NYTimes.com Article: Editorial: Rolling Back Women's Rights

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Editorial: Rolling Back Women's Rights

November 23, 2004





Dispensing with legislative niceties like holding hearings
or full and open debate, President Bush and the Republican
Congress have used the cover of a must-pass spending bill
to mount a disgraceful sneak attack on women's health and
freedom.

Tucked into the $388 billion budget measure just approved
by the House and Senate is a sweeping provision that has
nothing to do with the task Congress had at hand -
providing money for the government. In essence, it tells
health care companies, hospitals and insurance companies
they are free to ignore Roe v. Wade and state and local
laws and regulations currently on the books to make certain
that women's access to reproductive health services
includes access to abortion.

It remains to be seen exactly how the measure will work in
practice. But the intention, plainly, is to curtail further
already dwindling access to abortion and even to counseling
that mentions abortion as a legal option. It denies federal
financing to government agencies that "discriminate"
against health care providers who choose for any reason to
disregard state mandates to offer abortion-related
services. This represents a vast expansion of the
"conscience protection" that federal law currently gives to
individual doctors who do not want to undergo abortion
training.

The affront to women's rights, moreover, should not obscure
the serious threat to the First Amendment involved in
enacting what is likely to evolve into a domestic "gag
rule" as, one by one, health care providers order doctors
they employ not to provide patients with information about
the abortion option. This echoes the way Mr. Bush reimposed
a blanket Reagan-era gag rule for providers of reproductive
health services abroad on his first full day in office back
in 2001.

Unfortunately, vocal opposition from Democrats and a
handful of Republican moderates was not enough to stop the
pernicious assault on the rights of millions of women from
becoming law in the rush to pass the spending bill. At
least Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, won a
promise from the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, to
permit a direct vote on a bill repealing this measure not
long into the new Congressional session. In the meantime,
Americans, and American women in particular, are officially
on notice that post-election, the Republican war on
reproductive rights has entered an ominous new phase.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/23/opinion/23tue2.html?ex=1102241660&ei=1&en=194a0fb106acf54c


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