Title
Urging the United States government to take immediate action to protect and enshrine reproductive rights and ensure abortion access for all birthing people.
Body
WHEREAS, In 2022, using a specious historical constitutional interpretation, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that the right to abortion was not constitutionally protected, overturning the rights guaranteed by their landmark decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973; and
WHEREAS, In the wake of Dobbs, which remanded reproductive law to individual states, coalitions of religious conservatives and other forced-birth advocates set themselves to the task of pursuing total or near-total abortion bans in the states; and
WHEREAS, On Tuesday, April 9, the Arizona Supreme Court, made up entirely of Republican appointees, ruled in a 4-to-2 decision that an archaic 1864 law banning abortion from conception onward is "now enforceable;" and
WHEREAS, The law makes no exception for victims of rape or incest, and only permits abortions when they are necessary to save a woman's life, and doctors prosecuted under the law for providing, supplying or administering care to a pregnant person could face fines and prison terms of up to five years; and
WHEREAS, If the law, which predates Arizona's statehood by over five decades, is allowed to stand, Arizonans seeking abortions will travel to neighboring states, as residents of other restrictive states have done; and
WHEREAS, The time and expense of interstate travel are prohibitive to less-resourced individuals, who would then be forced to carry children to term and raise them in poverty, or turn to hazardous non-clinical interventions; and
WHEREAS, The right to bodily autonomy and family planning is so fundamental, and the landscape of reproductive rights in the United States so increasingly hodgepodge and out-of-line with the views of most Americans, so as to create an unsustainable situation that begs for the kind of in...
Click here for full text