According to the Boston Globe, a Hollywood studio survey found that two-thirds of teenage girls consider themselves fans of horror flicks. And it’s not just young girls. Taryn Plumb writes:

Women have swarmed to horror movies for the past five years, according to Ian Mohr, box office editor for Variety, a top entertainment industry publication. Generally, they make up slightly more than 50 percent of the audience, he said.

Thus, studios have tweaked their marketing and casting choices to entice them. They’re running advertisements for scary movies during popular television shows like “Laguna Beach” on MTV, and enlisting actresses such as Sarah Michelle Gellar to wrangle the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” crowd into line.

PG-13 releases draw the most gals, he said — such films are more plot heavy and don’t feature as much gratuitous gore or sex.

But a large number of females also are ravenous for gruesome, grisly, R-rated cinema, he noted.

Mohr’s take on the appeal? Today’s horror films feature “empowered” women who, in Nancy Drew fashion, solve perplexing mysteries.

“Audiences will follow a character in a film that they identify with,” he said.

The story also offers some strangely worded analysis about the influence of the feminism on movie-viewing habits: “It’s also a byproduct of the feminist movement, said Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University. Women, as a group, have grown and evolved — as has their taste in film, he said. Likewise, horror themes have broadened: It’s not all about snarling monsters chasing beauties in their underwear.”

Er, nice to know we’ve “grown and evolved.”

Columnist Ellen Goodman, meanwhile, asks, “Is there anything more depressing than the ‘Naughty Housewife’ ready to go trick-or-spanking? Sure. It’s the number of young women who will tell you fervently that as a post-feminist generation, they are liberated to make choices. And their choice for Halloween is ‘Alice in Pornland.’”

Goodman then switches to discussing the 24-year-old teaching assistant in London who was suspended recently for refusing to remove her veil, which hid all but her eyes. As she so often does, Goodman connects these issues seamlessly:

Have you noticed how much dress and undress matter? Even to prime ministers? Have you also noticed how many women believe they are making their own choices when they are actually caught in a cultural vise?

Here in America, our Halloween revelers have only the scantiest — and I do mean scantiest — idea of how the market has shaped the options that they regard as their own. Most women are only dimly aware of how we internalize the liposuctioned, breast-implanted, celebrity-shaped images that define the “right” female body. They are even less aware of a culture that defines sexy as something seen rather than felt.

There in London, a young teacher wearing the niqab seems equally unaware that the mask she dons as an act of self-expression aligns her with the mullahs of repression. After all, in today’s Iran the choices may be veil or jail. And in Afghanistan, women are choosing the burka to save their lives. As Deborah Tolman, who wrote “Dilemmas of Desire,” says, the stakes are astonishingly high: “If we can’t cover it, we can kill it. That’s the context.”

Mullahs and marketers are not the same. Nobody is forcing an American woman into the “Sultry Witch” costume. Nobody is forcing a British citizen into a full-face veil. But there is something, well, scary when women claim the “freedom” to fit into such narrow constraints of sexuality.

See also: “Woman Shopping For Halloween Costume Receives Memo From The Patriarchy” and “Halloween Costumes for Girls,” both from Feminist Law Professors.

Last month we noted that the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy had identified the annual cost of teen childbearing in the state of Arizona. Now all states know where they stand.

The Campaign has just released “By the Numbers: The Public Costs of Teen Childbearing,” a report authored by Saul Hoffman, an economics professor and department chair at the University of Delaware. The report provides the first-ever state-by-state analysis of the costs of teen childbearing.

In 2004, those numbers ranged from $12 million in Vermont to more than $1 billion in Texas. California ranked second at $896 million and Florida was a distant third at $481 million. For a quick look at the state totals, click here (PDF).

Nationally, the total cost to taxpayers (federal, state, and local) was at least $9.1 billion in 2004.

According to the Campaign, the report considers “the aggregate costs of teen childbearing to adolescents and their families, the public sector, and society at large. Key public sector cost components include: heath care, foster care, public assistance, criminal justice, and lost tax revenues.”

Teen childbearing has declined by about one-third since the early 1990s, dropping from 62 births per 1,000 teen girls in 1991 to 41 births in 2004. The abortion rate has decreased as well, from 43.5 abortions per 1,000 teen girls in 1988 to 22 in 2002, according to a report (PDF) released in September by the Guttmacher Institute.

