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It pains me deeply to see members of my own party attempting to legislate women's health and contraception choices.

What's happened with the over-the-counter birth control issue is that the Democrats didn't see it coming. They think that they've got a monopoly on talking to women from the waist down. Anything that has to do with reproduction and birth control and abortion - they call it women's health, then they call it women's issues.

Even more than the Pill, what has liberated women is that they no longer need to depend on men economically.

So why are we having to fight in 2012 against politicians who want to end access to birth control? It's like we woke up in a bad episode of 'Mad Men.'

Many poor and low-income women cannot afford to purchase contraceptive services and supplies on their own.

The FDA is redefining birth control as abortion. The FDA is setting the bar higher for this kind of drug.

It is important for women to have a choice, to have an opportunity to plan their families, because if they don't, the Republicans have said this is an ownership society. You are on your own, and they're going to begrudge that child everything, from WIC to a Pell Grant to health insurance.

The national Democratic Party has embraced abortion on demand. I believe this position is wrong in principle and out of the mainstream of our party's historic commitment to protecting the powerless.

I deeply believe - and not just as a matter of politics, but even as a matter of morality - that matters about reproduction and intimacy and relationships and contraception are in the personal realm. They're moral decisions for individuals to make for themselves. And the last thing we need is government intruding into those personal decisions.