To: Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia Attorney General and Governor Ralph Northam
Tell Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli: Letting Bosses Deny Women Birth Control isn’t a Ci...
Allowing employers to deny women access to birth control isn’t a civil right, it’s discrimination. Stop comparing the civil rights movement to denying women health care. Stop standing in the way of health care for Virginia women.
Why is this important?
Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is far out of the mainstream when it comes to women’s health. His entire career has been an exercise in trying to reduce and deny women access to care. He has co-sponsored “personhood” measures that would give full legal rights to fertilized eggs, supported defunding Planned Parenthood, and was the first attorney general to file a lawsuit to overturn the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — on the same day the bill was signed into law.
Now, he’s trying to find ways to deny women access to birth control by letting your boss decide whether you get coverage through the ACA. What’s outrageous is that he is invoking the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to support his position — saying that employers who want to deny women access to birth control should engage in civil disobedience.
In fact, Dr. King was among the first recipients of Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger Award, and he said of health care inequality: “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” Of course, Dr. King’s words are the opposite of what AG Cuccinelli supports.
Nearly 1.4 million women in Virginia are potentially at risk of losing coverage if Cuccinelli has his way.