TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) regulations
South Dakota
PASSED: A law requiring consultation at a crisis pregnancy center as a precondition to obtaining an abortion
According to the Guttmacher Institute, in 2011 a provision was enacted that required information on a broad range of potential negative mental health outcomes to be listed in a woman’s mandatory pre-abortion counseling. Other provisions of the 2011 law include a 72-hour waiting period and the requirement of crisis pregnancy centers to have a licensed medical or mental health professional on staff.
PASSED: A law that bans abortion coverage in the health insurance exchange that will be established under the federal health care reform law except in cases of life endangerment or possible risk of “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.”
The bill, according to the Guttmacher’s Institute report, restricts public funding of abortions except in cases of life endangerment.
In 2011, the Texas State House of Representatives passed the Sonogram Bill (HB 15) which requires a woman to get a sonogram before ending a pregnancy. This measure includes forcing victims of rape to have a sonogram at least 24 hours before the procedure. According to Planned Parenthood, “while a woman can opt-out of seeing the sonogram image and hearing the heart tone, she cannot opt-out of a medically unnecessary sonogram, nor can she opt-out of the fetal description except within very narrow parameters for situations of rape, incest, judicial bypasses, and fetal anomalies.”
The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, a law named after a woman who discovered her employer was paying her less than men doing the same job, was signed into law by President Barack Obama on January 29, 2009.
In 2007 Lilly Ledbetter took her pay discrimination complaint all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that claims like hers had to be filed within 180 days of an employer’s decision to pay a worker less—even if the worker didn’t learn about the unfair pay until much later, as was the case for Mrs. Ledbetter.
To make sure that people can effectively challenge unequal pay, the law President Obama signed shortly after taking office amended the Civil Rights Act of 1964 so that unfair pay complaints can be filed within 180 days of a discriminatory paycheck—and that 180 days resets after each paycheck is issued.
Check out the interactive version of this image HERE.
Democratic U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer of California chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and the Senate Select Committee on Ethics. She is a firm advocate for women’s health care and rights and has no trouble speaking her mind on Twitter.
Read her opinion article on the Republican War on Women for Politico here. Follow Senator Boxer @SenatorBoxer.
The Republican rhetoric surrounding birth control attempts to define contraception as a religious issue rather than a health issue. By framing the issue in this way, conservatives can claim that publicly funding the availability of contraception violates their religious beliefs.
“Contraception is under attack in a way it really wasn’t in the past few years,” said Judy Waxman, the vice president for health and reproductive rights at the National Women’s Law Center, in an interview for a Mother Jones article in February.
“In 2004, we could not find any group—the National Right to Life Committee, the Bush campaign, anyone—that would go on the record to say they’re opposed to birth control,” said Elizabeth Shipp, the political director for NARAL Pro-Choice America, in the same article. “We couldn’t find them in 2006 either, and in 2008 it was just fringe groups. In 2010, 2011, and this year, it’s just exploded.”
With the presidential election looming, many people argue that this will be the first time American’s access to contraception will be dramatically increased or dramatically scaled back depending on who is voted President.
Although Mitt Romney came on the platform strongly with the church and against the birth-control mandate with a proposal to defund Planned Parenthood, he is now changing his tune in time for the election. This new ad, which aired following October 16th’s presidential debate, tries to soften Romney’s message on birth control:
“This is an ad designed to deceive women,” said Planned Parenthood Action Fund Executive Vice President Dawn Laguens in an interview with NPR. “The Romney team knows that Mitt Romney’s real agenda for women’s health is deeply unpopular — ending safe and legal abortion, ending Planned Parenthood’s preventive care that millions of people rely on, and repealing the Affordable Care Act and the coverage of birth control with no copay.”
Source: The Huffington Post
According to an article on the Huffington Post, if elected president, Mitt Romney will take three separate measures against contraception. These actions include:
1. Romney plans to end Title X, the nation’s contraception program for low-income Americans that serves 5 million people per year and is estimated to prevent one million unintended pregnancies each year too. (it also saves taxpayers $3.4 billion in costs annually that otherwise would have been borne by Medicaid for prenatal care, delivery and infant care.) Title X currently supports six in ten of all family planning health centers in the United States. Romney plans to eliminate the program and with it coverage of contraception to more than 4 million people.
