The nation’s largest gay rights advocacy group is putting down roots in the South.

Last week, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) announced it will spend $8.5 million over the next three years to set up permanent offices and staff in Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi. HRC’s goal is to expand social and legal protections in those states for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) residents.

Wisconsin enacted the first law in the country barring parents from privately giving away their adopted children to someone other than a relative last week. While Christian adoption agencies applauded the move, they also called for greater support for parents dealing with difficult adoptive children.

Parental advisory: This article contains brief descriptions of brutal treatment

Between 2006 and 2011, three children in devoted homeschooling families died while being disciplined by their parents, professed Christians who reportedly read or followed Michael and Debi Pearl’s controversial parenting book, To Train Up a Child.

After 30 years of decline, the number of moms staying home with their children rose in the past decade, according to a report released last week by the Pew Research Center.

The report found 29 percent of mothers stayed at home in 2012, compared to 23 percent in 1999. The increase follows a steady decline from 1970, when nearly half of mothers were stay-at-home moms.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a device last week that can quickly inject a life-saving antidote into people who have overdosed on heroin or other opioids. 

While some say the device, called Evzio, is necessary to save lives, others argue easier access to the antidote will encourage drug use.

An estimated 16,000 people die every year from opioid-related overdoses, according to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, and the number is growing. Opioids include prescription painkillers like OxyContin and Vicodin, as well as the street drug heroin. 

The Girl Scouts are losing brownie points over their partnership with Barbie.

Last week two consumer groups, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and the Center for a New American Dream, launched a petition calling on the Girl Scouts to end a promotional partnership with Mattel, saying the Barbie brand encourages the “sexualization” of girls and “idealizes a dangerously impossible body type.”

A new app is using data technology to help women get pregnant, and crowdfunding their fertility treatment if they don’t.

Glow, a startup launched by PayPal founder Max Levchin, uses fertility-tracking to help couples conceive. The free app allows users to input information about body temperature, ovulation, diet, and other data points. Glow then draws conclusions from its users’ combined data and provides health tips, advice about the best days to get pregnant, and factors that may influence their fertility.