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While it's critical to promote policies that help prevent unintended pregnancies and make abortion less necessary, NARAL Pro-Choice America also fights to protect the right to safe, legal abortion.
In 1973, the Supreme Court guaranteed American women the right to choose abortion in its landmark decision Roe v. Wade. In Roe, the Court issued a compromise between the state's ability to restrict abortion and a woman's right to choose.
Since that time, the anti-choice movement has worked furiously to dismantle it – with the ultimate goal of overturning the decision altogether. Anti-choice activists are working hard in state legislatures, the courts, and Congress to take away our rights.

Making abortion access more difficult and dangerous is a key tactic of the anti-choice movement. Even with Roe v. Wade's protections still in place, 87 percent of U.S. counties have no abortion provider. Yet anti-choice lawmakers continue to impose a broad range of restrictions on women and their doctors, making abortion difficult, and in some cases nearly impossible, to obtain.

The anti-choice movement's ultimate goal is to outlaw abortion in all circumstances. While some states still have laws on the books that would ban abortion throughout pregnancy, Roe v. Wade's protections prevent these bans' enforcement. However, state legislatures across the country continue to consider enacting new total bans in order to challenge Roe in the courts. In addition, in the majority of state legislatures and Congress, anti-choice lawmakers have passed unconstitutional laws that would ban safe and medically appropriate abortion as early as the 12th week of pregnancy.

In 2000, the FDA approved RU 486 (also called mifepristone, non-surgical abortion, or medical abortion), giving American women the option to end an unintended pregnancy without surgery. Although millions of women have safely used RU 486 worldwide since 1981, anti-choice lawmakers and groups fought FDA approval every step of the way; having failed, they are now doing everything they can to make it difficult – or even impossible – to obtain. (RU 486 should not be confused with emergency contraception, also known as the "morning-after" pill, which is a basic form of birth control that prevents pregnancy and does not cause abortion.)

Improving access to birth control is at the forefront of our efforts to prevent unintended pregnancy and reduce the need for abortion. For the 98 percent of American women who use some form of contraception during their lives, birth control is basic, essential health care. More than 40 million women of reproductive age are sexually active and want to prevent unintended pregnancy. [Guttmacher Institute, Facts in Brief: Contraceptive Use (Feb. 2005)]

Unfortunately, 40 years after the Supreme Court struck down a ban on birth control, the far right still tries to block women’s access to contraception. Below are just a few examples of the obstacles to improving women’s access to birth control.

Emergency contraception, also known as the "morning-after" pill, is simply a concentrated dose of ordinary birth-control pills. If taken within 72 hours of sex, it is highly effective in preventing pregnancy. In fact, it can reduce a woman's chance of becoming pregnant by 89 percent. It is especially critical for victims of sexual assault or for women whose primary method of birth control fails.

A good family-planning program will ensure that women have access to contraception and that they can raise healthy, happy families when they choose to do so. However, the Bush administration is doing everything possible to block women from getting those basic preventive services.

In theory, the concept is simple: a woman walks into a pharmacy with her prescription and walks out with her medicine. However, renegade pharmacists across the country are refusing to fill legal, valid prescriptions for birth control and state legislators are proposing bills that would permit this discrimination against women.

While most insurers generally cover prescription drugs, not all insurers cover all prescription contraceptives. As a result, women pay roughly 68 percent more in out-of-pocket medical expenses than men, mostly due to their reproductive-health needs. Insurance plans that cover prescription drugs should cover prescription birth control equally. It's that simple.

The United States has unacceptably high rates of teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), and HIV/AIDS infections. To address this challenge, NARAL Pro-Choice America supports honest, age-appropriate, and medically accurate sex education that promotes abstinence and provides young people with the information they need to protect themselves.
Unfortunately, anti-choice lawmakers and groups have a strategy that would only make our teen-pregnancy epidemic worse: spending your hard-earned tax dollars on unproven, ideological "abstinence-only" programs that actually censor life-saving information.

Research shows that honest, medically accurate sex education works. "Abstinence-only" programs aren’t proven effective, and some studies even show that young people who go through these programs are less likely to use contraception and protect themselves when they become sexually active. Making matters worse, many of these "abstinence-only" programs include blatantly false and inaccurate information. Young people deserve better than this – and so do taxpayers.

There is also overwhelming public support for honest sex education: 99 percent of Americans believe it is appropriate for young people to have information about STDs, and 94 percent of Americans think it is appropriate to teach young people about birth control.

Approximately 30 percent of all women in the United States are women of color. Although they face many of the same health issues as white women, systemic obstacles disproportionately and adversely affect their access to quality reproductive-health care.

Factors that contribute to this problem include: insufficient research on minority women's health, language barriers, the lack of cultural-competency training, and the shortage and inequitable distribution of minority and women health-care professionals.

* Women of color experience shockingly high maternal-mortality rates.
* The devastating rates of STDs and HIV are particularly acute for women of color, whose rates of infection are dramatically higher than those of white women.
* The reproductive health of women of color – a disproportionate number of whom are low-income – is threatened by limited access to basic reproductive-health care, including family-planning services and abortion care. * Researchers have identified extremely troubling disparities in access to pain management during labor and delivery for women with limited English proficiency.

As a result of these inequities and structural challenges, the reproductive-health needs of many women of color are going unmet in the United States. We must overcome these obstacles to guarantee every woman the right to make personal decisions regarding the full range of reproductive-health choices.