American Civil Liberties Union

As you may have heard, Mississippi passed a law earlier this year, which was explicitly designed to shut down the only health care center in the entire state where a woman can get a safe, legal abortion.  In passing the law, some politicians made quite clear that they knew the closure would jeopardize the health and lives of Mississippi women—and that they didn’t care.

The Kansas legislature is not known for being friendly to women’s health. Just last year, the Kansas legislature took away family planning and reproductive health services in an effort to defund Planned Parenthood and prohibited women from purchasing comprehensive health care coverage.

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?

The debate over access to contraception ain’t over yet. Earlier this year, the Arizona legislature introduced a bill that would allow employers to impose their religious beliefs on their employees and deny them access to basic health services. Several weeks ago, the bill appeared to be dead, but the bill, HB 2625, came roaring back with a vengeance. Arizona’s legislature passed the bill and it now sits on Governor Brewer’s desk.