The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy website, TeenPregnancy.org, has lots of good information worth reviewing.

Nicaragua Bans Abortions: Nicaragua’s National Assembly voted 52-0 to ban all abortions, even in cases where the mother’s life is at risk. “Nicaragua already has strong anti-abortion laws, with women and doctors who take part in abortions facing prison sentences of up to six years,” reports the BBC. “A section of the bill increasing those sentences to up to 30 years was not approved by the parliamentarians, and so will not be signed into law by the country’s President, Enrique Bolanos.”

Protesters gathered in the nation’s capital Wednesday, concerned about the law’s effect on women who suffer pregnancy complications, including ectopic pregnancies. “They are forcing women and girls to die. They are not pro-life, they are pro-death,” Xiomara Luna told Reuters.

“Test Tube Babies” on TV: PBS is airing “Test Tube Babies” as part of its American Experience series. Rachel at Women’s Health News has a write-up. Check here for local listings.

Fired Source Editor Wins Lawsuit: “After a tumultuous two-week trial, Kimberly Osorio, a former editor in chief of the Source magazine, won a workplace lawsuit against the popular hip-hop monthly, and a Manhattan jury awarded her $15.5 million,” reports the Washington Post. “Osorio, who was fired by the Source last year, sued the magazine and its founders, David Mays and Raymond Scott, alleging sexual harassment, gender discrimination, defamation, retaliatory discharge and maintaining a hostile work environment.”

“This is a victory for women in hip-hop,” Osorio said after the verdict was reached Monday. Read more coverage from SOHH.com. Interestingly, the jury threw out the charges of harassment and discrimination but found that Osario was fired for complaining to her bosses about those very charges. She was awarded money for the retaliatory firing and for defamation.

Nip/Tuck to a Whole New You: Diana McLellan reviews the new book “Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession With Cosmetic Surgery” by NYT writer Alex Kuczynski, who first felt the need for Botox injections at age 28.

Medicare’s Racial Divide: Researchers at Harvard and Brown universities looking at the medical status of more than 334,000 elderly patients enrolled in 151 health plans have determined there’s a huge gap in the health status between blacks and whites. The differences were noticeable even for those enrolled in high quality health plans.

These findings suggest “that the problem of healthcare disparities is widespread and deeply rooted, reflecting medical, social, and economic factors ranging from physicians not being culturally sensitive, to patients not being able to afford medications or find stores offering fresh fruits and vegetables,” reports the Boston Globe. “Previous studies had looked at whether blacks and whites nationwide received medical tests at the same rate — which they don’t. Health policy specialists not involved with today’s report called it a landmark study because it looked at the actual health of the patients and found disparities regardless of where they lived or whether they belonged to high- or low-quality medical plans.”

New Breast Cancer Center Opens: “Although it kills about 60 percent of patients within five years, inflammatory breast cancer is one of modern disease’s great secrets — rarely recognized by patients, often misdiagnosed by doctors, poorly understood by researchers,” reports the Houston Chonicle. “The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center hopes to change that. On Friday, it announced it was creating the first clinic in the world dedicated to the treatment and research of inflammatory breast cancer.”

“Pink is Not the Only Color Associated with Breast Cancer”: Boston has relaunched a citywide Pink and Black campaign to raise awareness of how breast cancer affects black women, reports the Boston Globe. “Most of the ads I’ve seen were always white women, like it’s a white woman’s disease,” Carmen K. Johnson, a black woman and cancer survivor who is featured in a campaign ad, told the Globe. “It’s imperative that black women find their lumps early. The doctors still don’t know what causes breast cancer, and they surely don’t know why breast cancer in black women is more aggressive.”

Busy Ballots: “On the list of ballot measures that affect women in this year’s midterm elections, South Dakota’s initiative to repeal a statewide ban on virtually all abortions leaps out,” reports Women’s eNews. “But there are about 200 initiatives on ballots next month — the third-highest number since the first measure was voted on in 1904 — and many also directly affect women.”

My First Stripper Pole: Oh, yes. Via Feministing.

