You have until July 31.
TL;DR: That’s the end of the period for you to comment on the “gag rule” that the Administration has proposed to try to destroy Planned Parenthood.
Of course, that’s not what the proposal says … in a nutshell, as the Sacramento Bee put it:
The proposal would deny federal Title X funds for birth control, cancer screenings and sexually transmitted disease tests to any clinic that also provides abortions or even refers a patient for the procedure. Just to be clear, it’s already against the law to use federal money for abortion; Title X recipients undergo frequent audits to ensure their funds go where they’re supposed to.
Sound better? Nope. It’s still a blatant attempt to destroy Planned Parenthood and any other clinic that provides a full range of reproductive health services, if the clinic dares to provide, or discuss, or refer patients for abortion as well as keeping them from getting pregnant, keeping them healthy, or even seeing them through healthy pregnancies.
Your reproductive rights don’t mean much if you can’t exercise them. That means YOU need to speak up, and NOW. Here’s the comment link for Proposed Rule 2018-11673.
Some points you can make:
- Title X focuses not on ending unwanted pregnancies, but preventing them. It’s the nation’s oldest family planning program.
- More than a million low-income Californians, most of them women of color, annually use Title X health care.
- Women’s health clinics are the only health care sources available in some rural areas of California.
- This proposal would put the health care of the four million people who depend on Title X at risk by defunding clinics that provide birth control, cancer screenings and sexually transmitted disease tests.
- If enacted, the gag rule would prohibit ANY Title X health care provider from referring patients for abortion — even if that’s what the patient wants, and even if withholding that information threatens their health.
- This would destroy the trust between patients and doctors.
Read our earlier article for more info.
Oh, and also: if you have any friends in Maine or Alaska, tell them to talk to Senators Collins and Murkowski, who could make the difference in whether an anti-choice Justice gets confirmed for the Supreme Court.
