The American people deserve to know what steps Vice President Cheney had in mind when he told an audience of anti-choice activists last night that "America still has some distance to travel" to achieve President Bush's goal of eliminating a woman's right to choose, according to NARAL Pro-Choice America, the nation’s leading advocate for personal privacy and a woman’s right to choose.

NARAL Pro-Choice America President Kate Michelman said: "This is classic Bush Administration politics -- the President hides behind Dick Cheney to placate the far right, while trying to keep mainstream Americans from hearing his true beliefs. It seems clear from the Vice President’s speech, though, that Bush has an aggressive second-term agenda in mind. The American people deserve to know now what he is planning."

Since taking office in January 2001, George W. Bush has led a steady and unrelenting attack on freedom of choice and the right to privacy, using all the powers of his presidency. In late 2003, Bush signed the first ever federal ban on abortion. Attorney General John Ashcroft then went on a fishing expedition through women’s private medical records, arguing that “individuals no longer possess a reasonable expectation their histories will remain completely confidential.” Bush has also worked to pack the federal courts with anti-choice judicial activists – including one who called Roe v. Wade an “abominable decision.”

Just a few weeks ago, Bush signed yet another piece of legislation intended to undermine Roe, this time granting unprecedented separate legal status to embryos beginning at conception. The Vice President praised both pieces of anti-choice legislation last night and vowed to vigorously defend the abortion ban.

Cheney’s speech came just a few days before the March for Women’s Lives, a historic gathering of pro-choice Americans from every walk of life, to take place this Sunday, April 25 on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The March is sponsored by NARAL Pro-Choice America, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Black Women’s Health Imperative, Feminist Majority, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, the National Organization for Women, and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.