Choice for Women in Pennsylvania
Thursday, March 14th, 2013by the ACLU
Some legislators in Harrisburg will stop at nothing to bar women from accessing safe, legal abortion – even if it means endangering their health.
Their latest efforts, Senate Bill 3, House Bill 742, and House Bill 818, would ban private insurance companies from covering abortion services for patients in Pennsylvania’s new health care exchanges. The bill is so narrowly tailored with so few exceptions that even a woman with a serious health complication like cancer could not get insurance coverage of abortion.
A simple amendment to these bills would provide women in the most desperate of circumstances – facing cancer, serious illness, or fetal defects – with an opportunity to use her private insurance coverage to pay for an abortion.
Tell your legislators: Protect women with serious health complications.
I walk the halls of our state capitol almost every day, and I have to tell you – some of our legislators don’t understand why an amendment like this is so critical to women’s health.
Too many women in Pennsylvania face heartbreaking circumstances that make pregnancy dangerous. Politicians are trying to withhold comprehensive health insurance coverage, just to make a difficult situation even more difficult.
For a woman whose health is in danger, access to abortion isn’t about political partisanship. It’s about the right to make a profoundly private decision on her own. Politicians in Harrisburg must protect a woman’s ability to get the health care she needs. But without your legislators’ support, an amendment to protect women’s health could fail – closing off access for women who need it the most.
Urge your legislators to support an amendment to these bills that allows a woman with major health complications access to comprehensive insurance coverage.