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Since the fall of Roe v Wade two years ago this month, we have seen an all-out campaign to attack choice in any way possible. In the House, nearly every time we are voting on important legislation, my Republican colleagues have found a way to use it to limit reproductive care in some form or fashion.

This week, it was the annual bill that funds the VA and military construction projects. This bill slipped in a provision that would prohibit the VA from providing abortions to female veterans in the cases of rape or incest, or to protect the health of the mother.

This bill would prevent the VA from providing or even talking to female veterans about reproductive healthcare, meaning that our veterans would have less access to reproductive health options than the average American.

This is a particularly shameful example of how Republicans are chipping away at abortion rights at the federal level — but it is also part and parcel of a much larger campaign to impose a nationwide ban on abortion. As we approach the two year anniversary of the Dobbs decision, it’s important to recognize that overturning Roe was the front door to restricting women’s access to abortion. And now, we’ve seen Republicans try to use the back door in 5 big ways:

The first is through attacks on IVF and family planning. Candidates—including in our race—have sponsored legislation that says an embryo is a person, which definitionally threatens IVF, as we saw with the Alabama Supreme Court decision. But what’s less understood is that these same proposals could also impact contraception: many of the same legal issues that would prohibit IVF also affect women’s access to birth control pills, IUDs, and Plan B.

The second category is threats to the medication used to carry out abortions. Right now, we’re waiting for a decision from the Supreme Court that could overturn FDA approval of Mifepristone, the drug most commonly used in abortions. If you’re in a state that has legal abortion — like Michigan, where we’ve codified Roe into our Constitution — but clinics can’t get the medications necessary, then you don’t have real access. And if FDA approval of Mifepristone is overturned, you should assume that the GOP will go after the other drugs used to perform abortions.

The third category is restricting a woman’s right to travel to another state for an abortion. For nearly a year, Senator Tuberville from Alabama held up over 400 senior military confirmations as he tried to restrict the Pentagon from providing women servicemembers with paid leave and travel reimbursement to go to another state to receive abortion healthcare. The same concept will almost certainly be inserted into legislation on the Pentagon’s budget this summer.

Number four is outright bans on abortion in individual states. Right now, 21 states have either banned or have major restrictions on abortions. Luckily, we have seen efforts in Michigan, in Kansas, in Ohio, and other states to protect abortion, but we still have states carrying out full abortion bans — in Idaho, Texas, and more. It’s a constant attack at the state-level, which is why we need federal legislation.

And the fifth category is threats to life-saving care for pregnant women. The Supreme Court will decide this month whether a woman can walk into an ER and have the doctor prioritize the life of the mother over the life of the fetus. We’re now seeing women in the middle of miscarriages being told to wait in hospital parking lots until they’re sick enough for doctors to care for them. We’ve all known women who could have been put in this situation, and this is an attempt at putting the unborn over the life of the woman.

What House Republicans have done with the VA budget — in deciding to turn a bill to fund veteran’s service into an attack on choice — is yet another proof point that the extreme anti-choice movement was never going to stop with overturning Roe. So while Michigan voters made their voices heard on reproductive freedom in 2022, we need that same energy in 2024 because the reality is that these threats to abortion care across the country could still affect us. In the Senate, I’ll vote to protect the rights that Michiganders voted for and restore the Roe standard nationwide.


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Thank you,

Elissa
 


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