[NOW-action-list] Oppose the Bush Administration's Efforts to Dismantle Reproductive Rights

National Organization for Women
TAKE ACTION NOW!

Oppose the Bush Administration's Efforts
to Dismantle Reproductive Rights

January 17, 2003

• Action Needed
• Background
• George W. Bush's Reproductive Rights Attack Checklist

On the 30th anniversary of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, we are perilously close to losing our access to family planning and our right to safe and legal abortions.

Action Needed

1. Sign the Save Roe Now petition and encourage others to do the same.

2. Speak out at every opportunity. Our silence lends credence to our opponents' vicious lies. If you are in the Washington, D.C. area, come to Capital City NOW's candlelight vigil on Weds. Jan. 22 at 5:30 p.m. in front of the Supreme Court.

3. Contact your senators and representative and tell them you oppose the Bush administration's anti-abortion, anti-family planning and anti-women measures. The Bush administration is pushing new laws and stacking the judiciary to dismantle our abortion and reproductive rights. Urge your lawmakers to vote for pro-choice, pro-women and pro-family bills and judicial nominees. And, as the likelihood of a Supreme Court vacancy increases, urge your senators to only support pro-choice and pro-women Supreme Court nominees and, if necessary, to filibuster against confirmation of any nominees in the mold of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

Background

Since arriving in office two years ago, Bush has energetically and effectively pushed an anti-abortion, anti-family planning and anti-women agenda. Read this list of actions taken or proposed by the Bush administration — it leaves no doubt that Bush and his right-wing cronies intend to gut our hard-won right to abortion and birth control and to eliminate our rights to reproductive health services and information.

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THE BUSH CHECKLIST

BUSH'S GOAL: ESTABLISH THE LEGAL PRINCIPLE OF FETAL PERSONHOOD

ON THE AGENDA:

1. Make fetuses eligible for coverage under the State Child Health Insurance Program. Be sure the low-income women who carry them are not covered, even for life- or health-threatening conditions during pregnancy. DONE.

2. Include fetuses as persons monitored by the Centers for Disease Control panel regulating human clinical trials. DONE.

3. Sign the Unborn Victims of Violence Act allowing an individual who harms or kills a pregnant woman to be charged with a separate offense for harming the zygote, blastocyst, embryo, or fetus in her body. Ignore, underfund and pay lip service to the problem of violence against women. PENDING.

BUSH'S GOAL: ELIMINATE ALL FEDERAL FUNDING FOR FAMILY PLANNING

ON THE AGENDA:

1. Reinstate the global gag rule, disqualifying any international group from receiving U.S. funds if they even mention abortion when providing medical information to their patients, ensuring more than 80,000 women a year will die from unsafe, illegal abortions. DONE.

2. Invent pretext to withhold $34 million from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which provides HIV/AIDS education, sterile birthing kits and contraceptive information to poor women worldwide. (Likely result: Two million unwanted pregnancies, 800,000 more abortions, 4,700 dead mothers and 77,000 deaths among children under 5). DONE.

3. Cut off Centers for Disease Control sex education program because it tells parents how to talk to their kids about contraception and disease prevention. Increase funding for abstinence-only programs. NEVER let them mention condoms. DONE.

4. De-fund women's health clinics by amending Title X (family planning program) to deny federal funds to any organization that provides abortion services with private funds, ensuring that more than one million low-income women lose contraceptive and other preventive health care. PENDING.

5. Deny federal funding to schools that provide emergency contraception (the morning-after pill) to teens. Who cares if it is essential to lowering teen pregnancy rates in the U.S.? In fact, discourage emergency contraceptive use even for victims of rape or incest. PENDING.

6. Require parental consent for young women to obtain birth control or treatment of sexually transmitted diseases. PENDING.

BUSH'S GOAL: DREAM UP NEW WAYS TO RESTRICT ACCESS TO ABORTION

ON THE AGENDA:

1. Kill that left-wing sponsored bill to allow military women serving abroad to use their own funds to pay for abortions at military hospitals overseas. Be sure that women who serve their country in harm's way further jeopardize their lives by traveling long distances or using inadequate, illegal or dangerous local facilities should they need abortion services. DONE.

2. Convert some of that nifty state legislation to the federal level to make sure we control the reproductive life of every woman in the U.S. For example, promote passage of and sign the Abortion Non-Discrimination Act that would allow health care providers who receive federal funding to refuse to provide abortion and contraceptive information if it violates the institution's "conscience." Religious hospitals could refuse to give information and treatment even if the woman is a rape victim or her life is at risk from the pregnancy. PENDING.

3. Put anti-abortion activist Dr. David Hager, the faith healer who prescribes prayer for PMS, on the FDA's influential Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee. DONE.

4. Then get them to "reevaluate" mifepristone (also known as the RU-486), which Hager opposes. PENDING.

5. Sign the Child Custody Protection Act, which would make it a crime for any adult other than a parent to escort a minor across state lines for reproductive health services (as soon as Congress passes it!). PENDING.

6. Begin the march to outlaw all abortion procedures by first passing and signing the "partial birth" abortion ban that would prohibit use of the safest vaginal abortion procedures to women, even when their life or health is at stake. So what if there isn't a medical procedure by this name. Doctors and maybe even some women will go to jail, but we've won the PR battle on this one. PENDING.

7. Come up with other crafty ways for state legislatures to harass abortion rights supporters and keep them busy preventing passage of blatantly unconstitutional legislation such as the proposed Georgia law requiring legal representation for each fetus, a hearing and issuance of a death warrant before an abortion. Or how about the Louisiana law diverting funds from a "Choose Life" vanity automobile license plate to a special anti-abortion advisory panel. PENDING.

BUSH'S GOAL: REVERSE ROE v. WADE AND DECLARE ALL ABORTION ILLEGAL IN THE U.S.

ON THE AGENDA:

1. Nominate 94 right-wing ideologues to lifetime positions on the federal bench. Use these judges as an applicant pool when a Supreme Court vacancy occurs. DONE.

2. When a Supreme Court vacancy occurs, appoint another justice like Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas, preferably a young one so he'll be on the Court another 35 years. PENDING.

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