H.R. 1797, sponsored by Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), was originally intended to restrict abortions only in Washington, D.C. However, Franks has amended the bill to expand its reach nationwide. It has racked up a whopping 184 co-sponsors.

The Center for Inquiry (CFI) considers this an absurd proposal, and urges you to contact your U.S. representative immediately to oppose it.

H.R. 1797 (PDF) is wrong and harmful for several reasons.

• It would prevent a woman from getting an abortion in many dire situations: where continuing a pregnancy could put at risk her health or ability to bear children in the future; where she is suffering from mental illness; and where she has learned of a severe or fatal fetal anomaly.

• It would impose criminal penalties on any physician found to violate the law, including fines and up to two years in prison. 

• It is based on the faulty assumption that fetuses can experience pain at 20 weeks. This is unsupported by existing scientific research, which suggests fetuses do not experience pain until at least 29 or 30 weeks. Furthermore, only 1.4 percent of all abortions happen after 21 weeks, and those usually occur due to urgent health dangers or difficulty accessing abortion services.

• It clearly violates almost 40 years of Supreme Court jurisprudence. As a federal court recently recognized in striking down Arizona’s 20-week ban, the Supreme Court has held consistently — in Roe v. Wade (1973), Doe v. Bolton (1973), and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) — that the U.S. Constitution provides women with the right to choose whether to have an abortion at any point prior to fetal viability.

Reproductive health care laws should be based on reason, science, and humanist values, and women should have the right to make their own reproductive choices without interference from politicians.

Message your U.S. representative today and tell them to oppose H.R. 1797!

Take action now! 

On June 12, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) considered several amendments to its reauthorization bill, called the Strengthening America’s Schools Act of 2013. One of those amendments, proposed by Sen. Rand. Paul (R-KY) and Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), would have allowed Title I funding— possibly as much as $14 billion —to go to private and religious schools.

Leading up to the vote, CFI collaborated with colleagues in the National Coalition for Public Education (NCPE) to write a letter to Sen. Tom Harkin, chair of the HELP Committee, and Sen. Lamar Alexander, ranking member, to explain why we strongly oppose vouchers. Several member groups of the NCPE also worked together to lobby key senators. In the end, the amendment failed 14-8.

CFI and the NCPE are now focused on lobbying members of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, which will consider its reauthorization bill on June 19.

These bills will likely not receive a full floor vote until the fall, at which time new amendments could be proposed. CFI remains dedicated to defending public education as a common good, and protecting taxpayer dollars from being used for private and sectarian religious education. We will keep our supporters updated as the situation develops. 

This newsletter will update you on some of our recent activity.

We hope you enjoy.

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FEDERAL

- On May 8, CFI joined more than 70 organizations in writing members of Congress to oppose any attempts to add riders to the Fiscal Year 2014 appropriations process that would restrict women’s access to comprehensive reproductive health care, such as abortion. In total, six letters were sent to thirteen federal lawmakers who are directly involved in the appropriations process in both chambers of Congress.

- On May 16, CFI submitted a letter to Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), calling his draft legislative proposal “both unnecessary and potentially harmful to science research supported by the United States government.” The letter was signed by Lawrence Krauss, Foundation Professor at Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, and an Honorary Board Member at the Center for Inquiry; Ronald A. Lindsay, CFI’s President and CEO; and Michael De Dora, director of CFI’s Office of Public Policy.

- On May 28, CFI released a statement recognizing the death of Alton Lemon, whose objection to government aid to religious schools in Pennsylvania led to the 1971 Supreme Court decision, Lemon v. Kurtzman, in which the court struck down the law and established what became known as the “Lemon test” — a keystone for subsequent decisions that have reinforced the principle of separation between church and state. 

- On May 29, CFI issued an action alert in opposition to proposals in Congress to create a nationwide ban on abortions after 20 weeks, and urged members to contact their U.S. representatives and senators to reject any such measure.

STATE

- CFI-Michigan issued an action alert opposing a measure in the statehouse that would broaden the state’s religious conscience protections to allow employers to deny coverage for any type of care they object to, including birth control. If you are a Michigan resident, you can contact your state senator here. 

- On May 21, members of CFI-New York City and NARAL Pro-Choice New York traveled to Albany to lobby their state representatives in support of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s women’s equality agenda.

- CFI is organizing groups in Ohio to send a letter Attorney General Mike DeWine sharing collective concern regarding his position on religious exemptions for the birth control rule. If your group is interested in joining this effort, please email opp@centerforinquiry.net.

INTERNATIONAL

- CFI’s representative to the United Nations, Michael De Dora, is preparing for a meeting on June 17 with Dr. Andrew P.W. Bennett, the Ambassador for Canada’s new Office of Religious Freedom.  

- We have continued to work with the U.S. Department of State and the U.S Commission on International Religious Freedom on behalf of secularists and skeptics who face life-threatening blasphemy and similar charges in their home countries regarding freedom of belief or expression. We will update you if and when anything happens.

