Roe v. Wade established a constitutional right to privacy and protected a woman's right to make reproductive decisions based on her own life, health, and conscience. Today, on the 37th anniversary of this landmark ruling, we face a new call to action.

People For the American Way shares the widely held view that abortion should be safe, rare, and legal. We believe that healthcare reform can and should uphold these principles. Unfortunately, current legislation would do more to restrict the rights of women than it would to protect them.

In the House, health insurance plans that participate in the new exchange would be prohibited from providing full reproductive health benefits to millions of American women. Senate language sets up an unworkable system in which women are forced to purchase abortion coverage separately from other healthcare needs, which violates privacy and stigmatizes abortion, and also has the potential to dissuade insurance companies from offering abortion coverage in the first place.

While the Senate has not gone as far as the House in its restrictions, neither bill upholds President Obama’s promise that those who are happy with their healthcare before reform will be able to keep it after. It is critical that whatever he is asked to sign is, at the very least, abortion neutral. Now is the time to defend women’s rights – not roll them back.

Please stand up to right-wing activists who want to hold healthcare reform hostage.

Anti-choice politics have become dangerously entangled with health care reform as evidenced by the troubling vote in the House of Representatives over the weekend for the Stupak-Pitts amendment. The legislation makes it virtually impossible for private insurance companies participating in the proposed new health care system to cover abortion services.

In an effort to maintain the status quo and avoid the use of federal funds to cover abortion care, the House had fashioned a compromise that required all health insurance plans to separate public and private dollars, thereby insuring that no tax dollars would be used to cover abortion services. At the urging of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that approach was rejected as unworkable; what was adopted instead, in the Stupak-Pitts amendment, is a radical departure from current law.

And, in an interesting note, here’s a must read op-ed from NARAL Pro-Choice America and Catholics for Choice pointing out that the system for separating out public and private dollars rejected by the House as unworkable employs the same principle for segregation of funds that the Catholic bishops have routinely used for managing federal funds they receive to ensure that tax dollars don’t finance religious practice.

Please sign our petition to Senator Reid urging him to help keep the Stupak-Pitts amendment out of the Senate health insurance reform bill.
 

In case you aren't already convinced that next month's election is pretty frickin' important, here's something else to consider: the next president will almost certainly have the power to shape the future of the Supreme Court for decades to come.

What does that mean for Roe v. Wade — and the future of reproductive rights in this country? We put together a short video that walks through some scary math. Click here to check it out.