American Civil Liberties Union

Update: The North Dakota legislature passed a bill today that bans most abortions in the state. Should this bill be signed into law by the governor, North Dakota will become the first state in the nation to ban most abortions.

Some politicians in North Dakota are so intent on taking away a woman’s ability to make personal, private decisions they are pushing a package of bills that, together, would ban abortion, prevent women’s health centers from providing comprehensive care, and block many people’s attempts at even starting a family.

Think the war on women is over? Think again.

Some politicians have decided to start the 2013 state legislative session by targeting women's reproductive health.

Yesterday in North Dakota, state senators voted on a measure that could be used to ban abortion, restrict treatment for infertility, and threaten access to contraception. If politicians in North Dakota get their way, women would be prevented from seeking abortion and other reproductive health care in the state.

Yesterday, Michiganders were illegally blocked from entering the State Capitol as their legislature passed controversial bills. Hundreds of people came to the Capitol to have their voices heard, but they were kept out of the political process by the very folks whose job it is to represent them.

Not only did they pass the so-called “right to work” legislation, but with the public locked outside, these politicians also advanced bills that will interfere with a woman’s ability to make her own reproductive health decisions. Politicians pushed a bill designed to shut down women’s health clinics in the state that provide abortion care. They passed a measure that would prohibit insurance plans from offering comprehensive health care coverage that includes abortion. And, a little more than a month after news broke that woman died in a hospital in Ireland because doctors refused to provide a life-saving abortion, the state senate passed a bill that could allow hospitals to use religion to discriminate in providing health care services, even in the case of an emergency.

Good medicine cannot co-exist with the extreme, ideological attacks on access to abortion.  The latest evidence of this comes from the state of Virginia, which has already served as a key battleground for the war on women.

For example, it was Virginia that sparked a huge outcry from women across the state and the country around legislation REQUIRING mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds.

And it is Virginia that is home to an Attorney General who twisted the law and threatened members of the Board of Health, so that they would vote for unnecessary and unprecedented regulations on doctors and facilities that provide abortion.