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?

In the latest affront to women's health, Alabama Governor Robert Bentley signed into law a bill that could force health centers in the state to close their doors if they provide abortion care. We may not all see eye-to-eye about abortion, but most people agree that we all need access to health care without politicians getting in the way.

Isn't it time we are allowed to make our own decisions about our health care?

This bill is just another example of political attacks on women's health, following on the heels of North Dakota, Arkansas, and other state efforts to block access to abortion care. The trend of attacking women is snowballing out of control, and we need to stop it.

Forty years ago today, the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, the landmark case that recognized that a pregnant woman...

The House Judiciary Committee has held eight anti-abortion or anti-family planning votes or hearings so far this Congress.  This morning, they’re scheduled to make it nine.  The Committee will be considering the so-called “District of Columbia Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act,” which would ban abortion in the District of Columbia at 20 weeks.