Kate Michelman (born August 4, 1942) is an American political activist. She is best known for her work in the United States abortion rights movement, particularly as a long-time president of NARAL Pro-Choice America.
Kate Michelman (born August 4, 1942) is an American political activist. She is best known for her work in the United States abortion rights movement, particularly as a long-time president of NARAL Pro-Choice America.
From 1985 to 2004, Michelman served as president of NARAL, a major abortion rights advocacy organization in the United States.
Following her departure from NARAL, she worked as a political consultant and published her memoir, With Liberty and Justice for All: A Life Spent Protecting the Right to Choose, with Hudson Street Press in 2006. [1] She also testified against Supreme Court justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas at their confirmation hearings. [1] In 2003, Michelman was named on the PoliticsPA list of "Pennsylvania's Most Politically Powered Women." [2]
In 2012, she and Carol Tracy were selected to be co-chairs of WomenVotePA, a nonpartisan political campaign focused on raising women voter turnout in the state of Pennsylvania and advancing the idea that women's health, economic security, and personal safety are at stake in every election.[ citation needed ]
Michelman is married with several children. She left her career as a political consultant to care for one of her daughters, after her daughter was paralyzed in a horse-riding accident in 2002, [3] and for her husband, who was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. [3] Due to problems with their health insurance, Michelman's family faced large hospital bills, particularly after her husband fractured his hip in a fall. Michelman stated that because of her family's mounting health care bills, her family had "literally fallen from the middle-class to potentially having nothing." [4] Her husband's assisted living bills totaled $9,000 a month and Michelman was forced to cash in her I.R.A. to help pay for her daughter's health care costs. [3]
The United States abortion-rights movement is a sociopolitical movement in the United States supporting the view that a woman should have the legal right to an elective abortion, meaning the right to terminate her pregnancy, and is part of a broader global abortion-rights movement. The movement consists of a variety of organizations, with no single centralized decision-making body.
Kay Bailey Hutchison is an American attorney, television correspondent, politician, diplomat, and was the 22nd United States Permanent Representative to NATO from 2017 until 2021. A member of the Republican Party, she was a United States Senator from Texas from 1993 to 2013.
The March for Women's Lives was a protest demonstration held on April 25, 2004 at the National Mall in Washington, D. C. There was approximately 1.3 million participants. The demonstration was led by seven groups; National Organization for Women, American Civil Liberties Union, Black Women’s Health Imperative, Feminist Majority, NARAL Pro Choice America, National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, and Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The march was intended to address topics such as abortion rights, reproductive health care, women's rights, and others. Originally named the March for Freedom, the march was renamed in an effort to expand the message of "pro-choice" to include the right to have children, access to pre and post natal care, as well as sex education that were not always accessible for women of color.
NARAL Pro-Choice America, commonly known as simply NARAL, is a non-profit 501(c)(4) organization in the United States that engages in lobbying, political action, and advocacy efforts to oppose restrictions on abortion, to expand access to abortion and birth control, and to support paid parental leave and protection against pregnancy discrimination.
Allyson Schwartz is an American Democratic Party politician who represented parts of Montgomery County and Northeast Philadelphia in the United States House of Representatives from 2005 to 2015 and Northeast and Northwest Philadelphia in the Pennsylvania Senate from 1991 to 2005. She has finished second in a statewide Democratic Party primary twice: for United States Senate in 2000 and for Governor in 2014.
Byllye Yvonne Avery is an American health care activist. A proponent of reproductive justice, Avery has worked to develop healthcare services and education that address black women's mental and physical health stressors. She is best known as the founder of the National Black Women's Health Project, the first national organization to specialize in Black women's reproductive health issues. For her work with the NBWHP, she has received the MacArthur Foundation's Fellowship for Social Contribution and the Gustav O. Lienhard Award for the Advancement of Health Care from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, among other awards.
The National Organization for Women (NOW) is an American feminist organization. Founded in 1966, it is legally a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization. The organization consists of 550 chapters in all 50 U.S. states and in Washington, D.C. It is the largest feminist organization in the United States with around 500,000 members. NOW is regarded as one of the main liberal feminist organizations in the US, and primarily lobbies for gender equality within the existing political system. NOW campaigns for constitutional equality, economic justice, reproductive rights, LGBTQIA+ rights and racial justice, and against violence against women.
The timeline of women's legal rights (other than voting) represents formal changes and reforms regarding women's rights. The changes include actual law reforms, as well as other formal changes (e.g. reforms through new interpretations of laws by precedents). The right to vote is exempted from the timeline: for that right, see Timeline of women's suffrage. The timeline excludes ideological changes and events within feminism and antifeminism; for that, see Timeline of feminism.
Faye Wattleton is an American reproductive rights activist who was the first African American and the youngest president ever elected of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and the first woman since Margaret Sanger to hold the position. She is currently Co-founder & Director at EeroQ, a quantum computing company. She is best known for her contributions to family planning and reproductive health, and the reproductive rights movement.
