Make Your Voice Heard: Tell HHS NO to Bush Regulations

The Bush Administration is making a last ditch effort to limit reproductive health care access for American women before their term in office is up.

Here's How:

New rules have been submitted to Health and Human Services (HHS) by the Administration that would change language around reproductive health care access- leaving the door wide open to interpretation in regards to what services women can access. The rules are vague enough that doctors could refuse birth control prescriptions because they equate birth control with abortion!

Bush's HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt wrote that redefining abortion wasn't his "intent" behind the new regulation. Regardless of intent, the regulation certainly could functionally allow the defining of contraceptives as abortion.

Funding for basic family planning services are also at stake with these new rules. Title X, which is our Nation's national family planning program, helps low income women afford reproductive health care services like birth control. This money cannot be used for abortion services. So, what if the case, under these new rules, could be made that birth control is abortion? That would eliminate low income women's access to critical preventative health care.

Before this ruling was official, Planned Parenthood worked with other groups like MoveOn.org and gathered over 325,000 petition signatures against this bogus rule-change in the making and delivered them to the White House.

Now that the rule is official, there is a 30 day comment period in which WE have to let them know that limiting our access to reproductive health care services is NOT OK.

Make your voice heard- send an email to HHS Secretary Leavitt today!
http://www.ppaction.org/campaign/frcp08ppan