cycles and rule out cancer. All of them thought forcing women to undergo unnecessary transvaginal ultrasounds to prove a political point about abortion was horrific; none of them wanted to go on the record about what it was like to have an ultrasound wand inserted into their bodies.

So, with the help of the generous staff at Preterm in Cleveland, Ohio, I stepped out of my skirt and onto an examination table to have a completely unncessary transvaginal ultrasound, and I documented the experience, which you can watch below. [MODEST VIDEO OF CARPENTIER ON THE EXAM TABLE IS AVAILABLE WITH THE ARTICLE ON RAWSTORY - (where4 edit)]

As you might be able to tell, it was vigorously uncomfortable — more than a typical pelvic exam, with which most women are very familiar. In part, it’s more uncomfortable because the technician has to press the wand directly against the areas she wants to get an image of — your uterus, Fallopian tubes and ovaries — so there’s more movement and more direct contact with pressure-sensitive areas of your body; you’re also not lying flat on your back to facilitate access to the upper reaches of your vagina; and you’re being penetrated with a longer, rigid object than is used in a regular pelvic exam. In my case, as the technician explained after, my uterus is “high,” or tilted toward my abdomen, so she had to tilt the wand accordingly — and because it was so uncomfortable, she halted the exam before fully exploring my Fallopian tubes or ovaries. If I had been pregnant (which I knew I was not), the exam might have lasted longer as she looked to rule out an ectopic pregnancy and locate the miniscule gestational sac.

It was not, however, like being raped, despite all the furor-generating headlines and “Doonesbury” cartoons that were printed. It was uncomfortable to the point of being painful, emotionally triggering (and undoubtedly is moreso for victims of rape or incest or any woman in the midst of an already-emotional experience) and something that no government should force its citizens to undergo to make a political point. But it wasn’t like being raped — and using language like that not only minimizes rape for its survivors but makes them and other women more frightened of the procedure, which has significant and important medical uses.

Notably, Preterm has a policy of performing ultrasounds on all patients seeking abortion, though Ohio law does not yet require it. For medical reasons, they use ultrasound to confirm pregnancies (in case of false positives), rule out ectopic pregnancies and physically locate the gestational sac in order to perform better, safer abortions. Patients that do not wish to undergo a transvaginal ultrasounds early in their pregnancies can opt to return at a slightly later date, when they are far enough along (though not too far along for a first trimester abortion) to be able to visualize something on the ultrasound.

But that, of course, is the choice of the patients and the medical professionals at Preterm. It’s not a choice to be made at a distance by elected officials with an ideological axe to grind, little medical knowledge and a belief that it’s acceptable to require doctors to put unnecessary instruments inside women’s bodies in an effort to achieve in practice what they can’t constitutionally pass into law: an end to abortion..

I myself am still trying to get a handle on what this "War On Women" thing actually is.

There are twice as many women out of work , than men, under the Obama administration.

Obama's policies have been JOB KILLERS.