2. Romney will, as he put it, “Get rid” of Planned Parenthood. Not an empty threat or a misleading one. Last year, the Republicans came within a hair of shutting the federal government down because they wanted to strip Planned Parenthood of its federal funding. President Obama held firm, winning the game of chicken. But Romney won’t be a defender of what is the largest provider of contraception in the country. If Planned Parenthood takes that massive hit, losing the $487 million of the federal funding it receives from Medicaid for contraceptive services and other federal grants for STI treatment, prevention and cancer screenings, it will be cut at the knees. The defunding would eliminate access to care at Planned Parenthood for half of its patients, 1.5 million people a year.
3. Romney will remove contraceptive coverage from Obamacare. Even if Romney doesn’t succeed in reversing Obamacare, which he promises he will, he would still eliminate contraception. The Secretary of HHS who is appointed by the President can simply highlight the word contraception and press delete.
According to this information, millions of Americans will be stripped of contraceptive access in these three acts promised by Romney. However the presidential election pans out, there is no doubt that conservatives will continue to push for the public defunding of Planned Parenthood and contraception in general using religious rhetoric.
The U.S. War on Women has led to conservative legislation that limits women’s access to abortion services and severely interferes with women’s reproductive health decisions in general. This map illustrates some of the most restrictive measures being passed and moved through state legislations today.
Areas of legislation include:
Mandated pre-abortion ultrasounds
Health care provided refusals to perform abortions
“Personhood” amendments that declare that life begins at the moment of conception and that zygotes have all the rights of citizens, effectively outlawing all abortions and even some methods of birth control
The targeting and defunding of Planned Parenthood
Bans that outlaw abortions after 20 weeks gestation and punish providers who do not uphold law with prison sentences and fines
Recently, there has been no shortage of remarks from right-wing politicians on women and reproductive rights.
Last Tuesday, October 23rd, Indiana GOP U.S. Senate candidate Richard Mourdock declared that he opposes aborting pregnancies conceived in rape because “it is something that God intended to happen.”
Other infamous remarks in recent past have come from Missouri GOP Senate candidate Rep. Todd Akin, the anti-abortion congressman who notoriously asserted that women don’t get pregnant from “legitimate rape,” Georgia state Rep. Terry England who compared women to farm animals while discussing an abortion measure on the Georgia state house floor, and Mitt Romney’s recent second presidenital debate remark in which he used the phrase “binders full of women” in response to a question about pay equity.
There has been an overwhelming response to the many remarks on women’s reproductive rights made by conservative politicians. As the only global advocacy organization dedicated exclusively to the advancement and protection of reproductive rights as fundamental human rights in constitutional and international law, the Center for Reproductive Rights rallies with celebrity endorsers to support and create various public awareness and education campaigns.
In this ad, celebrities including Meryl Streep and Kevin Bacon endorse the Center for Reproductive Rights’ Bill of Reproductive Rights.
Republicans however, argue that the War on Women is fiction.
This past April, Bloomberg TV’s Al Hunt asked RNC Chairman Reince Priebus how large of a problem it was for Republicans that polls at the time showed President Barack Obama with a 2-1 lead among female voters in battleground states.
“If Democrats said we had a war on caterpillars and every mainstream media outlet talked about the fact that the Republicans have a war on caterpillars then we would have problems with caterpillars,” Priebus explained. “The fact of the matter is that it’s a fiction.”
Later that day, the Obama campaign hit back at Priebus in a statement from Deputy Campaign Manager Stephanie Cutter. “Reince Priebus’ comparison of Republican attempts to limit women’s access to mammograms, cervical cancer screenings, and contraception to a ‘war on caterpillars’ shows how little regard leading Republicans, including Mitt Romney, have for women’s health,” said Cutter. “Reince Priebus’ comments today only reinforce why women simply cannot trust Mitt Romney or other leading Republicans to stand up for them.”
In April, Rachel Maddow responded to the Republican denial of a pay gap, and the Meet The Press attack on her, by “intellectually destroying” the Republican War On Women, according to Politics USA. Maddow continued to expose the Republican “lie” that there exists no War on Women. She explained that even within the Republican ranks, there is dissent on this issue.
End result? The Republican War on Women is not fictional.
The U.S. War on Women 