In Response to the Presidential Administration’s “Gag Rule”

I don’t know if Congress with its largely male composition can imagine what it would be like to be a young single teenage girl who is pregnant or a mature married woman who is pregnant and for whatever reason didn’t want to go forward with that pregnancy. Perhaps the young girl is terrified and traumatized by the prospect of carrying a baby to term.  Perhaps the mature woman has a husband newly dying of cancer and three children already on the ground who need her help.  There are many possibilities.

Regardless of one’s opinion about abortion, women and girls need access to reproductive healthcare, whatever their circumstances.  One half of babies are born with their deliveries paid for by Medicaid.  We need to do a better job for our people, and that means making reproductive healthcare a priority. Punishing people by making it hard to access reproductive healthcare not only is cruel to the people in need of it, it hurts all of us.