"Your DNA is mine, little girl!"

Molly Ivins once called Texas the national laboratory for bad government. To cite only one example, laws regulating abortion just don't come much worse than ours.

There is a growing trend for politicians to dodge this powder keg issue by mouthing innocuous-sounding platitudes about "reducing the number of abortions." But with a Christian right-approved Democratic initiative as political cover, two Republican state legislators are leading a full-on charge, mounted for battle on a Trojan donkey.

Should they succeed, the confidentiality of personal information, and medical privacy as we know it, will become a thing of the past for women in Texas.

So writes the anonymous journalist "moiv", who in the past year and a half has covered the Texas GOP's assault on reproductive rights in the Lone Star State with an intensity almost certainly unmatched by any journalist on the planet. In "Your DNA Is Mine, Little Girl", moiv describes a new Texas State bill that, overriding parental authority, would collect genetic information on minors. In Medical Privacy? Have an Abortion and Kiss It Good-Bye moiv describes a new bill that would require women in Texas who get abortions to provide extensive personal information as a precondition of the procedure ( see inside for excerpt of story )

Meanwhile Wade Horn, the head of the 47 Billion dollar federal Health and Human Services Agency has been caught doling out a contract of almost 1 million dollars to an organization he himself founded, and the 20 million member hard-right Southern Baptist Convention has decided to oppose oral contraceptives on the basis that they are "abortificants".

On the brighter side however, a new soon to be released documentary on the politics of abortion in the United States, "Lake Of Fire", will show a face of the US antiabortion movement seldom given media attention - "religiously inspired domestic terrorism". Also, a new biography of anti-feminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly challenges the view that the rise of the US Christian right was powered merely by right wing think tanks, by highlighting Schlafly's substantial track record of mobilizing and organizing American conservative women ; "Schlafly drove feminists crazy, both because she out-organized them, and because she should have been one of them."