"Thirty years ago today, the U.S. Supreme Court made the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that recognized that a woman’s right to control her reproductive life is central to a woman’s life and ability to participate fully and equally in society," said Nancy Northup, President of the Center for Reproductive Rights.
"While this anniversary is a moment to celebrate, it also marks a time of increasing peril for women’s rights. The Bush administration has embarked on a multi-faceted stealth campaign to deny women their most basic right of self-determination. Anti-choice policies and legislation now effuse all three branches of the government and are being exported worldwide. The public needs to recognize this threat with the urgency it deserves, and demand the protection of a woman's right to choose before it is eviscerated by the Bush administration and opponents of reproductive rights in Congress.
In the coming days and weeks, reproductive rights opponents in Congress and the Bush administration will launch a campaign to pass a sweeping federal abortion ban, the so-called ‘partial-birth abortion’ ban – which is nothing less than an attempt to eradicate the protection of a woman’s right to choose under Roe.
The federal ban would make it illegal for women to obtain the safest and most common methods of abortion deemed appropriate by their doctors, even in cases of risk to the health of the woman. Women, and their doctors, would no longer have the right to determine the technique that is the safest and most appropriate to end a pregnancy. Instead, this legislation would give that right to federal prosecutors.
President George W. Bush has said he would sign this federal abortion ban into law, despite the fact that just two and half years ago the Supreme Court ruled in Stenberg v. Carhart that a nearly identical Nebraska law was unconstitutional and posed an imminent danger to women’s health. The Court’s decision in Carhart made it no longer credible for politicians to claim to be defenders of women’s health and rights while supporting abortion bans that jeopardize women’s health.
As we celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Roe, lawmakers and the public need to recognize the reality of this federal abortion ban; it is a blatant assault on the right of women to make private medical decisions with their doctors, decisions that affect their health and their freedom."
