Opportunity for Change
In the months leading up to this election, hundreds of thousands of Americans stood up to demand an end to the relentless onslaught of attacks on women, doctors, and the rights of both.
There can be no question that this was a critical issue for many voters, and they made themselves heard. Once again, the people of the United States have elected a president who supports reproductive rights.
But there’s something very wrong when we have to fight so hard to ensure that the fundamental human rights of half the population are not decimated by the results of a single election.
President Obama now has a historic opportunity to guarantee reproductive rights for all women.
Go to DrawTheLine.org and write your own message to President Obama letting him know what you want to see him to do advance reproductive freedom. We’ll select some of your comments each day to appear on the homepage as a show of broad support for our objectives.
Women should never have to worry that a win for one candidate or another will determine whether or not they can get the full range of reproductive health care they need. Reproductive rights must be protected as fundamental, no more subject to change in an election than our bedrock rights of free speech and religious freedom.
The Center will now press ahead full steam with the strategies we have developed to advance these vital objectives and decisively win the battle for reproductive rights in the United States.
Through the Draw the Line campaign, we’re going to continue amassing and mobilizing broad public support behind our vision for the future of reproductive freedom—and keeping the volume turned up in support of reproductive rights in public discourse.
We will continue to lay the groundwork for—and advocate forcefully—legislative measures at every level of government that strengthen protections of reproductive rights for all American women.
We will maintain our vigorous support for the administration’s inclusion of copay-free contraception as essential preventive health care under Obamacare, through both the federal rulemaking process and in the courts.
We will work with our allies on Capitol Hill to defeat the new wave of hostile legislation that’s almost certain to emerge from the House of Representatives aimed at choking off women’s access to the full range of reproductive health services. At the same time, we’ll keep up our strong state-level work to protect reproductive rights and access to care working with fellow advocates and medical professionals to fight against restrictive legislation and seize opportunities to push for positive legislation.
We will continue to hold elected officials at all levels accountable for their statements and actions regarding reproductive health and reproductive rights issues, calling them out when they display hostility to women, reproductive health care providers, and the rights of both.
And—of course—when harmful, hostile, and demeaning anti-reproductive rights measures get passed into law, we will continue to fight them relentlessly in courts across the nation.
Just yesterday, our attorneys appeared before a federal appeals court to argue that one of the most extreme and catastrophically dangerous restrictions on reproductive choice ever passed in the U.S.—an Arizona law that could quite literally cost women their lives if allowed to go into effect—should be blocked.
In Mississippi, our battle against underhanded regulations aimed at shuttering the last abortion clinic in the state is heating up once again.
The case for strengthened reproductive rights protections is clear—and the Obama Administration now has the opportunity to act on it, promoting policies that guarantee reproductive health and rights and vigorously defending against the legislative tactics that politicians hostile to women have used to choke off access to essential reproductive health care for millions.
We ask President Obama to seize this opportunity. And we look forward to working with this administration to make sure it does the right thing.