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Abortion restrictions in the Senate health care bill are “offensive to people who believe in choice” and may be unconstitutional, Colorado congresswoman Diana DeGette said Saturday.

DeGette, a Democrat and co-chairwoman of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus, said in a written statement she has “serious reservations” about the provision.

DeGette's spokesman, Kris Eisenla, said women who buy health policies under a new insurance exchange would be required to purchase a separate rider to get abortion coverage under the new language.

He called that impractical.

“No one expects a pregnancy to go terribly wrong,” Eisenla said in an interview.

He said the provision may be unconstitutional because it could restrict a woman's access to abortion, which the Supreme Court legalized in the Roe vs. Wade decision in 1973.

Eisenla stopped short of calling the provision a deal-killer. DeGette wants to make sure the bill doesn't deny women access to abortions, Eisenla said.

The Pro-Choice Caucus is still reviewing the provision, Eisenla said. He said the caucus has 190 members.

Feminist Jelena Woehr, 21, has joined other young feminists in mobilizing to protect abortion rights. She focuses on issues such as domestic violence and improved career opportunities for women. Abortion wasn't her emphasis until Congress began considering potential restrictions on insurance coverage.

“People of my generation do not remember when abortion wasn't safe, legal and available and it's been a shock to think we might not have that right,” said the Colorado resident, a part-time student and Internet content developer.

Other young activists, though, are sitting out the fight, as the latest skirmish over abortion has exposed a proxy battle over the issue and its place on the contemporary feminist agenda.

Among many younger feminists, the matter of abortion rights, so central to the women's movement of the 1970s, does not confer the urgency it once did. For them, abortion is now part of a “reproductive justice” portfolio that also includes access to birth control and improving health care for poor and minority women.

Newcomers to the women's movement, secure in the knowledge that abortion is legal, have embraced a broader range of goals under the feminist umbrella, from body image awareness and gay marriage to the raping and genocide in Darfur. They largely are eschewing the national women's groups and mass marches on Washington that their mothers eagerly may have joined, in favor of online social networks and local organizing.

The thong-wearing ladies on the MTV reality show Jersey Shore are causing outrage among Italian-American groups—but Nicole LaPorte argues that they’re progressive prima donnas.

With her leopard thong, poof hairdo, and “Pornstar in Training” trucker cap, Nicole Polizzi—better known as “Snooki” on the MTV reality series Jersey Shore—is no Meadow Soprano.

And not just because Snooki and her female cohorts on the show—in which a group of self-proclaimed guidos and guidettes shack up in a house in Seaside Heights, New Jersey, for a summer of boozing, clubbing, and Jacuzzi-ing—aren’t Ivy League-educated Good Girls. Or that Snooki’s response to an Italian-American group and companies that recently pulled advertising from Jersey Shore because they said it reinforced negative stereotypes was: “FUCK YOU! If you don’t want to watch, don’t watch. Just shut the hell up! I’m serious. FUCK YOU!”

The truth is, the show is actually undoing age-old stereotypes and replacing them, for better or worse, with a progressive, and even revolutionary, model of prima donna that is more Lady Gaga than Victoria Gotti. In contrast to the one-dimensional portraits of Italian-American women that have been trotted out over the years—the loud-mouthed bimbo (Marisa Tomei’s Oscar-winning performance as Mona Lisa Vito in My Cousin Vinny); the long-suffering housewife (Connie in The Godfather; Carmela on The Sopranos); the daddy’s princess (Meadow Soprano)—the trash-talking, overly tanned ladies of Jersey Shore pick fist fights, refuse to cook or clean up, and shuffle around in slippers and sweats while the guys in the house preen and put on lip gloss. Most dramatically, they are not women who are defined by, or in the service of, the guidos and goombahs around them, whether it’s their fathers, husbands, or boyfriends.

Sure, they’re sex objects whose main mission in life is to snag a man. Snooki, who looks like a miniature cross between Donatella Versace and Elvira, tells the camera: “I want to marry a guido. My ultimate dream is to move to Jersey, find a nice, juiced, hot, tan guy, and live my life.”

But when it comes to sex, they’re aggressive predators who, if anything, objectify the men they’re so intent on scoring.

“I have a bad habit of playing little emotional games with men,” Jenni “JWOWW” Farley says. “When they date me, it’s cool at the beginning, we do our thing in the first month, and then I send them on a roller-coaster ride to hell.”

“Your No. 1 mission is to go out and find the hottest guido and take him home,” says Sammi “Sweetheart” Giancola, who, by the second episode, has attracted and spurned one roommate, Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino (an ab-ripped phenomenon who, naturally, refers to himself in the third person), and is sleeping with another, Ronnie Magro (the resident dumb-but-sweet thug). Though she momentarily ditches him, too, for an “old friend” referred to as “The Cop.”

Jenni “JWOWW” Farley, a smoky-voiced Long Islander with fake boobs, the proportions of which, presumably, inspired her nickname, is even more bold about her particular brand of feminism:

“I’m like a praying mantis. After I have sex with a guy, I will rip their heads off,” she proclaims on the show.

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