In a race for bragging rights to be the first state in the nation to end abortion services, North Dakota's Governor Jack Dalrymple signed three extreme abortion restrictions this week, less than 24 hours after they landed on his desk. One of them is likely to close the state's only abortion provider, the Red River Women's Clinic. These are the bills:

• HB 1305: Banning abortions for reasons of sex-selection or genetic anomalies.
• HB 1456: Banning abortions from the point at which a heartbeat can be detected.
• SB 2305: Requiring abortion providers to have hospital admitting privileges.

The first two are unlikely to have much effect beyond wasting North Dakota taxpayers' money on lawsuits defending them. Neither is likely to pass constitutional muster, though they contribute to the constant re-litigation of women's basic rights and grab headlines away from the restrictions that most effectively eliminate abortion access.

The last bill, SB 2305, though it sounds the most innocuous, is a Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) bill, designed intentionally to close the state's last clinic. Though proposed as a patient safety measure, Red River is likely to fall short because they have an excellent safety record and local hospitals require doctors to meet a 10 patient per year referral minimum to gain admitting privileges.

“I’ve had one time that I’ve had to admit a patient in the last ten years,” Red River's director, Tammi Kromenaker explained. "I would never employ a doctor who had to admit ten patients a year. That would mean they were a terrible doctor.”

Again, the Red River Women's Clinic is likely to be shut down because it's too safe a medical facility to get hospital admitting privileges.

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This stuff just writes itself. I've been out of town on college tours with my daughter for the past two days and as I slogged through the mountains of email, these two news alerts were right next to each other. Yes, these things happened on the same day.

That video at the top is President Obama's remarks at the White House Forum on Women and the Economy. Here's a snippet of what he said after making some heartfelt remarks about the impact of women in his life, especially his grandmother and mother.

Now, think about it. When women make less than men for the same work, that hurts families who have to get by with less and businesses who have fewer customers with less to spend. When a job doesn’t offer family leave to care for a new baby or sick leave to care for an ailing parent, that burdens men as well. When an insurance plan denies women coverage because of preexisting conditions, that puts a strain on emergency rooms and drives up costs of care for everybody. When any of our citizens can’t fulfill the potential that they have because of factors that have nothing to do with talent, or character, or work ethic, that diminishes us all. It holds all of us back. And it says something about who we are as Americans.

Right now, women are a growing number of breadwinners in the household. But they’re still earning just 77 cents for every dollar a man does -- even less if you’re an African American or Latina woman. Overall, a woman with a college degree doing the same work as a man will earn hundreds of thousands of dollars less over the course of her career.

Independently of the President's effort, another executive was making some decisions about how important women are to the economy as well, via Huffington Post:

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New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, a real credit to his gender, has come through for the ladies again, writing this past Sunday on why she's (rarely) the boss.

And his answer? Why, sadly, it's that we lack ambition. This conclusion is totally validated by the fact that one woman, Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, is supposed to have come to it.

Wow. I never realized we've been so screwed over all these years because we just didn't want any better for ourselves. Oh, wait ... no, that's just bull. There is no gender ambition gap. And on that note, let me tell you about a friend of mine who went to work for a tech startup not too long ago and didn't last very long, story illustration courtesy of Star Wars.

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