Today’s New York Times looks at the disparaging remarks Republican John Spencer, who is running against Hillary Clinton in the U.S. Senate race in New York, made about his opponent’s appearance.

Spencer has since apologized, but not before re-opening the discussion over the relevance of a candidate’s looks, and even the lengths politicians will go to conceal their makeovers — though public perception toward plastic surgery has changed dramatically.

From all the denials, it appeared that Mr. Spencer recognized that criticizing a candidate for her looks was beyond the pale, even in a campaign in which a challenger is lagging in the polls by more than 30 percentage points and is in desperate need of some attention. But looks have always mattered in politics, and in an age of 24-hour television news, it has become even more relevant.

What was especially intriguing about Mr. Spencer’s off-the-cuff remarks, as reported in The Daily News, was his speculation that Mrs. Clinton had evolved from an ugly duckling to the presentable 59-year-old woman she is today with the help of “millions of dollars” of “work.”

And if she had: Would it matter?

With Americans spending $12 billion a year getting injected, stapled and snipped, cosmetic surgery long ago went mainstream. Yet there is one arena in which an accusation of having work done still stings, and that is in politics.

Interestingly, all the politicians quoted about their looks, or cited for having been scrutinized for undergoing Botox injections or plastic surgery, are men. Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Kerry, Phil Gramm, Richard Gephardt, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi … writer Marc Santora even includes an excerpt from a letter in 1860 to show that appearances — and the integrity of appearances — have long been of concern to male candidates:

With a beard, “You would look a great deal better, for your face is so thin,” wrote Grace Bedell, 11. “All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be president.”

The reply came back promptly four days later:

“As to the whiskers, having never worn any, do you not think people would call it a piece of silly affectation if I were to begin it now?

“Your very sincere well-wisher, A. Lincoln.”

The only woman mentioned — besides Clinton, who has denied having any work done — is Janet Reno, who dared others to ridicule her looks by appearing with Will Ferrell in the “Saturday Night Live” sketch “Janet Reno’s Dance Party.”

By not recognizing how “looks” have always haunted women (Condoleeza Rice’s dress size, anyone?), the NYT fails to properly contextualize what Spencer was doing to Clinton. It’s not a gender-neutral act.

Plus: Scrutinizing public figures for their supposedly cosmetically altered looks isn’t just confined to politics, it seems. According to Ben Roethlisberger, quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers, it is even occurring in the most “manly” of arenas — on the football field. Oh, dear!

Following up on the New Jersey state Supreme Court decision that calls for equal rights for gay and lesbian couples but left the matter of marriage up to the Legislature, The New York Times has great coverage, assembled together here: News Analysis | Court Outlines Rights | A Fresh Fight | The Plaintiffs | The Justices | McGreevey’s Reaction | AUDIO: Back Story (mp3) | The Decision (pdf) | Empire Zone Blog

If you’re pressed for time, jump right to the AP’s simple Q&A about the state Supreme Court decision (via the Boston Globe). Reuters published a round-up of reactions from same-sex marriage activists, opponents and public officials.

And did you hear about Hillary Clinton? Via The Empire Zone:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton told a group of gay elected officials last night that she would support a gay marriage law in New York if a future governor and legislature chose to enact one, according to three participants at the meeting.

Mrs. Clinton listened and spoke for more than an hour with the three-dozen officials from New York, as they sat down — by coincidence — a couple of hours after the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that gay couples were entitled to the same legal rights and financial benefits as heterosexual couples.

Continue reading Patrick Healy’s post here.

Healy also points to Paul Schindler’s story at Gay City News, which offers more details about Clinton’s exchange with participants. As for Clinton’s previous stand on gay marriage and how she got to this point:

She also suggested that language she used when she first ran for the Senate in 2000 explaining her opposition to marriage equality based on the institution’s moral, religious, and traditional foundations had not reflected the “many long conversations” she’s had since with “friends” and others, and that her advocacy on LGBT issues “has certainly evolved.”

On Wednesday, Clinton presented her position on marriage equality as more one of pragmatism.

“I believe in full equality of benefits, nothing left out,” she said. “From my perspective there is a greater likelihood of us getting to that point in civil unions or domestic partnerships and that is my very considered assessment.”

