The House is expected to vote this week on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and tucked in the legislation is language intended to advance an anti-choice agenda.

The House bill includes a provision that an “unborn child” can be designated as a beneficiary for 529 college saving accounts, defining “unborn child” as a “child in utero” at “any stage of development.”

This isn’t about making college savings plans more accessible — people can already start these savings accounts in their own names before they have children and transfer them to their kids later. This is about laying the foundation for attacks on a woman’s constitutionally protected right to abortion.

Lawmakers in Congress are now attempting to use a tax bill to advance an assault on women’s constitutional rights.

The reason this provision has been included is to incorporate language into federal law aimed at undermining Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision on abortion rights. It’s part of a larger strategy by opponents of abortion rights to chip away at the decision by establishing “fetal personhood.” In fact, opponents of abortion rights have already publicly applauded the provision as an important step in their agenda.

Those who want to overturn Roe have been pushing to establish fetal personhood for years, through legislation at both the state and federal levels. Voters have consistently rejected on state ballot referendums personhood measures that would ban abortion, but anti-choice activists are also attempting to insert language that reinforces the notion of fetal personhood into law wherever they can.

So this approach is nothing new. What is new is that lawmakers in Congress are now attempting to use a tax bill to advance this assault on women’s constitutional rights.

This may be because supporters of “personhood” measures have prominent champions in Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Paul Ryan, who both have cosponsored personhood bills. At the same time, the Trump administration has tried to undermine reproductive choice every chance it gets, from reinstituting the global gag rule to trying to hold pregnant women in immigration detention facilities hostage if they seek to obtain abortion care.

It’s perhaps not surprising that anti-choice proponents would use any vehicle — including the tax bill — to subvert the constitutional rights. But this attack is wrong, and the provision must be removed.

Date

Tuesday, November 14, 2017 - 4:45pm

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The attacks on reproductive rights just keep coming. Today, Congress held a hearing on a bill that would outlaw abortion as early as just six weeks of pregnancy. This amounts to an effective ban on abortion, as many women do not even know if they are pregnant by that time. In fact, it’s the second unconstitutional pre-viability abortion ban that the House has considered in the last month. Just a few weeks ago, the House passed a bill banning abortion beginning at 20 weeks. And President Trump said that he would sign that bill if it landed on his desk.

It is clear that the goal of the president and leaders in Congress is to ban abortion completely, and the anti-choice activist behind this latest piece of legislation has boasted that the bill would prohibit abortion before a woman even knows she’s pregnant and was crafted “to be the arrow in the heart of Roe v. Wade.”

She also claimed that Mike Pence expressed support for her bill in a White House meeting.

It’s not surprising that anti-choice activists feel emboldened by Donald Trump’s presidency to attack women’s health and rights — no matter if the bills they are pushing don’t stand a chance in court.

Trump, who as a presidential candidate proposed punishing women who have an abortion and pledged to appoint only opponents of Roe v. Wade to the Supreme Court, is carrying out a virulent anti-choice and anti-women’s health agenda.

He has reinstituted and expanded the Global Gag Rule, severely undermined the ACA’s birth control benefit by allowing virtually any boss to deny coverage to their employees, signed legislation weakening protections for Title X family planning providers, and pushed for the passage of an Affordable Care Act repeal bill that would cut patients off from care at Planned Parenthood health centers and gut Medicaid coverage for millions of women and families.

Not only that, Trump has also appointed a slew of abortion rights opponents to key administration posts, such as Scott Lloyd, who as Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement prevented young immigrant women in federal custody, like Jane Doe, from obtaining an abortion.

This House bill is just the latest sign that the administration and leaders in Congress are determined to attack reproductive freedoms every chance they get -- which is why the fight for these constitutionally-protected rights is more urgent than ever.

Date

Wednesday, November 1, 2017 - 4:00pm

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The case of 10-year-old Rosa Maria Hernandez is cruel and shocking, even for a Trump administration that has made the indiscriminate targeting of immigrants a top priority.

Americans were rightfully outraged that a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy, who has lived in Texas since she was three months old, was separated from her family after undergoing gallbladder surgery at a Corpus Christi hospital. A phalanx of Customs and Border Protection agents accompanied Rosa Maria’s ambulance from a CBP checkpoint to the hospital, waited outside her room while she recovered from surgery, and then took her away from her family and put her into a detention facility in San Antonio.

While Rosa Maria has finally been reunited with her family, the government should now ensure that no deportation proceedings are filed against Rosa Maria or other young immigrants like her. And all Americans and members of Congress disturbed by the injustice on display in Rosa Maria’s case should intensify efforts to pass the bipartisan Dream Act as soon as possible. The Dream Act would protect not just the 800,000 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients — but an entire generation of young immigrants who grew up in the U.S. like Rosa Maria. DACA recipients and potential Dream Act beneficiaries are not safe unless Congress steps up and acts now.

The urgency to resolve young immigrants’ status becomes clearer and more pressing every day. Despite President Trump’s false reassurances that Dreamers would have “nothing to worry about,” we are already seeing DACA recipients and other young immigrants facing renewed attacks.

The Trump administration was denying DACA renewal applications even before it announced the end of the program. Take the case of Jessica Colotl, a 28-year-old from Atlanta who has lived in the U.S. since age 11 and graduated with academic distinction from high school and college in Georgia. Twice this year, a federal judge has stepped in to restore Jessica’s wrongfully denied DACA status, which the Trump Administration took away arbitrarily even though the Department of Homeland Security had granted her DACA twice previously and her circumstances remained unchanged.

Or take the case of Jesús Arreola, a 23-year-old resident of the Los Angeles area, who has lived in the U.S. since age one. Jesús worked at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, was an Uber and Lyft driver, and is the primary caregiver for his parents and siblings. DHS granted him DACA status in 2012, 2014, and again in 2016. Despite his valid DACA status, federal immigration authorities arrested him in February while he was driving a customer and falsely accused him of human smuggling. Even though an immigration judge promptly rejected the government’s bogus claims, and Jesús was never charged with any crime, DHS revoked his DACA. He is far from the only case of a wrongful DACA revocation, a practice the ACLU is challenging in a class action lawsuit.

Trump also is using administrative measures to hurt thousands of young people. Because of the new DACA reapplication deadline created by the administration, 22,000 DACA recipients will be at risk of deportation. The government did not provide these Dreamers with an official notice of the new and arbitrary Oct. 5, 2017, deadline, and thousands missed it as a result. Unless Congress does its job and passes legislation, 1,400 Dreamers per business day will start to lose their permits to legally live and work at home and become at risk of deportation.

Keep in mind, President Trump’s decision to end DACA was the outcome of a plot created by anti-immigrant leaders, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, White House Adviser Stephen Miller, and state attorneys general like Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. There should be no confusing what these hardliners’ ultimate goals are. They want to “prepare for and arrange [DACA recipients’] departure from the United States” and enact policies that terrorize their friends and families.

Congress should not give into the un-American agenda of deporting Dreamers and should instead take immediate action to protect them, along with their friends and families. Congress should attach these protections to must-pass legislation before the holidays, as Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and others have been calling for. And any efforts to pass a fix for Dreamers should not be paired with hardline immigration provisions like increased detention and deportation efforts, more CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, and the further militarization of border communities.

It’s time that responsible members of Congress from both parties took action on behalf of these young immigrants. No young immigrant Dreamer should have to spend the holidays wondering if they will have to leave the country they call home.

Date

Tuesday, November 14, 2017 - 11:15am

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