News & Commentary

Indiana politicians have made a crusade of pushing abortion out of reach. This year, they’ve added more shame and punishment to their cruel agenda.

Forty-five years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed a woman’s right to abortion. The landmark ruling in Roe v. Wade recognized that women have a fundamental right to decide when and whether to have a child – without undue political interference.

On January 7, 2015, after more than a year in which the fate of a Lafayette, Ind. health center was in potential jeopardy, a federal judge put to rest the question of whether the state of Indiana can constitutionally implement a law that regulates a clinic offering non-surgical abortion more strictly than physicians' offices providing the exact same procedure.

For more than two years, the ACLU of Indiana and Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky (PPINK) have testified against a law that would have prohibited Medicaid patients from taking advantage of Planned Parenthood services, including preventive care such as Pap tests, breast and testicular exams, birth control, and STD testing and treatment. The State favored such a restrictive law because it opposed letting Medicaid patients access their health care from a provider that also provided abortions, even though abortions are not provided using taxpayer dollars.

According to the 2012 United States Census, full-time working Hoosier women earn only 73 cents for every dollar men earn. This gender pay gap is particularly critical in an economy where more than 65 percent of women are primary breadwinners or co-breadwinners in their households. This pay gap reduces a woman's and her family's assets by $431,000 in pay over a 40-year career.