The Chicago Tribune has published several interesting stories on breast cancer this week — none of them about the color pink.

First up is a front-page story on a new DNA test that may reveal a woman’s “odds” of developing breast cancer. Judy Peres writes:

The test doesn’t check for mutations in the rare BRCA genes that dramatically increase cancer odds –which is often recommended for families with a lot of breast or ovarian cancer. Rather, it looks for more common genetic variations that its developers say occur more frequently in breast cancer patients than in healthy women.

The producers of such tests argue they help identify people more likely to get a disease and allow them to take action to reduce their risk. But experts say finding an association between genetic variations, or polymorphisms, and breast cancer is only the first of many steps needed to show that those variations can predict risk in healthy women.

Risk prediction tests based on DNA analysis are the newest development in a rapidly growing field. Genetic screenings — many available over the Internet — range from tests for genes known to cause specific diseases to pseudoscientific products that claim to tell consumers which nutritional supplements will keep them healthy.

Critics say some companies are exploiting consumers’ anxiety to sell them expensive tests they don’t need — products that cater to the “worried well” who can afford to pay.

The OncoVue breast cancer risk test was supposed to go on the market last spring — at a cost $647 per test — was delayed by the FDA which is now allowing the test to be sold at a discounted price of $397 to 12,000 women taking part in a study.

The test, which uses DNA from a woman’s cheek cells, looks for genetic variations called SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphism) and then adds in other potential risk factors, like age and family history of breast cancer. A computer crunches the data and produces a risk number “displayed as an absolute percentage and also in comparison to the average risk of women in her age group,” writes Peres.

Dr. Kathy Albain, director of the breast research program at Loyola University Medical Center, told the Trib: “An individualized ‘risk profile’ based on common polymorphisms is extremely premature … It is likely that this information will either give women a false sense of security or else increase anxiety needlessly.”

Craig Shimasaki, CEO of InterGenetics, which manufactures OncoVue, said data showing the validity of the OncoVue test has been gathered but has not yet been published.

The Trib also published that same day a story about a 24-year-old woman with a family history of breast cancer who learned she inherited the genetic mutation that put her at increased risk and therefore chose to have a double mastectomy.

Women who test positive for the BRCA mutation “have the power of information but face difficult decisions,” writes Bonnie Miller Rubin. “They are at much higher risk for breast cancer — between 56 and 87 percent will get the disease during their lifetime, according to the current issue of Journal of Clinical Oncology — and tend to develop a more lethal form at a younger age.”

Worried over her odds, Lindsay Avner chose surgery.

“I took away the ticking time bomb,” said Avner, one of the youngest patients at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center to elect to remove two healthy breasts.

A decade after it became possible to test for mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, experts remain divided on what to do with a positive result. Is mastectomy a pre-emptive strike that reduces risk and anxiety? Or a premature overreaction with permanent consequences?

“There’s no question that these women are pioneers — and heroes,” said Dr. Patrick Borgen, Avner’s surgeon.

The story also notes that a documentary called “In the Family” is slated to be released next fall about this first generation of women who have access to genetic information about their risk of breast cancer. Filmmaker Joanna Rudnick, who tested positive for the gene mutatation when she was 27, told the Trib, “How an individual woman experiences it is influenced by her family, her history, her place in life and her values.”

At FORCE: Facing Our Risk Of Cancer Empowered, Rudnick discusses going public with her story.

Finally, the Trib reprinted from Newsday an abbreviated version of Stephanie Zacharek’s review of “Cancer Vixen: A True Story,” a memoir documenting cartoonist Marisa Acocella Marchetto’s 11-month-long battle with and triumph over breast cancer.

Marchetto’s drawings aren’t exactly detailed, and they sometimes look a little rushed. But their casualness suggests an immediacy that suits the material. Marchetto details even the most frightening aspects of cancer with wry humor: When a doctor aspirates her tumor to “see if the cells are angry,” she draws them – with the legends “possible cancer cells, an artist’s rendition” and “magnified 3 gazillion times” – as perverse, irate smiley-faces, sticking their tongues out at her. (Each face also has one long arm growing out of it, at the end of which is a hand with the middle finger extended.)

