People For the American Way is among nearly 80 allied organizations setting forth a joint policy agenda to advance sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice in the U.S. and around the world. Amid unprecedented attacks, we must reach toward progress for all people. This requires extraordinary collaboration and vision. Below is an outline of our moral imperative. Visit reproblueprint.org for more detailed policy documents.
We are living in extraordinary times. There is both urgency for swift and transformative action and simultaneously more attacks on our freedoms than we’ve seen in recent history. This requires extraordinary collaboration and vision. It requires us to move forward a comprehensive agenda to defend our rights and ensure a safe and healthy world for future generations. We believe that in order for that broader vision to be realized we need sweeping protections for sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice for all people.
We are at a time when our country faces an unprecedented attack on sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice. In recent years, federal lawmakers have taken away health coverage from people with lower incomes; appointed judges who oppose abortion access, birth control, and antidiscrimination policies; and encouraged violence and discrimination against people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ+ individuals, people of Muslim faith and other religious minorities. Abortion access, in particular, has been under relentless attack in recent years. In the past five years, federal lawmakers have instituted an expansive global gag rule that withholds global health funds from international organizations that provide abortion care and information, and attempted to withhold federal public health dollars from providers who perform abortions in the U.S. At the same time, state policymakers have enacted an increasing number of laws to ban abortion in their states, cut abortion providers out of public programs, and withheld insurance coverage of abortion. In seventeen states, abortion is simply a theoretical right for many individuals, as laws and policies have made it virtually impossible for people to access safe and legal abortion.4 When a state has only a few practitioners who perform abortion (or, as is the case in six states, only one provider) and criminalizes people who self-manage their own abortions, people are not able to control their bodies, their lives, and their futures freely.
Our nation and our world cannot afford this dangerous trajectory. That’s why a coalition of nearly 80 organizations have come together to set forth this policy agenda to advance sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice for people in the U.S and around the world. We call on policymakers across the country to reach toward progress for all people—rooted in the reality that sexual and reproductive health and rights are inextricably linked to economic justice, voting rights, immigrants’ rights, LGBTQ liberation, disability justice, and the right to community safety and racial equity.