In October 2018 NIRH launched a month-long education campaign to inform the public about New York’s outdated abortion laws. Before the Reproductive Health Act passed in 2019, New York was just one of a handful of states with laws from the 1800s still on the books that criminalized self-managed abortion performed without a medical provider. [...]
On July 18, 2018, the Massachusetts legislature passed long-overdue proactive legislation to decriminalize abortion. This win is significant because it overturns archaic statutes that have been used to prosecute women who self-manage their own abortions. With this win, Massachusetts pushed back against a hostile anti-choice federal landscape, and laid the groundwork to push even further to [...]
On April 9, 2018, the Durham County Board of Commissioners unanimously passed a resolution calling for an end to the Hyde Amendment and calling upon President Trump and North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper to support measures to ensure and protect the rights of women, transgender, and gender-nonconforming individuals everywhere to have unhindered access to safe [...]
NIRH’s white paper, “When Self-Abortion is a Crime: Laws that Put Women at Risk: An Analysis of Massachusetts Law,” raises awareness about the harms of criminal bans on self-abortion, with a particular focus on Massachusetts, which is one of a handful of states with criminal laws on the books that explicitly make self-abortion illegal.
In 2017, NIRH supported a partnership between NARAL Pro-Choice Connecticut and Hartford GYN Center, a long standing health care provider in the Hartford community, to educate and mobilize a grassroots base about the harms caused by so-called crisis pregnancy centers or fake women’s health centers in their community. This was based in part on a [...]
NIRH is committed to expanding access to underutilized forms of contraception, including IUDs and implants. Though offering immediate postpartum LARC to patients who want this method is considered a best practice, barriers including policy, reimbursement, and lack of education for both providers and patients, and the challenges of implementing this service, have made it so [...]
Implementation is an integral part of expanding access to contraceptive coverage after successful advocacy for a policy change. Too often, a new policy is passed but its enactment is limited due to the difficulty that comes with vital work like ensuring that systems are created or updated and key stakeholders and informed and educated. As [...]
On November 20, 2017, the Pittsburgh City Council voted to pass a Will of Council calling for the passage of the Equal Access to Abortion Coverage (EACH Woman) Act, a federal bill that would reinstate abortion coverage in public insurance programs, and for the repeal of Pennsylvania’s ban on abortion coverage in private insurance plans [...]
The National Institute for Reproductive Health, in partnership with All* Above All, has supported advocacy in Chicago and the state of Illinois to expand public coverage of abortion since 2013 with our partners the ACLU of Illinois (ACLU of IL) and the Chicago Abortion Fund (CAF). In 2017, NIRH supported the ACLU of IL as they [...]
The legal status of abortion has changed throughout American history – from legal to illegal and back to legal again. However, women seeking to end an unintended pregnancy have always done so, whether it is legal or not. Our white paper, “When Self-Abortion is a Crime: Laws that Put Women at Risk,” documents this history in New York and assess whether there is any justification for the state’s criminal abortion ban.
