Reproductive Refusals & Restrictions

 This week’s been a tough one. I think we all know that. We started the week learning about the tipped minimum wage, stagnant at $2.13 since 1991, and what it means for gender inequity. Yesterday we dealt with a panel of five men testifying before a House committee about how birth control tramples their freedom of religion in addition speaking out against the Blunt amendment all week. And there was even more Senate obstruction on judicial nominations.

Sadly, I don’t have good news for you. After the jump are stories on low literacy rates and their impact on women, PETA’s latest ad, and some disturbing bills from the Virginia state Legislature. Read more »

Last February, the Department of Health and Human Services released an interim final rule stating that student health plans would be treated as individual health insurance plans, meaning that they would have to cover the women’s preventive health services. Let’s translate that out of “legal-ese:” the Department will require student health insurance plans (not student health centers) to cover preventive services for women, such as contraception, screening for sexually transmitted infections, and screening for interpersonal and domestic violence, without co-pays or deductibles. Read more »

A few weeks ago we shared the very exciting news that the Obama administration had held strong and we’d secured no-cost birth control for millions of women through the Affordable Care Act. This was a huge and important step for women’s health and something the National Women’s Law Center has been working towards for over a decade.

But, unfortunately, this decision and final rule has not quieted the opposition. Instead, those opposing the rule are continuing to push back and decry this significant advancement. We’ve posted a number of responses to the negative press and quotes, and we’re continuing to fight back by working with our state partners and submitting letters to the editor to newspapers across the country. Read more »

There has been a lot of press on the recent announcement by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that it was finalizing the rule requiring coverage of all FDA-approved contraceptives with no co-pays or deductibles, and a lot of it hasn’t been positive.  Most of the focus has been on the fact that the Administration chose not to expand the exemption for certain religious employers.

Take Michael Gerson’s and E.J. Dionne’s recent op-eds, for example. Both of them admonish President Obama for not expanding the religious exemption to entities like religiously-affiliated hospitals and universities, and Gerson says that the rule covers “abortifacients” which is just wrong. He also concludes that the decision on the final rule means that “war on religion is now formally declared.” The way these two see it, it should have been a no-brainer to expand the exemption. But wait just one minute, is this all the rule is about – religious institutions versus the Administration? Is there anything else that maybe we should be considering when analyzing this rule?

Oh right…. the tremendous health benefits of contraception. Oddly and sadly, these health benefits are blatantly ignored in all of the negative commentary (Dionne tips his hat just a bit by vaguely referring to how the rule protects “women’s rights”). So it got me thinking, maybe they just don’t understand the health benefits. Maybe I should take a moment to explain just how critical contraception is as a preventive health service. So Gerson, Dionne, and all of the others who ignore the real issue at stake, please take notes. Read more »

The constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid poses a fundamental question to the Supreme Court: is a state government less able to exercise free choice in the face of the threat of loss of federal assistance than an impoverished pregnant woman whose health is threatened by the continuation of the pregnancy?

In 1976, Cora McRae needed to terminate her pregnancy for medical reasons, but she had very little money. She had health insurance through Medicaid, but under a provision of federal law known as the Hyde Amendment, federal Medicaid funds can not pay for abortions, including medically necessary abortions, though Medicaid covers other medically necessary expenses, including the costs of childbirth. McRae joined with other plaintiffs to challenge this law in court, arguing that by paying for childbirth expenses, but not for medically necessary abortion expenses, the government was unconstitutionally coercing her reproductive decisions and denying her right to choose to end her pregnancy. In 1980, the Supreme Court rejected McRae’s challenge to Medicaid’s failure to fund medically necessary abortions. “Although Congress has opted to subsidize medically necessary services generally, but not certain medically necessary abortions,” the Court wrote, “the fact remains that the Hyde Amendment leaves an indigent woman with at least the same range of choice in deciding whether to obtain a medically necessary abortion as she would have had if Congress had chosen to subsidize no health care costs at all.” In other words, refusing to provide Medicaid coverage for abortions did not represent unconstitutional coercion of a poor woman’s reproductive choices because, according to the Court, it was her poverty that constrained her choices, rather than any barriers the government had placed in her way. That she was poor and might be forced to make certain choices because of her poverty—like going through with a potentially dangerous pregnancy because she could not afford an abortion--wasn’t the government’s fault, the Court held. Read more »

Here’s to a new year.