Dr. Eric Poehlman, a former University of Vermont professor, is currently serving a year in prison for what The New York Times Magazine calls “one of the most expansive cases of scientific fraud in U.S. history.”

For years, the world-renowned researcher on topics such as obesity and menopause denied allegations that he had fabricated research and data. The multi-year investigation, initiated by a young lab technician who had considered Poehlman his mentor, involved the University of Vermont, the Department of Health and Human Resources’ Office of Research Integrity and the U.S. Department of Justice.

“The revelations,” writes Jeneen Interlandi, “led to the retraction or correction of 10 scientific papers, and Poehlman was banned forever from receiving public research money.”

Poehlman is the first scientist sentenced to prison for fabricating data. It’s a rather fascinating story that raises serious questions about issues of trust and the integrity of science. For those who are concerned with women’s health, it also means, once again, a re-evaluation of the accepted truths.

While flags have been raised in recent years about drug companies funding research through private, for-profit companies, government-funded research carried out at academic institutions is generally considered more protected by checks and balances. And those checks and balances did work in Poehlman’s case — eventually.

But as Sally Jean Rockey of the National Institute of Health said in a statement to the court on behalf of the NIH, “Science is incremental … When there’s a break in the chain, all the links that follow that break can be compromised.”

“Reproductive rights activists say they are seeing new resistance by states to sex education programs that only teach abstinence until marriage, a hallmark stance of the Bush Administration,” writes Rebecca Vesely in Women’s eNews.

According to Martha Kempner, vice president of information and communications at the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, 13 states so far have determined that their abstinence only programs are ineffective; three states are declining abstinence only funding. “I think there is a pushback by the states on accuracy,” said Kempner.

Vesely reports that the Bush administration has allotted nearly $800 million between 2001 and 2006 for abstinence only education and now wants to double funding and develop an education model to “ensure that the federal government is sending a consistent health message to teens.”

The administration might also want to check on the accuracy of that message. “On Oct. 18,” writes Vesely, “the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office warned the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that it is violating federal law by failing to require that federally funded educational programs include medically accurate information about condom effectiveness.”

Earlier this month, SIECUS released an updated review of three federally funded abstinence only programs and concluded that the curricula “are riddled with messages of fear and shame, gender stereotypes, and medical misinformation that put young people at risk.”

When Good Stories Get Bad Play: The New York Times published an academic analysis of the growing popularity of hypersexualized Halloween costumes and presented it in the Style section, complete with flashy photos of a busty blonde model demonstrating the sexpot version of Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz and three other sure-to-win-the-bar-prize outfits. The piece made it to number 2 on the Times’ most e-mailed list today. I’m sure it was on the basis of the cultural critique.

Happy Anniversary! The Women’s Research & Resource Center at Spelman College is celebrating 25 years of feminist activism with a series of talks and symposiums involving activists and scholars from around the globe. Dr. Helene Gayle, newly appointed president and CEO of CARE and former director of the Gates Foundation’s HIV, TB and Reproductive Health program, will kick-off the anniversary celebration Oct. 25.

To Bleed, Or Not to Bleed? Such is the question with new forms of birth control on the market that suspend periods for three months or more. Over at Slate, Sarah E. Richards argues in favor of a monthly reminder: “Life without getting your period, though, would be life without one of the touchstones of the female experience: a sisterhood of shared empathy, tampons and chocolate, and laundry lessons passed from grandmother to granddaughter. Liberation from premenstrual emotional peaks and valleys sounds great, but we would also lose the surge of creativity and libido that comes with the urge to strangle your houseplants. Would movies be as poignant, or garlic mashed potatoes ever taste as good?”

But writing at Salon, Carol Lloyd respectfully offers a different perspective: “I’ll keep the chocolate and the empathy, but the tampons? That’s one touchstone of the female experience I’d gladly leave on the Walgreen’s shelf.”

Bill O’Reilly claims a pregnant woman’s life could “never” be “in danger” from pregnancy complications. You’ll find plenty of facts counteracting his statements at Media Matters. I’m also betting O’Reilly doesn’t read The New Yorker.

