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President Bush and anti-choice hardliners in Congress are targeting
our most basic individual rights – including freedom of choice.
Since his first day in office, the President has been waging an
aggressive war against a woman’s right to make informed and
responsible decisions about her health and body.
The first step in fighting these actions is
to learn more about the issues:
Packing the federal courts with anti-choice
justices
Chief Justice John G. Roberts, a graduate from Harvard Law School, was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2003 and nominated to the Supreme Court by President Bush. Chief Justice Roberts assumed his seat in the Supreme Court on September 29, 2005.
Justice Samuel Anthony received his law degree from Yale University Law School and was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Bush and assumed his seat on January 31, 2006.
While sitting on the Third Circuit in 1991, Justice Alito was the lone dissenter in the case of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey. In that case, he voted to uphold a Pennsylvania law requiring married women to notify their husbands prior to obtaining abortions. This decision was not supported by the Supreme Court, which held the statute unconstitutional. Moreover, documents submitted in connection with Justice Alito’s confirmation included an application for a job in the office of the United States Attorney General during the Reagan administration. In this application, Alito stated that he was “particularly proud” of his contributions in recent cases in which the government argued “…that the constitution does not protect a right to abortion.” In the confirmation hearings, he did not state whether his view on the issue had changed either personally or from a legal perspective.
Little has been revealed about the direction of the Court under Roberts’ leadership.
Roberts was part of the Court in its opinion in the recent case of Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, decided on January 18, 2006. Ayotte involved New Hampshire’s statute prohibiting an abortion to be performed on minors until 48 hours after parental notification. The statute held no provision for medical emergencies. In a unanimous opinion drafted by Justice O’Connor, the Court held that the State had a valid interest in requiring parental notice of an abortion, and that the act was unconstitutional only in its limited application to an emergency situation.
Gonzales v. Carhart and Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood were argued during the 2005 – 2006 term. Both cases involve challenges to the Federal Partial-birth Abortion Ban on the grounds that it lacks an exception for a medical emergency. It remains to be seen what Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito will do on the Court in regard to women’s health and choice.
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Increasing funding for abstinence-only
education
In abstinence-only education programs, birth control is mentioned
only in terms of its failure rates. Practical, real life issues
such as safer sex methods, abortion and sexual orientation are completely
overlooked.
On the other hand, the American Medical Association, the American
Academy of Pediatrics, the National Institutes of Health and the
Institute of Medicine have all issued reports in the past several
years highlighting the important role that medically-accurate sexuality
education, including information on both abstinence and contraception,
plays in combating teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted infection
transmission rates.
Medically-accurate programs acknowledge that individuals have the
right to choose when they want to become sexually active. Those
who decide to engage in sexual intercourse should receive honest,
accurate and responsible safer sex information. This kind of curriculum
has been proven to delay the onset of intercourse, reduce the frequency
of intercourse, and increase contraceptive use.
Unfortunately, President Bush’s budget for fiscal year 2005
allocates $273 million — up from about $80 million —
for programs teaching young people that, “sex outside marriage
causes harmful psychological and physical effects.”
The budget also contains several initiatives to promote marriage,
including a $240 million program that gives states grants to promote
marriages and limit out-of-wedlock births; a $120 million fund for
research and pilot programs on marriage promotion; and $50 million
to “promote responsible fatherhood.”
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Redefining the legal status of a fetus
In February 2004, President Bush signed H.R. 1997, the so-called
“Unborn Victims of Violence Act,” into law. Though its
proponents claim it protects pregnant women from violence, H.R.
1997 helps create a precedent that recognizes a legal status for
a fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus separate from the woman in whose
body it resides. This, in turn, may help lay the groundwork for
a future effort to reverse Roe v. Wade.
The administration also attempted to give embryos new status in
the HHS Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protection
Charter by modifying the charter to declare that embryos in experiments
are to be considered “human subjects.”
And, in yet another attempt to elevate the legal status of the
fetus to that of a person, the Department of Health and Human Services
proposed new regulations that would extend coverage under the Children’s
Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to “unborn children.”
This new regulation recognized the fetus at any stage of development
as a “person,” making it eligible for health coverage.
