Washington, D.C. - This Sunday more than a million people from around the country are expected to converge in our nation’s capital to communicate a simple truth: reproductive rights are human rights, and we all must be free to exercise them. This is a critical time for such a gathering. At every level of government — federal, state, and local — the ability of women to obtain safe and legal abortion services in accordance with the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision is under attack.
The Congress and many state legislatures have recently passed dangerous and misleading abortion restrictions, threatening the lives and health of women. The number of anti-choice bills introduced in the Maryland General Assembly has jumped in recent years. Around the country, typical tactics include the imposition of biased counseling laws and obstructionist mandatory waiting periods that treat women as if they are incapable of making their own decisions. Certain groups also seek to deny women access to birth control and medically accurate information. In a number of pending legal cases around the country, Attorney General John Ashcroft has sought the private medical records of hundreds of women as part of his long sought goal of denying a woman’s right to choose. These efforts pose a real threat to basic freedoms and to women’s health.
We are fortunate in Montgomery County that women have had access to a range of reproductive services, and to the family planning services needed to prevent abortion in the first place. We have excellent physicians, hospitals, and clinics throughout the region. Organizations like Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington (PPMW) have clinics in Silver Spring and Gaithersburg that are open to everyone in need, including our growing immigrant populations and our low-income families.
What many on Capitol Hill do not seem to understand is that the growing attacks on service providers like PPMW restrict access to the health care and information that reduce the need for abortion and helps keep people healthy. Pap smears, HIV tests, birth control and breast cancer screenings are all at risk when the White House, Congress or state legislatures make it more difficult for patients to come to clinics.
It is ironic that at a time when the United States seeks to expand the rights and liberties of women in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, some would attempt to limit the freedoms of women here at home. We must not take these rights and freedoms for granted. I encourage everyone in the 8th Congressional District of Maryland to join me at the March for Women’s Lives on April 25 to stand up for and protect these hard won rights.