Columbus — Ignoring the US Constitution and the advice of Ohio physicians, the state senate has passed Senate Bill 145, the Abortion Method Ban, which blocks the safest, most common abortion procedure.
NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio Deputy Director Jaime Miracle said: “This ban forces women seeking an abortion to seek out less-safe procedures, but today we saw from state lawmakers that they just don’t care. The decision about whether and how to terminate a pregnancy should be up to a woman and her doctor. They don’t need political interference driven by inflammatory, biased rhetoric.
“Medical experts like the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists oppose bills like these. They feel doctors will be forced by ill-advised, unscientifically-motivated policy to provide lesser care to patients. This bill is just another unconstitutional attack on access to abortion care, just like the other 18 restrictions that Governor Kasich signed during his tenure.”
Protesting silently in the senate chamber for the vote were 12 women dressed as characters from The Handmaid’s Tale. The Handmaid’s Tale is a Margaret Atwood novel that is a current television series. It takes place in a not-so-distant future where the United States has become a totalitarian society led by men and plagued by infertility. To solve that problem, child-bearing women are forced to become “handmaids” and birth babies fathered by men leading the regime.
In a separate vote, the Ohio legislature approved $1,000,000 for so-called crisis pregnancy centers. NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio Executive Director Kellie Copeland said: “So-called crisis pregnancy centers are in no way medical institutions. They lie, they scare, and they coerce women. In a time of enormous budget shortfalls, when Republican leadership is plotting to remove access to Medicaid for low-income Ohioans, somehow Republican leaders think it’s appropriate to hand over a million dollars of public funds to fake clinics. We call on Gov. Kasich to respect taxpayers and women who need real medical support. He must line-item veto this waste from the budget.”
Crisis pregnancy centers are a danger to women’s reproductive health and rights. Not only do they lie to women about the risks associated with birth control and abortion, they do not give women accurate information about all the medical options available.
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