The regulation did not provide health coverage to the woman either
prenatal or postpartum, thus elevating the fetus and reducing the
woman to mere “host” status.
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Censoring free speech
The negative effect of the President’s attempts to roll back
our reproductive rights extends to any person seeking scientifically-proven,
medically-accurate information.
Shortly after President Bush took office, the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC) Web site posted “revised”
fact sheet downplaying condom effectiveness, when in fact their
effectiveness against unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted
infection has long been established.
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) Web site also posted a “revised”
fact sheet that suggests an unproven link between abortion and breast
cancer. This bogus link preys on millions of women’s legitimate
concerns about breast cancer risks. The best available evidence
shows that induced abortion has no net effect in putting women at
increased risk for developing breast cancer.
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Restricting funding for international
family planning
Women, men and teens in our country are not the only ones who suffer
from the anti-choice actions of President Bush and the United States
government.
On his first day in office (also the 28th anniversary of Roe v.
Wade) the President restored the Reagan-era global gag rule on international
family planning assistance.
This rule prevents nongovernmental organizations in countries that
receive U.S. international family planning assistance from using
their own money — not that supplied by the U.S. — to
provide abortion services, counseling, or referrals, or to lobby
to change abortion laws. It effectively prevents health care providers
from advising patients about abortion and from discussing laws that
restrict abortion. The policy has already resulted in increased
numbers of unintended pregnancies, more unsafe abortions, and the
deaths of an unknown number of women around the world.
In the following year, President Bush issued a memorandum that
extended the global gag rule to family planning funds administered
by the U.S. Department of State (Bush, 2003). Attempts have also
been made to gag reproductive health care providers across the globe
from receiving HIV/AIDS funding simply because they promote a full
range of family planning services.
The President continued to attack international family planning
by withholding $34 million in funding for birth control, maternal
and child health care, and HIV/AIDS prevention from the United Nations
Population Fund (UNFPA) based on false claims that UNFPA supports
coercive abortion practices. Hundreds of millions of dollars were
withheld from other international family planning programs as well.
Equally disturbing, the administration reversed U.S. support of
the 1994 Cairo agreement that affirms the right of all couples and
individuals to determine freely and responsibly the number and spacing
of their children and to have the information and means to do so,
as well as doing an about-face on support of an international women’s
rights treaty (The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination Against Women).
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Limiting stem cell research
President Bush has placed severe limits on stem cell research that
are not only scientifically baseless but also ignore the wishes
of a majority of Americans. The restrictions will most likely severely
limit research, hampering gains that scientists had hoped to achieve
in developing new treatments for a broad range of conditions and
diseases. In bowing to the demands of a small number of anti-choice
extremists, the President has sacrificed the health of Americans
and others in the process.
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Reducing access to family planning and
abortion
If the funds earmarked for abstinence-only education in the President’s
2005 budget had been allocated to Title X (the nation's family planning program) instead, more than 4.2
million additional women could obtain much needed subsidized family
planning aid. Instead, the budget freezes funding for Title X at
$278 million. If Title X funding had kept pace with medical inflation
since 1980, that figure would be almost $643 million.
Access to emergency contraception (EC) is also at stake: on December
16, 2003, a joint hearing of the FDA Nonprescription Drugs and Reproductive
Health Drugs Advisory Committees voted 24 to 3 to recommend that
Plan B® emergency contraception be made available over the counter.
However, in complete disregard in its own independent review board,
the FDA proceeded to deny EC over-the-counter.
In 2001, the President targeted his own staff by stripping contraceptive
coverage from federal employees in his first budget, even though
the Office of Personnel Management found that the coverage did not
add any additional cost to the premiums. Fortunately, Congress restored
the benefit as part of the Treasury Postal Appropriations bill.
Turning an eye to the more than 100,000 women serving in the military
and living on American military bases overseas, President Bush supports
the current law prohibiting them from obtaining abortion services
in overseas military hospitals, even with their own money.
But perhaps the most egregious action against our freedom of choice
has been the passage of the federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act
of 2003. Surrounded by smiling men and not a woman in sight, President
Bush signed into law this dangerous abortion ban that will harm
women and that ignores a woman’s constitutional right to make
decisions about her own body.
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