American Civil Liberties Union

The Kansas House passed an unwieldy 70-page bill, chock full of troubling provisions aimed at depriving a woman from receiving accurate information about her pregnancy, preventing her from accessing medical care and punishing health professionals who treat her. We need to make sure the Senate doesn't do the same.

Here are just a few examples of what this bill would do:

• It would provide legal protection to a doctor who discovers that a baby will be born with a devastating condition and deliberately withholds that information from his patient because he doesn't want her to seek an abortion. That means a doctor could decide to lie about the results of a woman's prenatal test so that she won't have information that she needs to make the best decision for her circumstances.
• The bill attempts to scare women by forcing doctors to tell patients about a supposed link between abortion and breast cancer — a risk that the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, and other medical experts roundly reject .
• This bill would also require public hospitals to turn away a woman who desperately needs an abortion to prevent serious harm to her health. The extremists pushing this bill would have a hospital tell a very sick woman that she should come back when her pregnancy is about to kill her, even if that risks her future fertility or causes organ failure.
• And there's a provision that targets workers at women's health centers that provide abortion care. The bill could prohibit those workers from volunteering at their kids' school. We've seen a lot of bizarre provisions about women's health care, but this is one of the strangest. Imagine the nurse who helps care for women at the local clinic. When she wants to accompany her son on a class field trip will she be told to stay home unless she quits her job?

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.

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.

Some politicians in Michigan are at it again – they are pushing a revised version of the sweeping anti-abortion bill that could threaten to close women’s health care centers. We beat back this bill before and now it is urgent these state lawmakers hear from us once more.

It’s unbelievable that extremists would keep trying to pass HB 5711. People in Michigan, tired of politicians interfering with a woman’s ability to make personal health decisions have been sending their message to Michigan legislators loud and clear.  But it seems some politicians in Michigan have been working overtime to ignore their voices.