Relationships and Going Places

The advocacy group Compassion & Choices says that bills on aid-in-dying have been introduced this year in Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Wyoming and Utah. "I'm very worried about it because I meet people in my practice who conflate hospice and palliative care with assisted suicide or euthanasia,” said Ira Byock, director of the Providence Institute for Human Caring in California. more »

Jane Shortall writes: Into our life, onto our stage, they marched, the good, the not so good, and the downright peculiar. Despite the circumstances, the horrific illness, the very reason we were here, at times, both of us felt we were in some daft comedy, the characters created by Woody Allen. It had always been obvious to me, with no need for deep thinking, that we would have been so much better off, for every reason imaginable, staying in France.   more »

A bill to strengthen connections to early childhood education programs; a bill to increase the number of months of vocational educational training that may be counted as work under the temporary assistance for needy families program; a bill to provide for the establishment of a commission to accelerate the end of breast cancer; a bill to create a tax credit for foster families; a bill to direct the attorney general to make grants to states that have in place laws that terminate the parental rights of men who father children through rape. more »

Drawing from her research into the growth of asexual communities and queer studies, Stanford lecturer Karli Cerankowski is shedding light on an under-studied and misunderstood facet of human sexuality: asexuality. However, much as homosexuality was once consistently pathologized by the public, the asexual community faces similar contention. more »