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The goal of the National Women's Law Center's Reproductive Rights program is to ensure that all women's reproductive health needs are met, regardless of income, age, or geographic location. The Center focuses on promoting health policies that increase low-income and disadvantaged women's access to reproductive health services and that promote reproductive health as an integral part of overall health. The Center fights attacks designed to eliminate reproductive choice, in Congress, state legislatures, and state and federal courts across the land. Key to the Center's approach is developing new legal strategies to defeat religious and other restrictions on reproductive and other healthcare.
Women's right to choose is at greater risk than it has ever been since the Supreme Court's landmark decision of Roe v. Wade in 1973. Pro-choice victories of the past are under attack by the most activist anti-choice Administration of the post-Roe era and a largely anti-choice Congress. The President has placed anti-choice officials at the helm of important agencies, reinstated the global gag rule, and proposed restrictions on contraceptive funding and access. He has also supported new laws, passed by an anti-choice Congress, defining legal "personhood" as beginning at the time of conception, barring certain safe and legal abortion procedures, and allowing for a sweeping right of refusal for all health care entities, which could dramatically undermine federal, state, and local laws that protect a woman's right to choose. The Center is pursuing a multi-faceted strategy to preserve the full range of health services, unencumbered by religious refusals, in our Religious Restrictions Project.
Perhaps most grave is President Bush's declared intent to fill any Supreme Court vacancy with an avowedly anti-choice jurist. Such a move would put Roe at serious risk. In 2000, the Court upheld the Roe decision by a narrow 5-4 margin. President Bush has stated that his model for future justices are Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, two of the most ardent opponents of abortion on the Court. In fact, many of President Bush’s nominees to the lower federal courts are anti-choice advocates. Thus, if President Bush is able to replace just one justice, which seems likely with Justice Rehnquist extremely ill, the result may be that Roe is overturned and the right to choose lost.
These days, even access to contraception is imperiled. At the state level, pharmacist religious refusals to fill prescriptions for contraception—including emergency contraception—are an increasing problem across the country. To date, twenty states have introduced legislation to allow pharmacists to deny prescriptions for contraception because of their personal beliefs. In addition, despite federal and state laws that mandate coverage of prescription contraception in health insurance plans, many employers and insurers still fail to provide coverage of all FDA-approved forms of contraception.
In addition, the Medicaid Program, which is the largest federal provider of family planning to women, and also crucial to comprehensive health care for low-income women, is at risk of a dramatic loss of funding
At this critical juncture in the history of women's reproductive rights, it is imperative that policy makers throughout the nation hear from pro-choice women and men . Let them know that you will not accept your rights being taken away. Please visit the Take Action section of our website, and let your voice be heard.
Also, you can find out more about legal issues affecting women's health by visiting the health section of this website or learn more about your right to have prescription contraceptives covered under your employer's health plan by visiting www.nwlc.org/pill4us.
In this section, you will find:
FAMILY PLANNING AND BIRTH CONTROL:
