Preserving Access to Reproductive Health Services: Two New NHeLP Projects

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January 1999

NHeLP has launched a new project to preserve access to reproductive health services. As part of this initiative, NHeLP will work with low-income health advocates and women’s health advocates to:

 

  • Educate federal and state policy makers working on Medicaid and welfare reform to increase awareness about barriers to reproductive health services and propose solutions to address such barriers;
  • Impact public policy developments by working with federal administrative personnel implementing the Medicaid managed care provisions of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997;
  • Monitor state-level access to family planning in Medicaid managed care;
  • Expand outreach and education on Medicaid, Medicaid managed care and access to reproductive health services;
  • Produce fact sheets, checklists, and other advocacy tools; and
  • Provide technical assistance to local and national advocacy groups and women’s health services providers and work collaboratively to develop legal strategies, where necessary, to enforce access to reproductive rights.

 

As part of this effort, NHeLP also has joined with the California Women’s Law Center (CWLC) to form the the ARCH Project (Advocates for Reproductive Choice in Healthcare). With CWLC in the lead, The ARCH Project is an education, organizing, advocacy and policy effort to ensure that reproductive health services are available and accessible in communities where religiously affiliated health care systems are taking over local health care resources. Religious health systems are now among the fastest growing non-profit health care providers in the United States. As religious systems merge with secular hospitals, low-income women, men, and adolescents are losing access to a whole range of legal and medically necessary reproductive health services. The threatened services include contraception, most fertility treatments, emergency contraception for rape victims, sterilization, abortion, and condoms to combat the spread of HIV and AIDS. Please contact Lourdes Rivera, NHeLP, at (310) 204-6010 or Susan Fogel, California Women’s Law Center, at (213) 637-9900 for more information.