Portside

Unequal access to transportation and housing disenfranchises many low-income communities. Teenagers who attempt to obtain medical care often experience these inequalities in a heightened way given that they often lack the time, money, and autonomy required to seek the care and information they need. Black people in the United States are among the most discriminated against when it comes to health care—which is further exacerbated when they are not a cisgender man.

Restricting contraception access is rooted in the notion that women’s sexuality should be limited to marriage and reproduction.

Sexual health is a lifetime responsibility, and we need to equip young people with the tools they need.

A response to the recent Rewire commentary, "Want to Lose on Abortion? Talk About It as an Economic Issue."

Police violence and interaction could be seen as particularly extreme forms of maternal stress. If one lives in a community that is frequently policed, the accumulative effects of these interactions can have health consequences more insidious than those caused by actual physical violence.

If we let the election extinguish our inner fire and vision of a just future, then that's worse than anything we lost at the polls in terms of votes or anything coming down the pike in the next four years, said Jill Adams, chief strategist for the Self-Induced Abortion Legal Team.

As the Hyde Amendment turns 40 in September, activists and legislators are seeking to permanently end the prohibition on federal funds from covering abortion care. According to sexual and reproductive health rights nonprofit group the Guttmacher Institute, between 18 percent and 35 percent of people insured by the federal Medicaid program who have experienced an unwanted pregnancy have been forced against their will to carry that pregnancy to term under Hyde.

"Reproductive justice is my world view and my outlook," says Dr. Willie Parker, who left a successful career in obstetrics to provide abortions to mostly low-income women of color in the Deep South.

Huerta encouraged people to consider both what is at stake and why their voting rights might be targeted in the first place. “What we have to think about is, if they’re doing so much to suppress the vote of the Latino and the African-American community, that means that that vote really counts. It really matters or else why would they be trying to suppress them?”

The Supreme Court protected the right of women and families to make their own choices. And it did so by reminding us that facts are real. Science is real. Evidence is real. And it can’t be willfully ignored or tarnished or fabricated to advance anti-choice ideology that erodes the constitutional right to reproductive health care.