Black Women and Breast Cancer: “A study showing an alarming gap in breast cancer death rates for black and white women in Chicago has mobilized health experts to find the root causes and recommend within a year ways to reduce the unusually high mortality among African-Americans,” reports the Chicago Tribune. “By 2003, the last year for which statistics are available, the rate for Chicago’s black women was 73 percent higher: 40.5 breast cancer deaths per 100,000, compared with 23.4 for white women. For the U.S. as a whole, the mortality rate for white women is 25.2, compared with 34.6 for black women — 37 percent higher.”

In Connecticut, Spreading the Word: Barbara Smith, an outreach coordinator for the government-funded Connecticut Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program at St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center, makes it a point to get personal wherever she is. “I present them with my story, and I say, ‘Let’s talk about it because we’re dying from this at a greater rate than any other race.’” … “When you’re sitting down playing cards, just ask your sister: When’s the last time you got your mammogram? We’ve got to talk about this.”

Maryland to Restore Benefits: The Washington Post today reports that poor legal immigrant children and pregnant women will receive health care benefits after the state’s hightest court ruled that they should not have been cut from Medicaid rolls. “This is a wonderful victory,” said Douglas M. Bregman, one of the children’s attorneys. “We only had 13 plaintiffs. Now we have everybody back in the program.”

Today’s Dads: Rebel Dad, who chronicles media coverage of stay-at-home dads, is excited about new data showing that the number of hours men spend per week on childcare is on the rise. Half Changed World has more analysis here.

Why I Gave Up on Hip-Hop: Lonnae O’Neal Parker has this to say: “When those of us who grew up with rap saw signs that it was turning ugly, we turned away. We premised our denial on a sort of good-black-girl exceptionalism: They came for the skeezers but I didn’t speak up because I’m no skeezer, they came for the freaks, but I said nothing because I’m not a freak. They came for the bitches and the hos and the tricks. And by the time we realized they were talking about bitches from 8 to 80, our daughters and our mommas and their own damn mommas, rap music had earned the imprimatur of MTV and Martha Stewart and even the Pillsbury Doughboy.”

Of Microphones and Men: Russian officials may try to spin President Vladimir Putin’s comments about envying Israeli President Moshe Katsav — who stands accused of rape — into a lost-in-translation moment. More likely it’s a good ol’ boy back-slap on a global scale.

Full Frontal Feminism: Jessica Valenti’s new book about why feminism matters isn’t in stores until 2007, but the book jacket is stirring up debate at Feministing. To get this many people talking months before a book — and not just any book but a book about feminism — is released has to be a good sign. Commenter Bear explains.

East Coast folks, take note: Big Moves is taking back the universe.

Check out this fab dance troupe and their fall extravaganza: “Gargantua: Fear Of A Fat Planet,” which is billed as nothing less than an out-of-this-world sci-fi dance odyssey.

One part dance musical, one part “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, with a blast of B-movie kitsch and some kick-ass liberation politics to boot, GARGANTUA is a campy extravaganza with more booty, more food fights, and more heart. Like other Big Moves shows, GARGANTUA showcases plus-sized performers doing dance, song, and spoken word that’ll knock your socks off. Unlike previous shows, GARGANTUA is a full-fledged musical, with an original script, fat chicks on rollerskates, and an outrageous military plot that could tear the galaxy apart.

As if you needed further incentive, the poet laureate of the Planet Gargantua is the one and only Jaclyn Friedman. I was a witness when Jaclyn brought down the house this summer at Chicago’s Green Mill during their famed poetry slam — you don’t want to miss her on stage.

“Gargantua” kicks off this weekend in Boston and then travels to Lowell and Northampton before ending up in New York. The show is rated PG-13, and all the important information concerning dates, locations and ticket info can be found here. When you buy tix, tell them Jaclyn sent you – and then tell Jaclyn I said, “Bring the show to Chi-town!”

The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen last week called for a criminal investigation into why Mentor Corp. didn’t send all its data about safety issues with new silicone breast implants to the Food and Drug Administration. David Brown of the Washington Post writes:

In a letter to the FDA’s administrator, Public Citizen said it learned of test results — some new, some reinterpreted — from a scientist at implant maker Mentor Corp. who says he could not persuade his bosses to forward the data to the regulatory agency.

