Politics vs. women's rights

The Hill
June 26, 2014, 10:00 am
Politics vs. women's rights

...Between 2011 and 2013, politicians in over two dozen states passed more than 200 restrictions on access to abortion services and other critical reproductive health care. That’s more attacks on women’s health care in two years than in the entire preceding decade. And this year, legislators in Mississippi, Arizona, Louisiana, and Oklahoma passed unjustifiable laws designed to shut down clinics, putting the care and counsel of quality reproductive health care providers out of reach.

For countless women in these states, especially those facing difficult economic circumstances, getting the reproductive health care has been turned into a nightmare experience ripped from the pages of dystopian fiction.

Take Kylie Shelley. Faced with an unexpected pregnancy, she considered her options and decided not to go through with the pregnancy—but because she lives in Oklahoma, she was forced to undergo an ultrasound and sent home for 24 hours before the procedure could be performed. She struggled to pay for her care, which cost four times her weekly paycheck, and was further set back when the 24-hour waiting period cost her an entire day’s worth of hourly wages.

If Kylie had chosen to travel to another state to avoid scaling these barriers, she might have met Klaira Lerma. Klaira works at a Colorado abortion clinic, where patients come from as far as Texas, Nebraska, and North Dakota, because political attacks on reproductive health care in their home states have made it nearly impossible to safely and legally end a pregnancy. These women pay for plane tickets, bus fare, child care, and hotels just to get the medical care they need....

Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/healthcare/210578-politics-vs-womens-rights#ixzz35nZPrpuM
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