On October 4, HHS announced a final rule to undo a horrible Trump administration action that resulted in the Title X family planning program’s capacity being cut in half.
Texas SB 8 and the Supreme Court majority’s response to it are both appalling.
For more than four decades, each spending bill Congress passes has contained a discriminatory and harmful rider: the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of federal funds to pay for abortions except in cases of rape, incest, or life-endangering pregnancies. A House Appropriations subcommittee hearing addressed its harms, which disproportionately fall on Black and Brown women.
A new estimate from the Guttmacher Institute calculates the impact of the Title X gag rule: a 47% drop in the program’s capacity to serve female patients, most of whom have low incomes and few other options for receiving high-quality family planning services.
The Title X family planning program has long provided voluntary, high-quality, evidence-based care to clients with low incomes, but its ability to uphold standards of care and its own programmatic requirements is under threat.
Friday, May 31 was nearly the last day on which Missouri residents could obtain abortion care in their state — and across much of the country, access to abortion care is increasingly restricted.
The annual “March for Life” this year tries to claim science is on their side, but it isn’t. Commentators are calling them on the contradiction between this claim and the anti-science policies pushed by organizations that aim to ban abortion.
Outside the Supreme Court during the Kavanaugh confirmation vote, we heard from Senators and advocates, but most importantly, we heard from survivors of sexual assault.
Senator Harris’s bill to reduce racial disparities in maternal mortality has won praise, but several commenters have also noted that much larger steps will also be necessary to fix the conditions that put black women at elevated risk of a range of health problems
The comment deadline on the Trump administration’s Title X gag rule is Tuesday, July 31. If implemented, it will severely damage a successful program that used to enjoy bipartisan support and that has helped millions of low-income people access high-quality reproductive healthcare.