News & Commentary

The ACLU of Maine filed a lawsuit this week to ensure that all women, regardless of their income, are able to exercise their constitutional right to choose whether and when to have children.  The lawsuit challenges a Maine regulation that denies coverage for abortion for eligible women who use Medicaid services.

In the 1920s, the ACLU defended Mary Ware Dennett, a birth control pioneer whose sex education pamphlet was deemed obscene and whose work helped lead the way for the organization that would become Planned Parenthood. 90 years later, we are proud to work alongside our friends at Planned Parenthood of Northern New England to ensure that every Maine woman can make the best decisions for herself and her family about her reproductive health. 

I heard a lot of talk about "wasting the taxpayer's dollars" this session, mostly in the context of "welfare fraud" and the need to reserve benefits for "our people," i.e. U.S. citizens. No one repeated this refrain more than the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), an agency whose enabling statute includes the following guiding principles:

Wondering how your place of employment affects your contraceptive coverage? It’s been a year since the Supreme Court ruling on the Hobby Lobby case and, just last Friday, the Obama administration finalized rules that will allow women working for particular religious non-profits and corporations to still receive coverage for their contraceptives. With these new rules in place, employees in need of contraceptives will still have access to insurance plans that cover contraceptives, even if their employers have religious objections.

As I wrote in an op-ed in the Press Herald on Sunday, the Constitution makes it clear that the bills – now totaling 71 – languishing on Governor LePage’s desk are now law. That includes six new laws we worked hard to pass that protect civil liberties in Maine. Here’s a look at them:

The last two weeks have been phenomenal weeks for all of the reproductive justice and abortion rights bills making their way through the state legislature. After a long wait, we finally saw movement on four bills addressing women's reproductive health. Two anti-abortion bills were soundly defeated and two bills supporting women’s reproductive rights were passed in both chambers of the legislature.

This Wednesday, May 13th, the Judiciary Committee will hear testimony on two anti-abortion bills.  Testimony for the two bills will be heard at 1:00 in Room 438 in the Statehouse. If you’re able to join us on Wednesday, please wear pink to show your support for defeating these bills. 

A few weeks ago, Girls actress Jemima Kirke shared her abortion story with Draw the Line – a national campaign launched in 2012 by the Center for Reproductive Rights. Her abortion narrative is common – her life wasn’t “conducive for raising a happy, healthy child.”  Kirke was frank about her experience, focusing on the financial toll seeking an abortion took on her, as well as the isolation that she felt after the abortion. Kirke’s shame about being pregnant drove her to pay for her abortion procedure out of pocket. Paying for the abortion herself meant emptying her bank account and forgoing the anesthesia because she couldn’t afford the additional cost. Towards the end of her video Kirke makes a profound statement, linking stigma to the inaccessibility of abortion: "It's the obstacles and the stigma that makes [abortion] not completely unavailable...and that's the tricky part. We think we have free choice...but then there are these little hoops we have to jump through to get them."

Last week, CNN’s Jessica Ravitz published a piece reflecting on the status of women in the U.S., as compared to other countries in the world. Ravitz wrote the piece to draw attention to “Equal Pay Day” – the date that symbolizes how far into the year women must work to earn what a man earned in the previous year.