Beyond Abortion and Contraception: Representation and Women's Health.

The linkage between the descriptive representation and substantive representation of underrepresented groups has been a long-standing concern for scholars, particularly those interested in the gendered nature of state legislative institutions. However, there is much scholarly ambivalence about how and when gender and partisanship interact in the substantive representation of women's health issues. How can infertility--a broadly appealing issue that is not aligned with political ideologies, unlike more commonly debated issues of abortion--inform and clarify the theoretical connection between descriptive and substantive representation by gender? Employing a novel research design that analyzes the role of time in gendered representation of women's health interests in state legislative institutions between 1985 and 2003, this paper argues that time plays a dynamic and multifaceted role in the relationship between partisan female legislators and the representation of women's health issues beyond abortion and contraception. The author acknowledges Lee Ann Banaszak, Kelly Dittmar, Mark Major, Michael Nelson, The Women and Politics Reading Group at Penn State University, and participants in the Center for American Political Responsiveness at Penn State University for their comments on previous drafts of this manuscript. Paper prepared for the Annual Meeting of the Souther Political Science Association, San Juan, Perto Rico, January 6-10, 2016. Please do not cite without permission from author. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]