When President Obama rolled out his budget blueprint yesterday, he said "we are making a historic commitment to comprehensive health care reform. It's a step that will not only make families healthier and companies more competitive, but over the long term it will also help us bring down our deficit."

We hope this critically important effort will include helping people plan for healthy pregnancies and avoid unplanned pregnancies (of which there are 3 million each year). There is abundant evidence that doing so will improve the health and well-being of children and families. And, study after study shows that it will also save money--for taxpayers and employers.

Should be a no brainer, right? Well, yes, but first our leaders need to get over two things: the fear factor and the joke factor. Family planning is more than mainstream: 98% of sexually active women use some form of family planning. It is a key part of women's lives and health. Consider this: the typical American woman spends five years pregnant or trying to become pregnant and three decades trying to avoid pregnancy.

And, it has broad public support: 88% of voters support women's access to contraception. In fact, a recent poll by Public Strategies Inc. found that 72% of Republicans and Independents favor legislation that would make it easier for people at all income levels to obtain contraception.  The American people get this and the President does too, which is why his budget takes an important step to help more states provide family planning through Medicaid.

So, enough of the talk show jokes and smirks. Let's get serious and help do something that is common sense, promotes responsibility, improves health, and saves money.

Who says there's no good news in the economic downturn? A Washington Post article says previously free-spending young men are having to cut back on their efforts to buy women's attention with large infusions of cash. No more rounds of $15 martinis for said woman and her friends. No more Moet champagne, $250 dinners.

In other words, it's not as easy on the wallet to get a desirable woman smashed before taking her to bed. Too bad.

One guy said he is more likely to take his dates hiking now than to fancy restaurants. Gosh, they might even find they can have fun together sober.

Interestingly, another Post story is about the health risks for women who drink even a glass of alcohol a day. I wasn't particularly happy to hear that--but maybe not a bad thing for women to know when, instead of a round of Manhattans, their date orders a round of Budweisers.

President Obama's proposed budget contains the following language:

"The budget supports State, community-based, and faith-based efforts to reduce teen pregnancy using evidence-based models. The program will fund models that stress the importance of abstinence while providing medically-accurate and age-appropriate information to youth who have already become sexually active."

Stay tuned, more in due course...

Why are so many young women still getting pregnant when they didn't intend to? Is it that they don't know enough about how pregnancy happens? Or how to use birth control? Or, are they using birth control sometimes, and thinking that's as good as using it every time? Or that they want to know more but are too embarassed to ask? Or that it just won't happen to them? Turns out, the answer is all of the above, and more.

Check out this great article in the current issue of Self Magazine: "Single, Pregnant and Panicked."

It includes findings from some Campaign polling and focus groups that shed light on what single 20-somethings really think—and what they still don't know—about pregnancy and birth control. The findings are pretty shocking.

Check out the full survey.

Here's some of what we learned:

• 54% of sexually active (but not monogamous) single 20-somethings don't use birth control every time.


• While nearly half of our survey respondents said they don't look for information about preventing pregnancy because they already know enough about it, we found that 50% of those women surveyed don't know at what point in their cycle they are most likely to get pregnant, and 23% of women we surveyed think that taking birth control pills increases the risk of getting all types of cancers (NOT true!).


• 21% said finding the right source of information on pregnancy prevention is too hard.


• 21% of young adult women said they don't seek out information about birth control and pregnancy prevention because it's too embarrassing to talk about.


• 67% of our respondents (male and female) say they know nothing about IUDs, which the medical community considers the most effective form of long-acting contraception.


• 16% of young adult men say they only use contraception if their partners insist on it.

Many who are taking chances with their birth control say that if pregnancy hasn't happened yet, it probably won't...that's the most magical thinking of all.

Go to self.com to read the article and take the pregnancy quiz that nearly 1,000 women have already failed.  And don't forget to tell us what you think.

As a twenty year old dealing with the stress of college, socializing and beginning adulthood, the last place I expect to find stress is the gym. Exercising is a great way to blow off steam, work up a sweat and leave high on endorphins. However, I have found that the gym has become a hot, new 'pick-up' spot, where every gym-goer is a participant whether they want to or not.

The formula is easy: girls increase their heart rate on the cardio equipment while guys increase their heart rates by watching them. There is nothing more masculine to me than watching Mr. Free-Weights (who will represent the genre of guy I'm discussing) lift a five pound free weight once and grunt loudly to accentuate how heavy the weight is and how strong and manly he is to be lifting weights. Mr. Free-Weights will then take a ten-minute walk around the gym checking out the inventory of girls, flexing his biceps at anyone who happens to make eye contact with him. After his ten-minute scan, he returns to his free weight to grunt and inventory some more.