Kansas’s law is extreme: it bans abortion coverage in comprehensive plans for the vast majority of abortions, including those necessary to protect a woman’s health and for pregnancies resulting from rape/incest. As a result of the law, thousands of women in Kansas will lose their existing abortion coverage and will now have to pay out-of-pocket for this medical procedure.

Kansas’s law wasn’t passed in a vacuum. In fact, the politicians in Kansas have had a field day this past legislation session inserting themselves, again and again, in private health care decisions, including passing laws that threatened to shut down all three abortion clinics in the state and a law that defunds Planned Parenthood. Luckily, the courts have blocked both laws.

And Kansas does not exist in a vacuum. Across the country, legislature after legislature has attacked women’s access to abortion and other reproductive health care. As we have discussed before, it has been the worst legislative session on record for women’s health care.

It’s time to draw a line in the sand, and stop states from taking away insurance coverage for medical care that 1 in 3 women in the U.S. need. We hope the court will stop the law and protect the ability of women in Kansas to make the best decision for themselves and their families. Such a ruling would also send a strong signal to politicians around the country who are poised to pass laws like Kansas’s. This would support women to say: "Not so fast: Protect my health insurance, and don’t take it away."

Have you been impacted by an insurance ban in your state? Help us stop this trend from spreading and tell us your story.

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This violation of the separation of church and state is disturbing, but what is more upsetting is the fact that these programs are funded in response to the global HIV/AIDS crisis. Rather than fund truly effective HIV/AIDS prevention programs, the federal government has funded religiously infused abstinence-only-until-marriage programs overseas that indoctrinate youth with Christianity.

We learned about these constitutional violations in the course of our investigation, which began in July 2009, when the Inspector General of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) released a report after auditing USAID’s faith-based grantees. The report came to startling conclusions about the misuse of government funds.

For example, the Inspector General noted several instances of biblical references in government-funded curricula, and USAID itself admitted that some of the abstinence-only-until-marriage programs it funds "reflect a religious perspective and include religiously infused materials and religious references." One of the curricula includes an optional Biblical verse for "reflection memorization," the purpose of which is to show students that "God has a plan for sex and this plan will help you and protect you from harm."

The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request to learn more about what was funded by our government. When we received no response to our request, we were forced to file a lawsuit asking a court toder the federal government to release the relevant documents. Over the course of the last year and a half, we’ve received and reviewed over 16,000 pages of documents that show that our government repeatedly violated the constitutional guarantee of separation of church and state, and wasted our tax dollars on ineffective and harmful abstinence-only-until-marriage programs.

For example, one program tells instructors to use a Bible "as a focal point to indicate that these are prayerful reflection sessions and not simply discussions;" that program participants should follow in Jesus’ footsteps; and asks participants to recite Scripture. Another program includes optional Biblical stories and verses; for example, Corinthians 10:13, which says, in part, "And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear."

We recently met with USAID and asked them to stop funding religious abstinence-only-until-marriage programs overseas. They indicated that these programs are coming to a close later this year, and that they will instead focus on innovative strategies for combating HIV/AIDS.

Let’s hope this is true, because it is extremely disturbing that young people are learning biblical verses instead of information that could save their lives. Because these programs will continue for the next few months, we sent a letter to USAID last week asking that USAID demand that its grantees stop using religious references in government-funded programs. After our government has spent millions of dollars on these unconstitutional and dangerous programs over several years, it is too little and a little too late. But it would be a good start to what is hopefully a new era.

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The hospital’s Ethics Committee determined that her physicians would be permitted to perform the abortion under the Ethical and Religious Directives under which Catholic hospitals operate. Though the hospital provided the necessary care in this instance, the Catholic hierarchy — via the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (PDF) and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Phoenix (PDF) — subsequently issued statements denouncing the emergency abortion, and making clear that abortion can essentially never be performed at a Catholic hospital. This means that the next woman who enters a Catholic hospital in need of an emergency abortion could die. You can read more about the issue here and here.

We are now asking you to chime in too. Please send a letter to Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, asking her to investigate hospitals that refuse to provide emergency abortion care, and issue a bulletin making clear that refusing to provide this care violates federal law.

(Cross-posted to Feministing and RH Reality Check.)

The details of the Arizona story are deeply troubling. St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center, a Catholic-owned hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, provided a life-saving abortion to a young mother of four. After the incident was reported in the media, my colleague, Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, blogged about the issue here. A young woman was 11 weeks pregnant and dying from pulmonary hypertension. The hospital’s Ethics Committee determined that if the woman wanted to terminate the pregnancy to save her life, her physicians would be permitted to do so under the Ethical and Religious Directives under which Catholic hospitals operate. The woman decided to terminate the pregnancy, and an abortion was performed.

Sister Margaret Mary McBride was the liaison between the Ethics Committee and the physicians who were treating the pregnant woman. Sister McBride, a nurse with more than 30 years experience in health care administration, was demoted because of her role in facilitating the abortion. The Roman Catholic Diocese of Phoenix, which oversees St. Joseph’s, denounced the abortion and issued a statement explaining that abortion is never allowed in Catholic health facilities, even to save the life of the woman. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops also indicated that Sister McBride was properly punished for her role in the abortion when it issued a statement clarifying that an abortion like the one performed at St. Joseph’s was inconsistent with the Ethical and Religious Directives. Although St. Joseph’s provided the life-saving care that the patient needed, Sister McBride’s subsequent treatment and the diocese’s and the Catholic Bishops’ unambiguous statements send the message to hospital employees, at St. Joseph’s and at other Catholic hospitals around the country, that they risk punishment if they provide life-saving pregnancy terminations in the future.

