Defunding Women's Health Care Providers
People for the American Way
Defunding Women's Health Care Providers
In 2013, our Chipping Away at Choice report outlined five growing threats to reproductive health care access: targeted regulation of abortion provider (TRAP) laws, crisis pregnancy centers, mandatory waiting periods, race- and sex-selective abortion restrictions, and interference with medical providers. These restrictions, often presented as commonsense measures to protect women’s health, are, in actuality, part of a concerted effort by the anti-choice movement to quietly chip away at reproductive health access and undermine the foundation of long-standing rights.
Sadly, these damaging, incremental tactics have become even more widespread since our last report, driven by conservative gains in the 2014 elections and the continued state-level advocacy of anti-choice groups including Americans United for Life and the National Right to Life Committee. States have enacted a staggering 282 new abortion restrictions since 2010, according to statistics compiled by the Guttmacher Institute. Fifty-one of those new restrictions were enacted in the first half of 2015 alone.
Americans United for Life’s (AUL) general counsel reportedly once compared his group’s approach to ending legal abortion to carving a ham: “Each slice makes it smaller and smaller until it is no more.”
This strategy of abolishing legal abortion in incremental steps faces a critical legal test as the Supreme Court decides whether to consider an appeal of a lower court decision upholding sweeping restrictions on abortion clinics in Texas. If the law is allowed to stand, all but a few of the state’s abortion providers could be forced to close, and the anti-choice movement’s “chipping away at choice” strategy would achieve one of its biggest victories yet.
The quieter, incremental tactics of anti-choice activists create barriers to abortion access in an attempt to force more women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. Such burdens, such as high costs exacerbated by mandatory waiting periods and the need to travel long distances to reach increasingly scarce providers, disproportionately impact low-income women. In this way, it is often the women whose financial stability and future success hinges on abortion access that are the very women who are denied reproductive care.
In this updated report, we examine recent developments in these incremental anti-choice efforts and explore an additional incremental threat to abortion access and reproductive care: 20-week abortion bans.
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http://www.pfaw.org/rww-in-focus/chipping-away-choice-growing-threats-women-s-health-care-access-and-autonomy-2015-updat?utm_medium=email&utm_source=aa&utm_campaign=waronwomen#defunding