For Immediate Release: February 22, 2019
Contact: [email protected]
As reports come about the Trump administration’s nationwide “domestic gag rule,” a dangerous policy threatening the healthcare of millions, NARAL Pro-Choice America President Ilyse Hogue issued the following statement:
“Shortly after using his largest platform yet to attack women and our reproductive freedom, Trump has made his relentless campaign against women’s health, rights, and lives all the more real through this gag rule.
“Trump’s gag rule creates a country where a culture of forced silence dominates over women’s health, barring them from accessing the essential care they deserve; a country where women can’t continue to visit their trusted providers for healthcare; a country where doctors will be forced to hide information from patients.
“We wait for the day the Trump-Pence administration puts a fraction of the energy they spend on ripping away access to healthcare and silencing women into actually helping the American people, but we won’t hold our breath.”
This domestic gag rule is part of a pattern by the Trump administration to push policy after policy to rollback our basic rights since their very first day in office. When the Trump administration reinstated and expanded the global gag rule, overseas health centers that lost funding because they chose not to withhold reproductive health information from their patients were forced to cut services and close healthcare centers, and as a result women were cut off from basic healthcare across the world. The domestic gag rule dismantles Title X, the nation’s only program dedicated to family planning services, like affordable birth control, which 4 million people rely on to receive essential care. This administration has attempted to rip healthcare away from millions of Americans, tried to implement a rule that allows bosses to decide whether or not their employees can get affordable birth control, and more.
NARAL Pro-Choice America and its network of state affiliates are dedicated to protecting and expanding reproductive freedom for all Americans. NARAL works to guarantee that every woman has the right to make personal decisions regarding the full range of reproductive choices, including preventing unintended pregnancy, bearing healthy children, and choosing legal abortion. In recognition of its work defending our constitutional right to choose, Fortune Magazine described NARAL as “one of the top 10 advocacy groups in America.”