The Women’s Health Protection Act is necessary because Roe v. Wade has never been enough. While the 1973 Supreme Court decision affirmed that abortion is a constitutional right, it did not guarantee accessibility. Therefore, legislators have been able to propose restrictions that make abortion difficult to provide and nearly impossible to obtain.
A secular nation’s health laws should reflect science, and science shows that abortion is an extremely safe and effective procedure. Major complications occur in less than one-fourth of 1% of abortion procedures.
A 2019 Pew Research study found that support for abortion has remained consistently high for two decades. Sixty-one percent of Americans say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. And 83% of religiously unaffiliated Americans agree (as do 64% of black Protestants, 60% of white mainline Protestants, and 56% of Catholics).
Meanwhile, 77% of white evangelical Protestants think abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. Therefore, it is a small but strong faction of religious voters who dominate the anti-abortion movement, wasting congressional time and tax-supported resources on legal challenges to promote their anti-science, anti-woman agenda.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds recently signed a mandatory 24-hour waiting period for abortion, with the ACLU and Planned Parenthood immediately filing suit. And Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has signed a six-week abortion ban, which was promptly blocked by a federal judge at the behest of Center for Reproductive Rights, Planned Parenthood and ACLU.
