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NIRH’s Recent Successes:
Passing Resolution Supporting Insurance Coverage for Abortion Care in Durham County, NC
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 and comprehensive health care. NIRH and All* Above All partnered with NARAL Pro-Choice North Carolina and a broad coalition of local organizations, including Carolina Abortion Fund, SisterSong, ACLU of North Carolina, Action NC, American Association of University Women NC, Equality NC, Jewish Voice for Peace, [...]
NIRH White Paper on Self-Managed Abortion – “When Self-Abortion is a Crime: An Analysis of Massachusetts Law”
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.
Youth Ambassadors Council in Hillsboro, OR Expands Access to Teen-Friendly Reproductive Health Care
The members of the Youth Advisory Council (YAC) at the Inukai Family Boys & Girls Club are changemakers in their community, and in 2016, NIRH was proud to support them as they work towards their goal of increasing access to teen-friendly reproductive health care. In the first quarter of 2016, the Hillsboro School Board voted 4-3 to deny a policy that would have allowed the town’s school-based health center to dispense and prescribe contraceptives to students, despite advocacy by the YAC urging them to support the policy. Undeterred, the young people turned to a partnership with Washington County Public Health [...]
Stopping Fake Clinics’ Deceptive Practices in Hartford, CT
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 two-year investigation conducted by NARAL Pro-Choice Connecticut conducted that identified 27 CPCs operating in the state, whose deceptive practices they documented in the 2015 report, “The Right to Lie: Crisis Pregnancy Centers in Connecticut.” After one of these facilities moved into the same building complex [...]
Increasing Access to Immediate Postpartum LARC in New Mexico, Tennessee, & Utah
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 that the majority of hospitals do not provide this service. With the support of NIRH, partners like Young Women United, Southwest Women’s Law Center, Planned Parenthood Rocky Mountains and the New Mexico Perinatal Collaborative in New Mexico, Vanderbilt University, SisterReach, and University of Tennessee-Knoxville in Tennessee, [...]
Engaging Hospitals Across New Mexico and Utah in the Implementation of Immediate Postpartum LARC
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 more states have worked with their public and private insurers to allow long-acting reversible contraception (LARC), including IUDs and implants, to be covered in a postpartum setting, work to ensure the services are actually offered to patients is vital. This includes revising systems for billing [...]
Passing a Resolution to Support Abortion Coverage in Public Insurance Programs in Pittsburgh, PA
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 sold through the state’s Health Insurance Exchange. This remarkable effort was led by New Voices for Reproductive Justice, a human rights organization dedicated to the health and well-being of Black women and women of color in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and supported by the National Institute [...]
Empowering LGBT Youth as Advocates in Central Pennsylvania
Far too often, LGBT youth are overlooked in the development and delivery of sexuality education programs, with the result that they lack the information and tools they need to make healthy, informed decisions about their sexuality and reproductive health. In 2017, NIRH partnered with the Family Health Council of Central Pennsylvania and the LGBT Center of Central Pennsylvania to provide LGBT-centered comprehensive sexuality education to a cohort of students, as well as to provide them with advocacy training so they would be able to call for this sort of curriculum in their high schools. After receiving their training, staff at [...]
Expanding Access to Abortion in Illinois with HB40
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 successfully fought for passage of House Bill 40, which protects the legal right to abortion in the state and ensures that that right is a reality for low-income women by lifting Illinois’ restriction on Medicaid coverage of abortion. Previously, NIRH and All* Above All had [...]
NIRH White Paper – “When Self-Abortion is a Crime: Laws that Put Women at Risk”
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.
