My Prescription for Protecting Women’s Reproductive Health
Abortion is health care. Period.
But we just saw Texas strip away most access to to safe, legal abortion through a six-week abortion ban that empowers private citizens to seek out a $10,000 bounty for suing people who receive abortions and anyone who helps them do so.
It’s a terrifying and dangerous chapter in the fight for reproductive rights. And as a physician, a woman, and a mom to three kids, I am committed to continuing the fight to defend abortion access, as well as the full-range of contraception and health care options.
Frankly, I can’t think of a more important moment to send a woman physician who spent time with patients making difficult decisions about their bodies and reproductive choices to the U.S. Senate — and I would be honored to be the first. Here’s what I would fight for.
Codifying Roe & Enshrining Abortion Access Into Law
It is clear we need to codify Roe v. Wade — urgently. By passing the Women’s Health Protection Act, we can prevent other states from passing laws like Texas, by ensuring there are laws on the books to protect women’s access to abortion and the ability of health care providers to provide them.
But we can’t stop there.
Protecting Access To Contraception
As a physician, I also uniquely understand just how consequential this law is to the sacred doctor-patient relationship, and fear it sets a dangerous precedent for private citizens interfering in personal health decisions of complete strangers — and it could go beyond abortion.
Kelsey Leigh, a Pennsylvania woman who has shared her personal experience with abortion with me multiple times, said it best at a recent roundtable: “just as someone doesn’t get to interject and tell you which breast cancer treatment to pursue, someone doesn’t get to interject and tell me how to take care of my body and my child.”
She’s right — medical decisions should be left between people and their doctors. But what’s happening in Texas could jeopardize access to birth control, emergency contraception, IUDs, and other forms of contraception, subjecting doctors who give basic health care advice to harassing lawsuits.
I’m proud that under the Affordable Care Act, which I fought to pass as the President of the National Physicians Alliance, we made birth control available at no cost to those with insurance. As good as that was, there is more to do, especially for underserved communities, when it comes to contraception access.
First, we need to make all contraception available at no cost and over-the-counter — including things like emergency contraception and spermicide. Unfortunately, right now, you can only access these forms of contraception for free with a prescription. That’s completely unnecessary and something we should fix right away.
In addition, we ought to expand access to abortion care by ensuring that out-of-pocket costs aren’t a barrier. We need to both repeal the Hyde Amendment and eliminate patient cost-sharing for abortion care. Unfortunately, the Affordable Care Act actually allows states to ban coverage of abortions, and a number of states have taken that step. We need to fix that, because — like any health care — abortion should never be out of reach because of cost.
Demanding Answers From Big Tech On Private Information Sharing
Beyond the clear health care implications, the Texas law amounts to an absolutely massive invasion of privacy and opens up the floodgates to civil lawsuits. Tech companies must be a first line of defense in protecting our personal information, including any information regarding our health care.
The Texas law allows anyone to be sued for helping someone get an abortion — which means a company that posts resources for women seeking an abortion, or even Facebook users who raise money for women seeking abortions could get sued. According to a fellow at Yale Law School, “Anyone who fundraises for abortion patients, providers or tells someone how to get to a clinic etc. could be at risk…Short answer is they could probably get a subpoena to get Google to turn over information about who bought Google Ads.”
This is a privacy nightmare. We need to know if and how major tech companies like Google and Facebook will comply with potential subpoenas for user data, as these firms host what could be even more personal and intimate communications between women, their partners, and those they might turn to for health care advice. We have already seen Lyft and Uber commit to paying the legal fees of any driver sued under the law, and GoDaddy took down a site aimed at collecting anonymous tips for those “violating” the new abortion ban. Google and Facebook must give the public and its users clear information on how it intends to protect the private information of its users.
These are just a few of the actions we ought to take as soon as possible to directly address the impact of what’s happened in Texas, especially as other states seek to enact their own similar bans. This doctor stands ready to battle back against these outrageous and unprecedented attacks on our ability to do what we want with our bodies. Those decisions should be left up to us — not politicians in Texas, Pennsylvania or Washington D.C.