We all know that, unfortunately, a pregnant woman can suffer complications that require emergency attention to save her health or her life, and the care she receives should not be limited based on which emergency room she was admitted to. Catholic hospitals operate 15 percent of the hospital beds in the country, and are often the only hospital in a particular community, and therefore the only place where a woman can obtain care. As a result, many pregnant women who seek emergency reproductive health care in Catholic hospitals do not share the religious beliefs of the hospital, and may not receive appropriate medical care. Moreover, doctors and other hospital personnel should not risk losing their jobs to treat these women.

We know that what happened at St. Joseph’s was not an isolated incident. Catholic-owned hospitals across the country have refused to provide emergency abortions, as documented in a recent article in the American Journal of Public Health. For example, a doctor in the Northeast decided to leave a Catholic-owned hospital after he was forced by the hospital’s ethics committee to risk a pregnant patient’s life. The woman was in the process of miscarrying at 19 weeks of pregnancy. She was dying: her temperature was 106 degrees, she had disseminated intravascular coagulopathy, which is a life-threatening condition that prevents a person’s blood from clotting normally and causes excessive bleeding. This patient was bleeding so badly that the sclera, the whites of her eyes, were red, filled with blood. Despite the fact that there was no chance the fetus could survive, the ethics committee told the doctor that he could not perform the abortion the woman needed to save her life until the fetus’s heartbeat stopped. After the delay, the patient was in the Intensive Care Unit for 10 days, and developed pulmonary disease, resulting in lifetime oxygen dependency.

The proper, compassionate course of action is to provide these women with appropriate emergency care. Hospitals are also obligated under federal law to do so. We hope that our government will enforce these laws to ensure that women and their families can enter any hospital emergency room and be assured that they will receive the proper care to protect their health and their lives.

(Cross-posted to RH Reality Check and Feministing.)

Last week, a federal district court in Massachusetts ruled that an ACLU challenge to the government’s use of taxpayer dollars to impose religious doctrine on victims of human trafficking may go forward. The decision is a victory for women’s health and for the basic constitutional principle that federal dollars cannot be used to favor one religious perspective over all others.

Since April 2006, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has awarded the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) millions of dollars to make grants to organizations that provide direct services to trafficking victims. HHS did this knowing that USCCB prohibits, based on its religious beliefs, grantees from using any of the federal funds to provide or refer for contraceptive or abortion services. We brought a lawsuit on behalf of the members of the ACLU of Massachusetts who object to their tax dollars being used for religious purposes.

Shortly after we sued, the government asked that the court dismiss the case. The government argued that taxpayers couldn’t bring the lawsuit. They argued that only, for example, a trafficking victim could raise an objection.

The government’s request relied principally on the 2007 Supreme Court decision in Hein v. Freedom from Religion Foundation, which barred taxpayers from challenging the funding of regional conferences hosted by the Bush administration to promote its so-called “Faith-Based Initiative.” Although that decision was quite narrow in scope and expressly refused to overturn decades of well-settled precedent, some advocates of government-sponsored religion have tried to use the Hein case — to varying degrees of success — to deny taxpayers their day in court. Fortunately, the federal court in Massachusetts rejected the government’s arguments and allowed our lawsuit to proceed.

It has been the law of the land for over 40 years that taxpayers have a fundamental right to challenge governmental expenditures to support religion. In recognizing that right, the Supreme Court looked to the core of the First Amendment, explaining, “Our history vividly illustrates that one of the specific evils feared by those who drafted the Establishment Clause and fought for its adoption was that the taxing and spending power would be used to favor one religion over another or to support religion in general.” Indeed, James Madison, the principal author of the First Amendment, believed that even a “three pence” tax to fund religious education would dangerously erode our precious religious liberty.

In last week’s decision, Judge Richard Stearns eloquently noted the importance of allowing taxpayers to bring these legal challenges: “I have no present allegiance to either side of the debate [over taxpayer standing], only a firm conviction that the Establishment Clause is a vital part of the constitutional arrangement envisioned by the Framers, and perhaps a reason we have not been as riven by sectarian disputes as have many other societies. I also agree that a rule that has no enforcement mechanism is not a rule at all."

Constitutional rights lack meaning if they are virtually impossible to enforce. It is unlikely a trafficking victim or a cash-strapped nonprofit organization that provides services to trafficking victims would come forward to sue the federal government. So unless taxpayers can bring cases like these, the courthouse gates will effectively be shut to any challenges to government-funded religious doctrine.

Although these technical and esoteric legal issues may seem like academic exercises, there is a lot at stake. More than 14,000 individuals, predominantly women, are brought into the United States annually and exploited for their labor, including those in the commercial sex industry. Many trafficking victims experience extreme violence and sexual assault at the hands of their traffickers. Some become pregnant as a result of rape and some contract sexually transmitted infections, including HIV. Contraceptive and abortion services are critical care for many trafficking victims. Last week’s court decision means that the ACLU can move forward with our challenge to ensure that these individuals receive the necessary care to safely rebuild their lives.

— By Daniel Mach, Director, ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief, and Brigitte Amiri, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project