Erika Eichelberger

Reporting Fellow

Erika Eichelberger is a reporting fellow in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. She has also written for The Nation, The Brooklyn Rail, and TomDispatch. Email her at eeichelberger [at] motherjones [dot] com.

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Serbia, Belarus, Kazakhstan to Monitor US Elections

—By Erika Eichelberger

| Tue Oct. 23, 2012 10:29 AM PDT

Last week, President Hamid Karzai got snippy with reporters about the possibility of Westerners monitoring his country's election process: "Afghanistan is not interfering in their election, and we are hoping they don't interfere in our election," he said.

Karzai's right that folks from Afghanistan won't be monitoring US elections. But people from Kazakhstan will.

On November 6, the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a United Nations affiliate, has already deployed a team of 57 observers from 23 countries, including Serbia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, to monitor voter suppression and learn about election administration, campaign finance, new voting technologies, and even our media environment.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

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Mormon Feminists Don't Like Romney

—By Erika Eichelberger

| Fri Oct. 19, 2012 12:00 PM PDT

Participants in a Days of '47 Pioneer Day Parade, which honors the settling of Utah by the Mormon pioneers.

Though President Obama holds an advantage among female voters, Romney doesn't seem to have a women problem in the polls. At least not yet. But there's one group he definitely can't count on: Mormon feminists.

Romney's awkward and tone deaf comments on women in Tuesday's debate did not sit well with this crew, who follow the teachings of Joseph Smith, but are pushing back against the church's chauvinistic ways.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Mitt Romney Probably Didn't Hack Your Facebook Page

—By Erika Eichelberger

| Wed Oct. 10, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

Mitt Romney/Facebook

It is not just conservatives who have been forced to like Mitt Romney. In recent weeks, a host of liberal types have complained that their Facebook accounts have erroneously "liked" Romney's page, and some are floating the theory (see here and here and here) that the Romney campaign has deployed a virus or used other nefarious means to inflate the candidate's online stature. This conspiratorial notion has spawned a Facebook community forum, and its own page: "Hacked by Mitt Romney" (cute url: facebook.com/MittYouDidntBuildThat), which has over 200 likes. It even inspired an editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which pondered: "Was I the victim of sabotage (like the time one of our kids swiped about 100 campaign signs and posted them all in our front yard)? Or the victim of my own keyboard clumsiness?"

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Shocker: Free Birth Control Means Fewer Abortions

—By Erika Eichelberger

| Fri Oct. 5, 2012 11:57 AM PDT

Make sure you're sitting down for this one: Free birth control leads to lower abortion rates and fewer teenage pregnancies.

I know.

That's according to a new study published on Thursday by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis. The project gave free birth control to more than 9,000 local women and girls, many of whom were poor or uninsured, and tracked them for two years. There were 6.3 births per 1,000 teenagers in the study group, compared to the 2010 national rate of 34 per 1,000. As for abortions, there were fewer than eight per 1,000 women in the study, compared with the almost 20 per 1,000 nationally.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Are Women Headed to the Infantry?

—By Erika Eichelberger

| Thu Oct. 4, 2012 9:54 AM PDT

Demi Moore in GI Jane. Joe None/Hollywood Pictures/ZUMAPress

Women could be poised to breach the final frontier of military macho. For the first time yesterday, women were included in a Marine Corps infantry officer training, a grueling three-month course at Quantico, Virginia, where Marines are schooled in making command decisions under extreme stress.

Women have fought and died in every American war, and more than 280,000 of them have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, but they are still barred from the infantry. In February, as my colleague Adam Weinstein reported, the Department of Defense urged Congress to allow women to serve in more combat-related jobs, and has since then opened up new jobs for women closer to the front lines. This training program is part of a Pentagon experiment to develop "gender-neutral physical standards," and collect data on whether women's bodies can actually handle this kind of Rambo job.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]