Reproductive justice is a critical feminist framework that was invented as a response to United States reproductive politics. The three core values of reproductive justice are the right to have a child, the right to not have a child, and the right to parent a child or children in safe and healthy environments. The framework moves women's reproductive rights past a legal and political debate to incorporate the economic, social, and health factors that impact women's reproductive choices and decision-making ability.
The Stupak–Pitts Amendment was a proposed amendment to the Affordable Health Care for America Act of 2010 (AHCAA). It was submitted by Representatives Bart Stupak and Joseph R. Pitts. Its stated purpose was to prohibit the use of federal funds "to pay for any abortion or to cover any part of the costs of any health plan that includes coverage of abortion" except in cases of rape, incest or danger to the life of the mother. It was adopted by the House but not included in the Senate's version, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). Representatives who support abortion rights said they would oppose AHCAA with the Stupak-Pitts language, and proposed to adopt PPACA. Stupak and several supporters said they would oppose PPACA without the amendment, but withdrew their opposition after President Obama promised an executive order to bar such funding. Anti-abortion groups criticized this action, saying that the executive order would not be effective.
Sarah A. Anderson was a Democratic member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. An "advocate for the rights of children, minorities, women and the impaired during her 17 years in the state House of Representatives," according to her obituary, she was also "the first black woman to preside over the General Assembly and serve as chairwoman of the Health and Welfare Committee."
Executive Order 13535 is an executive order announced by President Barack Obama on March 21, 2010, and signed on March 24, 2010. It reinforces a commitment to preservation of the Hyde Amendment's policy restricting federal funds for abortion within the context of recent health care legislation. The order was signed after an agreement with anti-abortion Democratic Congressman Bart Stupak, who had said he and several other anti-abortion Democrats in the House of Representatives would not support the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act unless the Bill's language prohibiting federal funding of abortions was strengthened.
Ariana Brannigan Kelly is an American politician from Maryland and a member of the Democratic Party. She is a member of the Maryland Senate from District 16, and was previously a member of the Maryland House of Delegates representing District 16 from 2011 to 2023, which is located in Montgomery County.
Robert Patrick Casey Jr. is an American lawyer and politician serving as the senior United States senator from Pennsylvania, a seat he has held since 2007. A member of the Democratic Party, Casey previously served as Pennsylvania Auditor General from 1997 to 2005 and as the Pennsylvania Treasurer from 2005 to 2007.
"War on women" is a slogan in United States politics used to describe certain Republican Party policies and legislation as a wide-scale effort to restrict women's rights, especially reproductive rights, including abortion. Prominent Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer, as well as feminists, have used the phrase to criticize proponents of these laws as trying to force their social views on women through legislation. The slogan has been used to describe Republican policies in areas such as access to reproductive health services, particularly birth control and abortion services; the definition of rape for the purpose of the public funding of abortion; the prosecution of criminal violence against women; and workplace discrimination against women.
Abortion-rights movements, also self-styled as pro-choice movements, advocate for the right to have legal access to induced abortion services including elective abortion. They seek to represent and support women who wish to terminate their pregnancy without fear of legal or social backlash. These movements are in direct opposition to anti-abortion movements.
Susan Wild is an American attorney and politician from the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. A Democrat, she is a member of the United States House of Representatives from Pennsylvania's 7th congressional district. The district is in the heart of the Lehigh Valley, and includes Allentown, Bethlehem, Easton, and Bangor. Wild spent the last two months of 2018 as the member for Pennsylvania's 15th congressional district after Charlie Dent resigned in 2018. From September 2022 to January 2023, she was chair of the House Ethics Committee. She continues to sit on the committee as ranking member. She also co-chairs the New Democrat Coalition Climate Change Task Force and is vice chair of both the Congressional Labor and Working Families Caucus and the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations. Wild is the first woman to represent the Lehigh Valley in Congress.
Abortion in Michigan is legal beyond fetal viability. A state constitutional amendment to explicitly guarantee abortion rights was placed on the ballot in 2022 as Michigan Proposal 22–3; it passed with 57 percent of the vote, adding the right to abortion and contraceptive use to the Michigan Constitution. The amendment largely prevents the regulation of abortion before fetal viability, unless said regulations are to protect the individual seeking an abortion, and it also makes it unconstitutional to make laws restricting abortions which would protect the life and health, physical and/or mental, of the pregnant individual seeking abortion.
Abortion in California is legal up to the point of fetal viability. An abortion ban was in place by 1900, and by 1950, it was a criminal offense for a woman to have an abortion. In 1962, the American Law Institute published their model penal code as it applied to abortions, with three circumstances where they believed a physician could justifiably perform an abortion, and California adopted a version of this code. In 2002, California passed a law guaranteeing women the right to have an abortion "prior to viability of the fetus, or when the abortion is necessary to protect the life or health of the woman." In 2022, California voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 1, which amended the Constitution of California to explicitly protect the right to abortion and contraception by a margin of 33.76%.
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