American Civil Liberties Union

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.

Today, Virginia Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli strong-armed the VA Board of Health into reversing previous decisions based on medical evidence and patient safety in favor of unprecedented regulations on doctors and facilities that provide abortion care. This political move will endanger women by shutting down good, safe providers of abortion care. In a year when we have seen numerous politicians show utter disregard for women’s health, the story of today’s vote illustrates just how far some politicians will go to interfere in a woman’s personal, private decision making. 

As Michigan legislators observed states quickly upping the ante with extreme war on women policies like the personhood amendments and mandatory vaginal probe laws, they must have grown tired of our state merely being a face in the crowd; so they decided to dole out their own special brand of bat-crackers crazy in the form of an outrageous, monster War on Women Mega Bill.

We’ve written about the War on Women Mega Bill before, which combines every attack on women's health into the greatest assault on reproductive rights in our state’s history.

Hi, my name is Rachel and I’m a rape victim. This is not typically how I would introduce myself, but with the current national discourse, I can’t stand by silently anymore. You see, before my freshman year of college I was at a party where I made the mistake of leaving my drink unattended. Just an hour later, I remember stumbling into a bedroom and passing out. The next thing I knew, I was waking up with a man on top of me with several other men in the room. I was instantly paralyzed in shock and fear, but I was able to stop the next man. I think it took a full 24 hours for what had happened to me to set in: I had been raped.