American Civil Liberties Union

In a Louisiana public school, female students who are suspected of being pregnant are told that they must take a pregnancy test. Under school policy...

By Noah Saenz

This week, as part of our “Teach Kids, Not Stereotypes” campaign, ACLU affiliates across the country filed administrative complaints and public records act requests seeking investigation of single-sex education programs rooted in sex stereotypes. We learned about one of these programs from Noah Saenz, a sophomore at Valley Charter High School in Modesto, California, who contacted the ACLU about the separation of students in his advisory class. 

After considerable arm twisting by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, today the Virginia Board of Health approved medically unnecessary regulations designed to force many women's health care centers in Virginia to shut their doors. These costly and unprecedented regulations require many women's centers to meet the building requirements as if they were newly constructed mini-hospitals. The retroactive application of these guidelines to existing health centers is excessive and inappropriate.

Today, the Supreme Court granted our petition seeking review of an appellate court’s 2-1 ruling upholding patents on two human genes associated with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer.  We represent 20 plaintiffs, including geneticists, patients, and scientific organizations representing over 150,000 pathologists and laboratory professionals.   The case is the first challenging whether human genes can be patented.