The scientist had worked for 15 years for Mentor, which is based in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was let go earlier this year in a company reorganization, although he thinks his protests to superiors were part of the reason.

The FDA is in the late stage of reviewing applications by two companies to sell once more silicone breast implants for general use. Last year, the agency gave preliminary approval for the devices on condition that Mentor and a competitor, Inamed (now part of another company, Allergan), complete required tests.

Currently, most breast implants used in the United States are filled with saline solution — salt water. Silicone implants can be used only under limited conditions, generally in FDA-approved studies at specified hospitals.

Many implants are used by women who have had a mastectomy for breast cancer, but most of the 250,000 sold each year are for breast enhancement. That number is expected to rise if the more popular silicone implants are allowed back on the market.

Seriously, Tara Reid should be ordered to do PSAs.

But I digress. For the record, Mentor released a statement that read in part: “During July, representatives from FDA visited our Santa Barbara facility. They asked questions and reviewed documents specific to our preclinical testing. To our knowledge, all questions were answered to the satisfaction of FDA.”

But Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, said in a letter to FDA Acting Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach: “This new information is compelling enough to warrant a reassessment of FDA’s position. At the very least it should clearly stop any FDA final approval of either device until the withheld data has been submitted, evaluated by the FDA staff, and made available to the public. This new evidence that information has been illegally withheld from the FDA should prompt a new criminal investigation into the Mentor’s failure to promptly send the agency all new information bearing on the safety of silicone gel implants.”

Public Citizen’s letter to the FDA and the whistleblower’s letter to the FDA are available here.

Our Bodies Ourselves, the National Women’s Health Network, and the National Research Center for Women & Families urge people to write to the FDA and insist that silicone gel implants not be approved for general use until serious safety concerns have been addressed.

Don’t you love how health care is always listed as a top priority for voters — yet once the polls close, healthcare gets buried. Politicians’ forceful promises to improve the system are reduced to cluck-clucking over a system that’s deemed too out-of-control to change.

Well, a new poll by ABC News/USA TODAY/Kaiser Family Foundation released Monday shows healthcare is still a major concern, ranking just behind the economy and Iraq as the single most important issue influencing voters’ choice for Congress this year.

One in four Americans (25 percent) told pollsters that medical bills had been a problem over the past 12 months for them or a family member in their household. “That’s the highest share of Americans reporting a problem paying medical bills in a series of Kaiser surveys taken since 1997. Among those reporting a problem this year, nearly seven in 10 (69%) have health insurance,” reports the Kaiser Family Foundation.

View the full poll results at Kaiser Family Foundation or USA Today.

Both ABC News and USA Today have major healthcare-related packages under the title “Prescription for Change.” Companion pieces to each outlet’s news coverage include videos, blogs and message boards.

In a blog post at ABC News, Matthew Holt, who runs the independent Healthcare Blog, weighs in on the difficulties of fixing the healthcare system.

No one said it would be easy. But it would be nice if politicians focused on applying more than a Band-Aid after election day.

It wouldn’t be accurate to say that Daily News reporter Tracy Connor was undercover — though cotton coverups were involved.

Connor and her 3-month-old daughter, Charlie, recently visited a range of private and public spaces in New York City to gauge the response to Connor breastfeeding in public. Nursing sites included a The Apple Store, a crosstown bus, Babies “R” Us, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the posh restaurant Le Cirque.

Mothers can breastfeed in any public or private place where she is otherwise authorized to be, according to a New York state law enacted in 2002. But not all stores and restaurants seem to be up on that news.

Read Connor’s account of who asked her to relocate and who didn’t blink an eye.

Plus: I don’t know how Lindsay Sterling kept her sanity when airport security made her dump the breast milk she managed to keep pumping through three days of flights and meetings. Read her story here.

The night of the murder of the Pennsylvania school girls, I turned off the television.

I’m generally a huge TV advocate who would rather discuss media representations than ignore them. But that night it seemed like death was everywhere, and I didn’t want to watch. Three shows that I had landed on while absent-mindedly clicking the remote depicted violence against women. That was enough.

I tried that week to articulate the frustration that these killings managed to avoid scrutiny as hate crimes based on gender — as pre-meditated mysoginistic acts. Two weeks later, New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert tackles the issue head-on, challenging the cultural norms that contribute to the media’s silence.

