by Alicia Gay, ACLU Liberty Center If you were faced with the decision of having an abortion, would your health insurance cover it? This is a question that many women have probably never considered. It’s a health care procedure that most people just don’t plan ahead for. Well, if you happen to be covered under your employer’s health plan, it’s likely that you do have at least some coverage. For now. Unfortunately, politicians across the country have been busy trying to take away that coverage. Since 2010, 13 states have passed laws prohibiting some or all insurance plans from covering...

By Alicia Gay, ACLU Liberty Center As a little girl from Kansas once said, “there’s no place like home,” and she was right. All of us may have a different notion of what “home” is, but ultimately we can agree home should be a place where we can feel comfortable and safe. Unfortunately for too many people who have experienced domestic violence, home isn’t safe. It is also regrettable that in many cases law enforcement officials, and in some cases our own government, have failed in their duty to protect the most vulnerable among us. In 1999, Jessica Lenahan (then Jessica Gonzales) repeatedly...

By Galen Sherwin, ACLU Women's Rights Project, and Rebecca T. Wallace, ACLU of Colorado Imagine you've recently come back to work after maternity leave and you're using every last minute of your break time to pump breast milk to feed your baby at home. You just need a little help from your employer — an extra 20 minutes a few times a week. But your employer refuses to help, and tells you that, instead of breastfeeding your baby, you should consider switching to feeding him formula. Worse yet — imagine that after you complain, you're fired. That's exactly what happened to Heather Burgbacher, a...

By Deborah J. Vagins, Senior Legislative Counsel, & Georgeanne Usova, Lobbyist Assistant, ACLU Washington Legislative Office In 1963, we could have only dreamed of a woman with a realistic shot at the White House, or a female Speaker of the House or Secretary of State. There were no women heading Fortune 500 companies, jetting into space, or sitting on the Supreme Court. The average women had limited educational opportunities and very few career options, and in the jobs they had, on average, they still only made 60 cents on the dollar that men did. Today, we’ve come so far in so many ways...

By Galen Sherwin, Staff Attorney, ACLU Women's Rights Project Returning to work after having a new baby can pose real barriers for women who are breastfeeding. Consider the following real-life examples: When one employee returned from maternity leave, her employer criticized her for needing to express breast milk (or "pump") as frequently as she did because she thought her baby should be eating more solid food, told her she had to stop pumping when her baby turned a year old, and fired her when she asserted her rights. A woman who worked for a local county agency and whose job required her to...

By Sara Mullen, Associate Director, ACLU of Pennsylvania Elizabeth Mort and Alex Rodriguez, of New Castle, Penn., thought the most difficult thing facing them when they arrived home from the hospital with their newborn daughter Isabella would be the sleepless nights. Instead, they were faced with the unthinkable — having their three-day-old daughter taken from them for five days by Lawrence County Children and Youth Services (LCCYS) because of Elizabeth's false-positive drug test performed by the hospital where Isabella was born. Elizabeth, who was eventually cleared of illegal drug use, had...

By Deborah J. Vagins, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office As the clock ticks down in the 111th Congress, there is little time left to finish critical pieces of legislation. In this economic downturn, however, there is nothing more urgently needed than helping families bring home fair wages. Unfortunately, a pernicious wage gap remains between women and men doing the same job, making this hard time even more difficult. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2008, women, on average, made only 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man. For women of color, the wage...

By Suzanne Ito, ACLU Imagine this scenario: You just had a baby. You might be a tad tired; in a bit of a stupor, perhaps. A hospital employee —maybe your doctor or nurse — hands you a 32-page pamphlet explaining what will be done with your baby's DNA sample after it's tested for disease. You accept the pamphlet. What have you just done? If you're in the U.K., according to the Daily Mail report last week , you've just agreed to allow the British government to hold onto your baby's DNA sample indefinitely — and possibly use it for future forensic testing, genetic research and other unknown...