Roe v. Wade faces increased challenges (Photo: Associated Press)

TESTING ROE: Legal challenges to Roe v. Wade have been on an uptick since 2007, the Washington Post reports. That year, the Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 to uphold a ban on partial-birth abortion. The ruling was Gonzales v. Carhart, and it's the reason Dr. LeRoy Carhart is currently providing late-term abortions just outside of Washington:

Using that decision as a road map, this spring Flood wrote and won passage of legislation that bans abortions after 20 weeks. Introducing into law the concept of 'fetal pain,' it marked the first time that a state has outlawed the procedure so early in a pregnancy without an exception for the health of the woman.

The law shut down LeRoy Carhart, the provider who had planned to expand his practice outside Omaha and provide late-term abortions to women across the Midwest.

The importance of Flood's bill is likely to be felt far beyond Nebraska. Abortion opponents call it model legislation for other states and say it could provide a direct challenge to Supreme Court precedents that restrict government's ability to prohibit abortion before a fetus can survive outside the womb. (It also prompted Carhart to shift his practice east, and he has since opened a late-term practice in Germantown, outside Washington.)

THE WASHINGTON CITY PAPER owes an apology to teenage girls.

MOVE OVER, MARYLAND: Rhode Island is set to take up same-sex marriage legislation ASAP, and the state's Governor-elect, Lincoln Chaffee, has pledged to do more than just sign a bill, should it pass his desk.

SLATE's Christopher Beam defends the May-December romance: "Age-gap marriages get a bad rap because everyone assumes they exist for the wrong reasons: Money and beauty. And sometimes they do. An older person may idolize a younger person for his looks, while the younger one idolizes the older one for her worldliness and maturity."

See what he did there? Beam consistently refers to the younger partner in the relationship with male pronouns, and the elder with female pronouns. Yet each of the two dozen marriages Beam cites involve an older male partner and a younger female one. Curious! Perhaps there is an alternate explanation for the bad reputation of such marriages.

STRIPPING TO THE HITS: NPR's Elizabeth Blair reports on the music scene within Atlanta's strip clubs, where booties launched a thousand hits:

What attracted us to this story was that the strippers seemed to have a lot of power in the hip-hop hit-making process. Obviously they are the focal point when a new song is being played. As DJ Scream told me, "There's nothing like seeing a woman dance to a record. There's records that I hate and when I see a woman dancing I think, 'It's not that bad.'"

. . . The dancers have an incentive to make a song exciting: They get paid when the patrons 'make it rain,' or throw money on the stage while they're dancing. I asked Sweet Pea, one of the main dancers in the Snack Pack at Magic City, if she'd ever refused to dance to a song she didn't like. She made it sound as though that just doesn't happen. "If it's got a good beat, you can dance to it," she said. In other words, even if she doesn't think a song has potential, she'll give it a try because she knows the folks from the record label will make it rain extra hard when she's dancing to their song.