After noting that little of the coverage following the murders made much of the fact that only girls were targeted, Herbert writes, “Imagine if a gunman had gone into a school, separated the kids up on the basis of race or religion, and then shot only the black kids. Or only the white kids. Or only the Jews.”

“There would have been thunderous outrage,” Herbert continues. “The country would have first recoiled in horror, and then mobilized in an effort to eradicate that kind of murderous bigotry. There would have been calls for action and reflection. And the attack would have been seen for what it really was: a hate crime.”

Unfortunately you need a NYT registration to read the column in full. Here’s more of an excerpt from “Why Aren’t We Shocked?“:

None of that occurred because these were just girls, and we have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that violence against females is more or less to be expected. Stories about the rape, murder and mutilation of women and girls are staples of the news, as familiar to us as weather forecasts. The startling aspect of the Pennsylvania attack was that this terrible thing happened at a school in Amish country, not that it happened to girls.

The disrespectful, degrading, contemptuous treatment of women is so pervasive and so mainstream that it has just about lost its ability to shock. Guys at sporting events and other public venues have shown no qualms about raising an insistent chant to nearby women to show their breasts. An ad for a major long-distance telephone carrier shows three apparently naked women holding a billing statement from a competitor. The text asks, “When was the last time you got screwed?”

An ad for Clinique moisturizing lotion shows a woman’s face with the lotion spattered across it to simulate the climactic shot of a porn video.

We have a problem. Staggering amounts of violence are unleashed on women every day, and there is no escaping the fact that in the most sensational stories, large segments of the population are titillated by that violence. We’ve been watching the sexualized image of the murdered 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey for 10 years. JonBenet is dead. Her mother is dead. And we’re still watching the video of this poor child prancing in lipstick and high heels.

What have we learned since then? That there’s big money to be made from thongs, spandex tops and sexy makeovers for little girls. In a misogynistic culture, it’s never too early to drill into the minds of girls that what really matters is their appearance and their ability to please men sexually.

What Herbert is getting at is respect — for childhood and for girls and women. We’re so far along on what Herbert terms the “continuum of misogyny” that acts of violence against women merely need to be packaged pretty to be suitable for cultural consumption.

“Once you dehumanize somebody, everything is possible,” Taina Bien-Aimé, executive director of Equality Now, tells Herbert. Indeed.

Boston-area residents, take note. On Tuesday, Oct. 17, at 7 p.m., the Center for New Words is presenting “In Spite of Hyde: Women Fight to Access Abortion” at the Cambridge Public Library. From the Center for New Words:

CNW is joining forces with the Eastern Massachusetts Abortion (EMA) Fund to mark the 30th Anniversary of the Hyde Amendment, which restricts federal funding (including Medicare & Medicaid) for abortion services. We’ll hear from reproductive justice activist Marlene Fried, stage a dramatic reading of the Amendment in all its ignominy, complete with stories from women whose lives have been directly restricted by the Amendment. And of course we’ll talk about what we can each do to work toward the Amendment’s demise.

OBOS’ own Ayesha Chatterjee, global translation and adaptation program assistant, will read at this event.

“In Spite of Hyde” is co-sponsored by the National Network of Abortion Funds, which this month launched the Hyde — 30 Years is Enough! Campaign.

The Campaign calls for “full public funding of abortion as a part of comprehensive health care for all, and support for low-income women to care for their children with dignity.”

Other organizations participating in the Campaign are listed here, along with information about how you can get involved. Some basic facts distributed by the Hyde-30 Years is Enough! Campaign:

* In 1976, Congress passed the Hyde Amendment, which forbids federal funding for abortion. The only exceptions are in cases of rape, incest, and danger to the life of the woman. Most states have also banned state Medicaid funding for abortion.

* Before the Hyde Amendment, federal Medicaid covered over one-third of all abortions. Since 1977 it has paid for virtually none.

* Congress also denies abortion coverage to military personnel and their families, women receiving care from Indian Health Services, and people on disability insurance.

Check out Our Bodies, Ourselves for state-by-state data that summarizes Medicaid abortion benefits available in each state.