Now, Franks has announced his intention to amend the bill and expand its reach nationwide. That’s right: Rep. Franks wants a nationwide ban on abortions after 20 weeks. The bill has quickly racked up 133 co-sponsors in the House, and has a companion in the Senate, S. 886.

The Center for Inquiry (CFI) considers these proposals an outrage and urges members to contact their elected officials in Congress to oppose them.

H.R. 1797 (PDF) and S.886 (PDF) are wrong and harmful for several reasons.

• They would prevent a woman from getting an abortion in many dire situations: where continuing a pregnancy could put at risk her health or ability to bear children in the future; where she is suffering from mental illness; and where she has learned of a severe or fatal fetal anomaly.

• They would impose criminal penalties on any physician found to violate the law, including fines and up to two years in prison. 

• They are based on the faulty assumption that fetuses can experience pain at 20 weeks. This is unsupported by existing scientific research, which suggests fetuses do not experience pain until at least 29 or 30 weeks. Furthermore, only 1.4 percent of all abortions happen after 21 weeks, and those usually occur due to urgent health dangers or difficulty accessing abortion services.

• They clearly violate almost 40 years of Supreme Court jurisprudence. The Court has held consistently — in Roe v. Wade (1973), Doe v. Bolton (1973), and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) — that the U.S. Constitution provides women with the right to choose whether to have an abortion at any point prior to fetal viability.

Reproductive health care laws should be based on reason, science, and humanist values, and women should have the right to make their own reproductive choices without interference from politicians.

Message your elected officials today and tell them to oppose H.R. 1797 and S. 886!

Take action now! 

The letter was signed by Lawrence Krauss, Foundation Professor at Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, and an Honorary Board Member at the Center for Inquiry; Ronald A. Lindsay, CFI’s President and CEO; and Michael De Dora, director of CFI’s Office of Public Policy.

The draft bill (PDF) proposed by Rep. Smith, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, would require the NSF director to certify that a research project meet three new criteria before awarding a grant. It must advance national health, prosperity, welfare, or defense; it must be “groundbreaking” and answer questions or solve problems of the utmost importance; and it must not be duplicative of other government-funded research projects. It also suggests these requirements be considered for all federal science agencies.

CFI’s letter reads, in part:

“These requirements represent a serious misunderstanding of the nature of scientific inquiry and discovery and, if approved, would not facilitate, but instead obstruct productive scientific research.

The NSF’s current process for reviewing applications for contract or grant funding is based on the time-honored and scientifically sound principle of peer review. Under current NSF procedures, a group of independent experts with specialized knowledge in a field of specific scientific endeavor evaluates requests based on two main criteria: intellectual merit and societal impact.

Your bill would not improve this process, which is widely considered to be one of the most successful science funding processes in the world and which has placed our nation at the forefront of scientific advances; instead, it would burden this process with standards that politicize science and fail to give proper weight to the importance of basic scientific research.”

Given the risk this draft bill poses to scientific research, Krauss and the authors urge Rep. Smith to scrap his proposal.

You can download CFI’s full letter here (PDF).

In total, six letters were sent to thirteen federal lawmakers who are directly involved in the appropriations process in both chambers of Congress:

Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) of the Senate Committee on Appropriations; Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY) and Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY) of the House Committee on Appropriations; Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM) of the Senate Subcommittee on Financial Services; Rep. Jose Serrano (D-NY), Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL), Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), and Rep. Ed Pastor (R-AZ) the House Subcommittee on Financial Services; Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) of the Senate Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies; and Rep. Rose DeLauro (D-CT) of the House Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies.

In our letters to these representatives, we noted that:

“In recent years, there have been multiple attempts to use the appropriations process to incrementally chip away at women’s health. These measures create unjust obstacles to care for millions of women, including women of color, low-income women, immigrants, and rural women, severely restricting their ability to make the best health care decisions for themselves and their families.”

You can download the six letters in full here.

This effort was organized under the umbrella of the Coalition for Abortion Access and Reproductive Equity. Other signatories include the American Civil Liberties Union, American Association of University Women, Catholics for Choice, Center for Reproductive Rights, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, NARAL Pro-Choice America, National Council of Jewish Women, and the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. 

This newsletter will update you on some of our recent activity. We hope you enjoy.

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FEDERAL 

- On April 8, CFI submitted formal comments urging the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to enact a final rule that requires all employers, apart from houses of worship, to provide or else arrange coverage for birth control without charging a co-payment. You can read our nine-page letter here, and some news coverage of our comments here.

- On April 11, CFI wrote a letter to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Suzan Johnson Cook regarding Bangladesh’s recent crackdown on freedom of expression, specifically its persecution of atheist bloggers arrested under the current blasphemy law. We urged them to raise public awareness of the situation and to pressure the Bangladeshi government to honor its obligations to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Right, which guarantees every individual the rights to freedom of belief, religion, and expression. You can read our letter and join us in writing the State Department here. 

 - On April 19, CFI submitted formal comments to the United States Commission for Civil Rights (USCCR) regarding the Commission’s recent briefing on “reconciling non-discrimination principles with civil liberties.” Our comments took the form of an amicus brief we submitted in the United States Supreme Court case of Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. You can read that brief here.

