Urging the United States government to take immediate action to protect and enshrine reproductive rights and ensure abortion access for all birthing people.

WHEREAS, In 2022, using a specious historical constitutional interpretation, the United States Supreme Court ruled in

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization

that the right to abortion was not constitutionally protected, overturning the rights guaranteed by their landmark decision in

Roe v. Wade

in 1973; and

WHEREAS, In the wake of

Dobbs

, which remanded reproductive law to individual states, coalitions of religious conservatives and other forced-birth advocates set themselves to the task of pursuing total or near-total abortion bans in the states; and

WHEREAS, On Tuesday, April 9, the Arizona Supreme Court, made up entirely of Republican appointees, ruled in a 4-to-2 decision that an archaic 1864 law banning abortion from conception onward is “now enforceable;” and

WHEREAS, The law makes no exception for victims of rape or incest, and only permits abortions when they are necessary to save a woman’s life, and doctors prosecuted under the law for providing, supplying or administering care to a pregnant person could face fines and prison terms of up to five years; and

WHEREAS, If the law, which predates Arizona’s statehood by over five decades, is allowed to stand, Arizonans seeking abortions will travel to neighboring states, as residents of other restrictive states have done; and

WHEREAS, The time and expense of interstate travel are prohibitive to less-resourced individuals, who would then be forced to carry children to term and raise them in poverty, or turn to hazardous non-clinical interventions; and

WHEREAS, The right to bodily autonomy and family planning is so fundamental, and the landscape of reproductive rights in the United States so increasingly hodgepodge and out-of-line with the views of most Americans, so as to create an unsustainable situation that begs for the kind of intervention that only the federal government can provide; and

WHEREAS, The Women’s Health Protection Act, which would preempt many state-level abortion restrictions, and the Equal Access to Abortion Coverage in Health Insurance (EACH) Act, which would repeal the Hyde Amendment and related restrictions on Medicaid coverage for abortion, are currently pending in Congress, and their immediate passage would go a long way toward affirming the rights of women and birthing people to make their own decisions about their bodies; now, therefore, be it

RESOLVED, BY THE COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA, That we hereby urge the United States government to take immediate action to protect and enshrine reproductive rights and ensure abortion access for all birthing people.

End