The Senate's Democratic women are pressuring House Speaker John Boehner to drop his fight to restrict access to birth control.

In observance of International Women’s Day, all 12 Democratic women senators sent a letter Thursday to House Speaker John Boehner calling on him to rescind his pledge to push forward with efforts to restrict women’s access to contraception after the Blunt amendment was defeated in the Senate.

The senators’ letter comes in the wake of Boehner’s public pledge to continue efforts to limit birth control access in the House, where a similar version of the Blunt amendment has over 200 co-sponsors.

“Women are tired of being targets for a political strategy that endangers their health care and they want it to stop,” the senators’ letter says. “It’s time for you to put an end to the attacks on women’s health care and to work with the Senate to get back to the American people’s top priority: creating jobs and boosting our economy.”

Defeated last week, the Blunt amendment would have exempted nearly all employers from President Obama’s new rule mandating coverage of birth control for women. The amendment failed in a close 51-48 vote. Retiring Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine was the only Republican to vote against the measure.

Boehner’s promise to continue fighting also comes despite a national outcry from women, the overwhelming majority of whom have used contraception at some point in their lifetime.

“We are asking that you abandon the promise you have made to bring legislation to the House floor similar to the Blunt amendment, which was defeated in the Senate last week, and which would turn the clock back on women’s access to health care,” the senators write. “At a time when 99% of sexually active women in the U.S. have used birth control, its role in the lives of women and their families is hard to understate…. That is why the recent Republican attacks on birth control access have been so eye-opening for American women. For most American women, the battle over contraception was settled a half century ago.”

The letter was sent by Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Kay Hagan (D-N.C.), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.).

Voters Oppose Birth Control Restrictions

Meanwhile, the Greenberg Quinlan Rosner polling organization released results of a opinion survey which finds that nearly half of voters say that if their member of Congress supported the Blunt amendment (first introduced by Republican Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri), it would make them less likely to support him or her. A near consensus exists that women should have access to birth control, that insurers should cover it, and that the decision to use birth control is a private one, the pollsters say.

By wide margins, battleground voters believe that Democrats do a better job on access to birth control, women’s health issues, and abortion. While they give the Republicans an advantage on protecting religious freedom, voters are split on which party would respect their individual religious faith, the pollsters say.

Voters strongly oppose the Blunt amendment. A majority believe that religiously affiliated hospitals and colleges should not have a religious exemption. Nearly half say that they would be less likely to support a candidate for office if he or she supported the Blunt Amendment, including a majority of independents, the pollsters say.

Greenberg Quinlan Rosner conducted the opinion survey on behalf of EMILY’s List and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund to explore the impact of the birth control debate on voters in eight battleground Senate states.

The poll was conducted between February 27 and March 1, among 800 likely voters in Florida, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It has a margin of error of +/- 3.46 percent.

Scott Nance is the editor and publisher of the news site The Washington Current. He has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.

Sen. Olympia Snowe, right, bucked her party to kill the so-called Blunt amendment. But her Maine colleague, Sen. Susan Collins, left, voted to support it.

Just days after announcing her retirement due to the partisanship of the Senate, Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe helped kill a conservative measure which would have restricted the availability of contraception. Her Maine colleague, referred to as Snowe’s moderate “sister,” voted to support the bill, however.

Snowe became the lone Republican Thursday to vote against Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.)’s amendment, which would have exempted nearly all employers from President Obama’s new rule mandating coverage of birth control for women. The amendment failed in a close 51-48 vote.

Snowe stunned the political world just two days earlier by revealing that she would not run for re-election this year, by saying, “Unfortunately, I do not realistically expect the partisanship of recent years in the Senate to change over the short term.”

She had become of the rare GOP moderates in the Senate.

Snowe on Wednesday called the Blunt amendment “much broader than I could support,” giving voice to the kind of political independence which has become a hallmark of her 33 years of service in Congress.

However, Snowe’s home-state colleague and fellow Republican moderate, Sen. Susan Collins, chose to support the attempt to restrict birth control.

That Snowe and Collins had chosen a more-moderate course gave the pair “outsized influence in the Senate in recent years as they frequently became crucial swing votes on major issues,” according to a Maine newspaper.

But while the departing Snowe decided, once again, to walk away from the GOP party line, Collins, up for re-election in 2014, chose to hew to it.

Speaking on the Senate floor ahead of the vote, Collins says she was conflicted about the Blunt amendment but complained that those in the Obama administration “are playing politics with” the birth-control issue.

“… I feel I have no choice. I hope the amendment will be refined, and I also hope that the senate will move forward to address the many important pressing issues facing our nation and stop engaging in what is clearly an election year ploy,” she says.

Meanwhile, she had to look only to her soon-to-be-departed fellow senator from Maine to see that a choice was indeed possible.

Scott Nance is the editor and publisher of the news site The Washington Current. He has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.

Republican Rep. Darrell Issa chaired a hearing on Capitol Hill today on religious freedom and the new mandate that health insurers cover contraception. 

As the hearing got under way,  an argument broke out over Democrats could add a female witness to the all-male panel.

“Where are the women?” the minority Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., asked early in the hearing.

She criticized the Republican committee chairman, Rep. Darrel Issa, for wanting to “roll back the fundamental rights of women to a time when the government thought what happens in the bedroom is their business.”

“We will not be forced back to that primitive era,” she said.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There were NO women invited to testify. NONE.

Among witnesses invited to attend the hearing, by Rep. Issa, “was a representative of the Catholic bishops, who oppose the Obama administration “accommodation” on birth-control coverage” and ”many other men of other religions.”  

Not invited, complained Democrats, were representatives from the Catholic Health Association, which is run by a woman and actually runs the Catholic hospitals, nor Catholic Charities, both of which said Friday they supported the president’s plan.

Seriously… This isn’t about religious freedom. We all know that… It’s all about the Republican War on Women. Keep them home, in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant!

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi chastised the “House committee examining the Obama administration’s contraception rule that included an all-male panel of witnesses.”

“Imagine having a panel on women’s health and they don’t have any women on the panel,” she told reporters Thursday. “Duh.”

It appears that a majority Republican men are still not at all education about women’s health,
as we also witnessed today in an interview with Rick Santorum supporter, Foster Friess. Friess is the “single largest donor to the super PAC supporting Rick Santorum’s presidential bid.” 

His comments “shocked MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell in an interview” today when he “suggested a novel approach to contraception.” 

[...] the 71 year old Wyoming multi-millionaire offered this retort when Mitchell pressed him about whether he agreed with Santorum’s stance on contraception.

“Back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives,” Friess said. “The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.”

Friess was also quoted as saying “Who cares?” when Andrea Mitchell “pressed Friess again on Santorum’s position on contraception.”

Keep the little woman down… Stand behind your “religion” and keep the little woman down. Makes me sick… 2012, and we”re still fighting for our rights!