STATE

- CFI-Indiana Executive Director Reba Boyd Wooden worked with local members to fight a bill that would expand the state’s already problematic school voucher program. You can read more about the bill and CFI’s position here.

- CFI-Michigan issued an action alert opposing a measure in the statehouse that would broaden the state’s religious conscience protections to allow employers to deny coverage for any type of care they object to, including birth control. If you are a Michigan resident, you can contact your state senator here. 

INTERNATIONAL

- In response to Bangladesh’s crackdown on freedom of expression, an international coalition of atheist and humanist organizations — led by CFI and our partners the International Humanist and Ethical Union and CFI-Canada — has spent the past several weeks organizing protests in Washington, D.C., London, Canada, and Bangladesh, to be held May 2. You can find information on the protests here.

- On April 22, CFI’s representative to the United Nations, Michael De Dora, met with a representative from Canada’s permanent mission to the UN in New York City to discuss developments regarding freedom of belief and expression at the 22nd session of the Human Rights Council, which took place in March. The meeting was positive and constructive. 

- We have continued to work with the U.S. Department of State and the U.S Commission on International Religious Freedom on behalf of secularists and skeptics who face life-threatening blasphemy and similar charges in their home countries regarding freedom of belief or expression. We will keep you updated if and when anything happens.

CFI fully supports the free exercise of religion, and much of our work is dedicated to protecting freedom of conscience for religious believers and nonbelievers alike. However, Senate Bill 136 (PDF) does not protect freedom of religion; it allows for the imposition of religion on others.

If approved, SB 136 would put the citizens of Michigan at risk of not having access to a range of critical medical services. Consider just a few examples:

• Employers could deny women coverage for birth control and other preventative care;
• Health insurers could deny coverage to family members who seek to remove a loved one from life support;
• Doctors could refuse to inform a woman about her fetus’ severe defects out of fear she will have an abortion;
• And university guidance counselors could refuse to counsel a suicidal LGBT student.

As the Center for Inquiry recently argued to the federal Department of Health and Human Services, people should not be deprived of health care coverage simply because of their employers’ religiously motivated objections. People should have full control over their health care decisions and ought to be able to freely exercise their rights without interference from their particular employers.

The Michigan Senate could vote on SB 136 as early as this week. Please contact your state senator and tell him or her to oppose this bill and prevent employers and health insurers from dictating the health care decisions of Michigan citizens!

Take action now!

Last week, the government arrested several prominent bloggers for “hurting religious sentiments,” under Section 295A of the Bangladesh Penal Code. Home Minister M.K. Alamgir recently warned that the government has a list of seven more “atheist bloggers” who will also soon be targeted. Just today, a newspaper editor was arrested for printing quotations from the targeted bloggers. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of protesters belonging to the radical group Islami Andolan Bangladesh have rallied in the country’s capital, Dhaka, for even tougher blasphemy laws and more arrests. They have threatened violence if their demands are not met by April 25.

The Center for Inquiry (CFI) believes that no person should face social or legal punishment simply for holding or expressing their views, and we believe that no topic should be off-limits — especially religion, which has such an enormous impact on the lives of billions. That’s why we direct so much of our effort toward work at the United Nations and, more recently, organizing the Campaign for Free Expression.

CFI has written a letter to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Suzan Johnson Cook. We urged them to raise public awareness of the situation in Bangladesh and to pressure the Bangladeshi government to honor its obligations to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Right, which guarantees every individual the rights to freedom of belief, religion, and expression.

But we need your help. Join the Center for Inquiry in pushing Secretary Kerry and Ambassador Cook to press the government of Bangladesh to repeal its current blasphemy law, reject any new blasphemy laws, and end proceedings against bloggers for exercising their right to criticize religion.

Take action now!

You can download our nine-page letter here.

As you might recall, the “birth control rule” was originally announced on August 1, 2011, to acclaim from a wide variety of groups, including CFI. Yet almost immediately some organized conservative religious groups criticized the rule as an assault on religious freedom and called for it to be completely rescinded, or else amended to allow any organization to opt out.

In response, HHS has issued several “accommodations” for employers that object to birth control on religious grounds. These include an expansion of the definition of “religious employer” to allow merely religiously affiliated organizations to qualify for accommodation, and a procedure whereby religiously affiliated nonprofit organizations may opt out of the rule, thus requiring insurance companies to provide separate coverage.

CFI is pleased that HHS has resisted intense pressure to eliminate the rule entirely. However, we also believe that both the previous and proposed changes are unnecessary and unwise.

In our formal comments, we reiterate our support for the former definition of “religious employer” and detail a number of flaws with HHS’ new, expanded definition; explain why the birth control rule in no way violates religious liberty; and argue that adopted changes to the rule must not make it any harder for women employees to access birth control. As we write:

“We believe that there is no need for — and no constructive point to — further discussion. This prolonged debate, over something as fundamental as birth control, is a perfect example of the harmful influence sectarian religious institutions have on public policy. It’s time for us to move past them, for the common good.” 

You can read the letter in its entirety here.