Planned Parenthood and MoveOn submitted a petition to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Wednesday seeking to prevent the approval of draft regulations that would falsely classify contraception as abortion. The petition has over 325,000 names, which were gathered in less than a week. It reads “Contraception is NOT abortion. The Bush Administration’s proposal to change the definition of abortion and reduce women’s access to birth control must be stopped.”
In a press conference, Ellen Golombek, vice president of external affairs for the Planned Parenthood Action Fund remarked that “Our opinion is that this drastically impacts women’s health care and their access to birth control and actually takes some forms of birth control and interprets them as abortion, particularly hormonal birth control,” according to ABC News.
The proposed rule redefines abortion as “any of the various procedures – including the prescription and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action – that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation”. This would falsely label several types of birth control, including IUDs, the pill and emergency contraception as abortion.
