By Elissa Berger, Advocacy and Policy Counsel, ACLU at 3:20pm
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.
A longer version of this post originally ran as an opinion piece in in U-T San Diego on Nov. 23, 2012. The Senate is currently debating the defense authorization bill, including the language regarding the ban on military insurance coverage for abortion in cases of rape or incest.
By Brigitte Amiri, ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project at 9:45am
There are now close to 40 challenges to the federal birth control rule, which ensures that employees have insurance coverage for contraception. Why so many lawsuits, you ask? The answer is not entirely clear, but one thing is certain: each case repeats the same misguided argument that an employer’s religious beliefs can be used as a license to discriminate against its female employees. As we have explained in greater detail their legal claims are unsupported by a long history of cases. We’ve filed friend-of-the-court briefs in several contraception suits discussing those cases, all of which rejected other attempts to use religious beliefs as a basis for discrimination. In the last week alone, we’ve filed three briefs: one in a case in Michigan with the ACLU of Michigan, and two others with the ACLU of Illinois.
Yesterday, retiring Ohio GOP Congressman Steve LaTourette made national headlines while discussing the recent presidential election. He said:
My wife’s a Democrat, and she was so close to voting for Mitt Romney. But then, you know, Mourdock and Akin opened their mouth, and we sent [voters] running back to the Democratic Party, because they think we’re nutty […] We have to get out of people’s lives, get out of people’s bedrooms, and we have to be a national party…or else we’re going to lose.
By Elissa Berger, Advocacy and Policy Counsel, ACLU at 4:48pm
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.
We did it. After years of work from the ACLU of California and our allies, dangerous shackles and restraints can no longer be used on pregnant women in our state’s prisons and jails. Last week Governor Brown signed AB 2530, authored by Assemblymember Atkins, after it passed the legislature with overwhelming bipartisan support.
On Friday, a district court in Missouri rejected a case brought by a mining company challenging the federal birth control rule that requires employer health plans to cover contraception without a co-pay. The Missouri case is one of 30 pending, and it is the first case to be dismissed on the merits. It’s a tremendous victory for women, particularly those employed by the mining company.
