Tiffany Hankins: Ideology endangers women’s health care
The United States is currently experiencing a 30-year low in the number of unplanned pregnancies, including a historic low in the number of teen pregnancies, thanks largely to expanded access to health care under the Affordable Care Act, including free and low-cost birth control.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is, the Trump administration, with the support of anti-choice leaders in Congress like Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), is trying to roll back that progress by instituting draconian new restrictions on health-care access. Their ultimate goal isn’t just defunding Planned Parenthood, or overturning Roe v. Wade – it’s eliminating access to safe, legal abortion in America.
The latest proposal from Trump and his party will go a long way toward that goal – depriving clinics of federal funds if they so much as mention abortion to their patients and allowing health care providers to withhold vital, even life-saving, information if it contradicts their personal religious views. Much like the global gag rule, under which the U.S. withholds federal funding from health care providers that discuss abortion with their patients, the domestic gag rule will force community clinics across the country to shut their doors, depriving women of not just abortion but birth control, cancer screenings, sexually transmitted infection tests, and other preventive health care services.
Across the nation, advocates and elected officials, including more than 200 members of Congress, are speaking out against this attack on reproductive health care and the doctor-patient relationship that Americans hold sacred. However, our own congresswoman, Cathy McMorris Rodgers, is not among them. Instead, McMorris Rodgers has chosen to serve the Trump/Pence radical anti-choice agenda, voting for the global gag rule and proposing new restrictions on access to reproductive health care, including abortion.
McMorris Rodgers ought to look more closely at her own district, where at least eight federally funded clinics stand to lose funding under the new domestic gag rule. Those clinics, which include Planned Parenthood clinics in Spokane and Walla Walla as well as community health care centers from Colville to Nine Mile Falls, will now be forced to make a choice: Continue providing accurate, comprehensive health care services, including information about abortion and abortion referrals, or remain silent and deprive women of the information, care, and referrals they need to make informed decisions about when, whether and how to start or expand their families.
This is not a choice that any health care provider should have to make. We need a bold leader in Congress who will fight for all of us – not a radical anti-choice ideologue who’s willing to deprive her constituents of health care to score political points with her Trumpian right-wing base.
Tiffany Hankins is executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Washington.