Ever-evolving birth control issues affect fundraising, messaging

As the birth control issues pumps up some campaign coffers, one prominent Republican says his party needs to stop talking about it.

Politico: Birth Control Controversies A Fundraising Boon
EMILY's List -; whose mission is to elect pro-abortion rights Democratic women -; has raised nearly twice as much for candidates at this point in the 2012 cycle as it did during the entire 2010 cycle, according to spokeswoman Jess McIntosh. And that's with about eight months to go (Bravender, 3/18).

The Hill: McCain: GOP Needs To Move Away From Birth Control Debate
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Sunday that Republicans needed to fight the 'perception' that their policies were anti-women. … Polls suggest that Republicans are losing the public relations battle over the Obama administration's contraception mandate, which would force [some] religious institutions to provide birth control coverage to employees. GOP lawmakers have painted the ruling as an attack on religious liberty, but Democrats have portrayed the debate as an attack on women's health, a view a recent Bloomberg poll found six in ten American agree with (Mali, 3/18).

Elsewhere, Obama's account of his mother's fight with an insurer is fact-checked --

The Washington Post: The Fact Checker: 'The Road We've Traveled:' A Misleading Account Of Obama's Mother And Her Insurance Dispute
The sequence, in fact, evokes a famous story that candidate Obama told during the 2008 campaign -- that his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, fought with her insurer over whether her cancer was a pre-existing condition that disqualified her from coverage. But the story was later called into question by Dunham's biographer (Kessler, 3/19).