Arriving at the National Women’s Law Center three months ago, I never anticipated just how sustained and systemic the efforts to dismantle women’s health and reproductive rights had become.  Sure, I had paid attention to the Planned Parenthood defunding fight (which included the “trade” for a ban on DC funding of abortion services and the “this is not meant to be a factual statement” debacle) and had heard about HR 3 and the disgusting “forcible rape” debate. Indeed, it was those events that informed my decision to work on reproductive rights issues full time. But even though I was aware of what was going on, it was only when I became involved with the issues on a daily basis where I gained a whole new perspective on just how far those who oppose reproductive rights are going in order to completely unravel women’s rights. And it got me thinking, if so many bad things can happen in just my three months here, what will 2012 look like?

So in order to be prepared for this year, I decided to give a quick review of my first three months – a recap of the numerous anti-choice measures that cropped up in just the final months of 2011. Because when you lay it all out, you can’t ignore how serious these efforts really are.

In my very first week, the House of Representatives voted on HR 358, which literally would allow women to die at hospitals instead of getting the emergency care they need if it included abortion care. Seriously? Read more »

August brought with it a victory for women’s health. It was announced that all new health insurance plans would be required to coverage preventive services such as contraceptive coverage. However, in not so great news, the mandate included language that would allow religious employers to deny such coverage on the basis of religious or moral beliefs; also known as a “refusal clause.” Today, many religious institutions are pushing to expand the language, creating the opportunity to deny more woman necessary preventive services.

Needless to say I’m having a difficult time grasping what this so-called, “conscience clause” actually means. Call me silly, but it actually seems immoral to deprive a woman of contraception if those pills are necessary for her to maintain her health. It seems quite immoral to make a woman choose between receiving adequate health care coverage and her job. Do we honestly think it’s fair to deny contraceptive coverage to a teacher at a Catholic school or university even though she may not be Catholic herself? Read more »

In 2008 when then Senator Barack Obama was still campaigning for the presidency and there were notions that the Bush administration would offer a parting shot to women’s groups and the reproductive health community, Obama’s take on the proposed regulation to expand religious restrictions was clear –

“We need to restore integrity to our public health programs, not create backdoor efforts to weaken them. I am committed to ensuring that the health and reproductive rights of women are protected.”

But now, here we are three years later, and under President Obama, we are still having a very similar fight. Read more »

As you may have heard, the Catholic Bishops are urging the Obama administration to expand the religious refusal clause concerning contraceptives. This could allow religiously affiliated institutions that are not churches – such as hospitals, universities, Catholic Charities, and others – to refuse to cover birth control without co-pays for their students and employees. That’s even though birth control constitutes “preventive care” under the Affordable Care Act, which is mandatorily covered at no cost by insurance plans. And as we’ve been telling you, denying contraceptive coverage is harmful to women.

In response, today the HERvotes coalition is banding together for another blog carnival to fight the Catholic bishops’ push to expand the religious exemption for employer birth control coverage. After the jump, we have links to some of the posts in today’s blog carnival to get you started reading. While you’re at it, please make sure to take a moment to tell President Obama that all women need affordable birth control. For more information about contraceptive coverage and for more resources and blogs from the NWLC, please visit our contraceptive coverage overview page.

Since HR 358 passed the House of Representatives back in October, we’ve heard from a few of our supporters in the states. These advocates have been alerting us that their legislators just don’t get it. They fail to understand what this dangerous piece of legislation would do and they don’t understand why our advocates are opposed to it (hint: because it is dangerous, you know, and women could die as result of its passage).

The thing we learned from looking at the responses from the offices of Senator Scott Brown (R-MA) and Representative Chris Gibson (R-NY) is that they’re okay being out of touch with their constituents.  In fact, they’re ok not even acknowledging that are taking positions opposed by their constituents. Neither legislator addressed the concerns our advocates raised about this harmful legislation, instead just assuming that the constituents contacting them on this issue were in agreement with their anti-choice stance. Failing to meaningfully respond to the constituents’ concerns is worrisome considering the significant impact HR 358 would have on women and their families. Read more »