Sarah Kliff

In their seventh co-written book, husband-wife team Dick Morris and Eileen McGann give their take on the Obama administration (summary: lots of debt, socialism run rampant), which Democrats should be targeted by Republicans in the 2010 congressional races, and the best way to campaign against them.

How can the next generation defend abortion rights when they don't think abortion rights need defending?

The Nebraska Legislature has passed a law barring abortions after 20 weeks because of the possibility that the fetus could feel pain. The law, approved by the state legislature earlier today and expected to be signed by Gov.

While the congressional fight over health-care reform has wrapped up and legislators moved on, a new, state-level battle over abortion coverage has just begun.

Earlier this morning, The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder broke news that Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak will retire, which has since been confirmed by the Associated Press.

  The teen birthrate declined 2 percent in 2008, according to new, preliminary data released by the CDC. The new number is a welcome relief for public-health officials: between 2006 and 2008, the teen birthrate had increased 4 percent, halting a decades-long trend of dropping adolescent childbearing through the 1990s and early 2000s.What caused this drop in teen births is difficult to say but will likely be subject to numerous spins in the coming days.

A great, thought-provoking Trudy Lieberman piece in the Columbia Journalism Review today on whether The New Republic's Harold Pollack is accurate in calling "Press coverage of health care reform … the most careful, most thorough, and most effective reporting of any major story, ever." Lieberman's basic point: while there has been a whole lot of reporting on health-care reform, it hasn't necessarily left Americans more informed.

It was a high figure that I heard again and again covering health-care reform this past week: 16,500. That was the number of "bureaucrats" or "IRS agents" that numerous Republicans said would be necessary to enforce the individual mandate—basically, to make sure that Americans comply with the law to carry health insurance.

If Congress is mostly Democrats, why is there an anti-abortion-rights majority in the House? Because Republicans treat abortion as a litmus test, while Democrats don't.

Late last week, the Georgia Senate approved a bill barring gender- and race-specific abortions. If it becomes law, the bill, dubbed The Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act, would criminalize a person who performs an abortion "with the intent to prevent an unborn child from being born based upon race, color or gender of the child or the race or color of either parent of that child."This comes on the heels of another proposed abortion law, this one in Nebraska, that would bar abortions past 20 weeks'...

Implementing large-scale health-care reform is really, really difficult. As I wrote in a story today, it requires "a sweeping outreach effort alongside meticulous attention to details, and they stumble without both key elements in place."  But one nonprofit has already decided to take on the challenge: introducing Enroll America. "We want to make sure everybody gets enrolled," says Ron Pollack, the nonprofit's founder and current head of Families USA, a health-care-reform advocacy group. "This...

How do you get 30 million Americans to sign up for health insurance? With great difficulty.

While one House vote still stands between health-care reform and its final passage, the Democratic National Committee is wasting no time thanking vulnerable members of Congress who stuck with the party—and going after Republicans who stood in its way.

Some women's rights advocates want payback for going along with anti-abortion-rights provisions needed to secure health-care reform. But women have already come out ahead.

Abortion-rights supporters arguably threw up a white flag in health-care reform, deciding not to hold up the entire bill on their specific issue. And that, Katha Pollitt argues over at The Nation, means that women's-rights groups deserve payback. "You can call prochoice leaders hypocritical or cowardly or feeble or excessively deferential to the president's agenda.

Nancy Pelosi pulled it off: she got 219 House Democrats to pass the Senate's health-care-reform bill and, with the stroke of President Obama's pen, health care-reform will move from bill to law.Except, not quite.

Michigan Rep. Bart Stupak arguably saved health-care reform, agreeing to sign on to the bill and defend his decision on the House floor, in the face of jeers from Republican opponents and a heckler who seemed to have called him "baby killer." In saving reform, Stupak looks to have put his House seat in serious jeopardy.

  Moments ago, Rep. Bart Stupak signed on to support health-care reform after the president issued an executive order, reiterating that the bill would not allow for public funding of abortion.

After two days of back and forth, we finally have a definitive word on Bart Stupak: he's a yes and the final votes for health-care reform have been clinched.

Fifteen hours in the health care reform debate is beginning to feel like a lifetime. Last night, doom-and-gloom seemed eminent for abortion rights supporters, filing out of Pelosi's office 'livid' and Bart Stupak planning a press conference for the next morning.

Yesterday, I predicted the abortion issue would end as the epic battle that never was. In the appropriately unpredictable nature of the abortion issue in health-care reform, turns out I could be completely wrong.

In addition to attempting to decipher the many twists and turns that are the Stupak saga, one of the biggest challenges in covering abortion in health-care reform has been finding the best words to describe those who support or oppose abortion rights.

Nebraska has long played a pivotal role in the national abortion battle, mounting the first defense of the "partial birth" ban before the Supreme Court in 2000.

Abortion opponents were hoping that Bart Stupak's final stand on abortion would look something like this (video care of Catholic Vote): In the end, though, signs are pointing toward more of a retreat than a battle.

Obama will take to Fox News tonight to talk health-care reform. "Many of the falsehoods and myths about health reform gained traction with Glenn Beck and others on Fox, so the president is returning to the scene of the crime to make the final sale," a White House official explained to Politico earlier today.

Despite criminal charges in two states, the head of a radical right-to-die group insists his work is compassionate and necessary.

The past week of news in abortion and health-care reform has been, frankly, pretty useless. The narrative changed every day—there was a compromise, then there wasn't.

"Americans who support women's reproductive rights need to make their voices heard," The New York Times editorial opined yesterday. Noting the number of state legislatures debating bills that would significantly limit a woman's access to abortion—notably Utah's ban on "illegal abortions" and the proposed pre-viability ban in Nebraska—the Times editorial board urged supporters of abortion rights to take a more active role in the debate.

Via Politico's Live Pulse, the Archives of Internal Medicine has a great editorial this week calling attention to Obama's bad example setting in his most recent physical (no, not that whole smoking thing).

The Women Donors Network and Communications Consortium Media Center came out with some great polling today that really drives home why abortion has become such a central issue in health-care reform, even when the vast majority of us think it should not be.