Reproductive health care has been a particular victim in the current Administration’s strategy to perpetuate “alternative facts” in defense of unconstitutional policies. Alongside Republican Congressional leaders, the Trump Administration is backing an unconstitutional backdoor plan to defund the nation’s leading reproductive and women’s health care provider, Planned Parenthood. The misinformation being perpetuated is that Planned Parenthood should be entirely defunded to prevent it from using federal tax dollars to provide abortions, never mind the fact that the 1997 Hyde Amendment already bars federal dollars from being used for abortion-related services. Vice President Mike Pence and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price are among the politicians who continually perpetuate the false claim that Planned Parenthood takes taxpayer funds to pay for abortions, and denies that any women in the country have trouble affording birth control.

This kind of misinformation is linked to a broader agenda to undermine women’s freedom of choice to determine the course of their pregnancies. Further, the GOP tactic of holding federal funds hostage amounts to a political tug-of-war, in which the lives and well-being of the nation’s most impoverished and disadvantaged families are at stake.

A longstanding key complaint driving the political campaign to repeal the Affordable Care Act is the law’s provision guaranteeing that women have access to basic reproductive health care with no co-payments. Further, Congress passed HJ Resolution 43, on April 13, 2017, which permits states to bar Planned Parenthood from receiving Title X funds, a rollback of Obama’s ban against this in previous years. More than 60 percent of Planned Parenthood patients nationwide are part of publicly funded federal health programs for low-income people, such as Medicaid and Title X. Planned Parenthood serves 1.5 million of Title X’s 4 million patients a year, most of whom do not have an alternate family care plan.

Planned Parenthood, the nation’s leading reproductive health care provider, annually serves 2.5 million women, men and teens, 79 percent of whom live below the poverty line. Additionally, 21 percent of counties nationwide would have no family planning alternative available if their local Planned Parenthood clinic should close – more than half of Planned Parenthood’s centers are located in rural and impoverished communities. An estimated 1 in 5 women in the United States has relied on a Planned Parenthood facility at some point in her lifetime. These patients already face unfair systemic barriers in their access to health care. These are the patients primarily at risk of losing access to low-cost, often free, reproductive health care if federal policies under consideration by the current Administration to defund Planned Parenthood.

A full 97 percent of all services provided by Planned Parenthood clinics are life-saving procedures like cancer screenings, birth control, and STD and HIV testing and treatment. Despite the significance of these services, more than 60 legislative restrictions on reproductive health were enacted in the US at the state and federal level in 2016 alone, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights. Since 2011, the Center has tracked over 2,100 bills restricting reproductive health-care that legislators across the country have introduced – more than 300 of these have become law at both the national and state levels. Laws like HB2, which forced hospital-like guidelines on Planned Parenthood clinics in Texas, have resulted in devastating effects, causing the closures of 22 out of the 41 Planned Parenthood clinics in the state. Most of these closures were of clinics located in impoverished areas with few other health care options. Even though the Supreme Court overturned HB2, almost all of these clinics remain closed. The result of these closings also caused a significant increase in pregnancies from low-income women.

The core issue is that conservatives are betting with the lives of the nation’s most underprivileged in their battle to roll back Obama’s progressive health care reforms by exploiting the controversy of women’s freedom of choice and abortion rights. This reckless and negligent political strategy on the part of the GOP has already put millions of American lives in danger, and it has the potential to affect even greater numbers. Given that these federal assaults show no signs of abating, it’s up to states to take action to protect access to reproductive health care and Planned Parenthood funding. Individual states, starting right here in New York, should take the initiative to end this bandwagon of regressive policy making. It is time to call on our state legislators to protect and sustain Planned Parenthood’s ability to provide life-saving services to those who need them most.