President Biden’s actions on reproductive care “protect life and preserve religious liberty” by promoting health and access
Two weeks ago, the far-right justices on the Supreme Court overturned fifty years of precedent, undermining all Americans’ right to privacy and access to healthcare. In response to the ruling, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints encouraged its members to “appropriately…participate in efforts to protect life and preserve religious liberty.”
We have a wide range of personal views on the role of abortion in our own lives and in public policy. In the past two weeks, however, we have witnessed several concerning developments:
- Congressional Republicans calling for a national ban on abortion.
- State lawmakers banning abortion even in the case of rape and incest.
- Doctors deliberately waiting to treat life-threatening complications.
- Abused children having to travel across state lines to receive care.
- Doctors unilaterally refusing to refill prescriptions for the treatment of lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and other conditions on the off-chance that their patient might become pregnant in the future.
- State lawmakers floating proposals to ban out-of-state travel, to prosecute patients and providers for actions taken in other states, and to block FDA-approved medications from being sent through the US mail.
In our view, none of these proposals “preserve life.” They also undermine the religious liberty of Latter-day Saints and many of our Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and humanist neighbors. Furthermore, we are yet to see any significant state- or national-level proposals from Republican legislators that answers the call for “an infrastructure of life.”
These actions and inactions suggest that some of the Left’s harshest critiques of the “pro-life” movement — that it is most interested in imposing narrow theological views onto our entire country, that its motivations are rooted in controlling and punishing women who refuse to conform to reactionary Christian nationalist norms, that its policy positions depend on ignorance about the realities of reproductive health and discomfort with sexuality — might have unfortunate elements of truth.
We must do better. Ranking last among industrialized counties for maternal mortality is unacceptable. It is time to return to patient-centered care and stand against legislators, prosecutors, and politicians who use fear to disrupt the relationship between women and doctors.
We are glad to see movement across the country to defend and preserve health care access, including access to abortion. And we applaud the Biden-Harris administration’s actions today, including:
- Making sure that medication abortion, emergency contraception, and long-acting contraception are as widely-available as possible.
- Supporting the Attorney General’s commitment to protect the right to out-of-state travel for medical care.
- Protecting patient privacy, including reminding doctors and other medical providers that it is only in very narrow circumstances that they are required to disclose patients’ personal health information.
- Promoting the safety of patients, providers, and clinics.
- An inter-agency taskforce to protect access to reproductive health care.
It is our view that these steps by the Biden-Harris administration help protect the lives of patients and preserve the religious liberty of us and our neighbors. We call on the US House and Senate and state legislatures across our nation to follow in their footsteps.
As we said across the 2020 campaign, it is by our representatives’ fruits that we know them.
