Reproductive Rights

The California Constitution explicitly protects reproductive privacy, making the state a relative safe haven for women who make the difficult choice to end a pregnancy. The ACLU of Northern California worked hard to secure this right. We continue to use legislative advocacy, public education, litigation and grassroots organizing to protect and advance the rights of all California women to make informed personal decisions about childbearing.

Protecting Privacy, Teen Safety, and Abortion Rights

In the span of four years, California voters three times rejected a ballot initiative that would require doctors to notify a pregnant teen’s parent before an abortion. Propositions 73, Proposition 85 and Proposition 4 all proposed to amend the state Constitution to reverse the state Supreme Court ruling in an ACLU lawsuit that teenagers have fundamental rights to decide whether to end an unintended pregnancy. 

The defeat of each of these initiatives shows that Californians continue to care more about the health and safety of our young people than about ideology.

Expanding Prenatal Care for Working Poor Women

Until December 2008, California required that women reside here for six months before they were eligible to receive essential health services through the state’s Access for Infants and Mothers program. The ACLU-NC joined with other public interest organizations to challenge the rule on behalf of Maternal and Child Health Access, a non-profit organization.  

The San Francisco Superior Court agreed with our argument that the Constitution protects the right to travel and that states cannot treat newcomers unfairly. The court struck down the requirement, clearing the way for these women to obtain essential prenatal and other medical care they need.

Securing Sex Ed Victories at State and Local Levels

For more than a decade, the ACLU-NC has been working to ensure that sex education in public schools is science-based, free of bias, medically accurate and age-appropriate. The law we co-sponsored with Planned Parenthood in 2004 has become a model for other states and for the national REAL (Responsible Education About Life) Act.  After years of Bush Administration support for ineffective, biased and harmful abstinence-only education, the nation is poised to take a new direction, and many are looking to California as a leader.

Despite our significant progress, much remains to be done to implement our legislation and guarantee that students in classrooms across the state are being taught comprehensive sex education. Our strategy is to work both at the school-district level with parent activists and at the state level.

In Fremont Unified School District, we worked intensively for a year with a committed group of parents and community members who sought to remove the federally funded abstinence-only middle school curriculum and replace it with a comprehensive curriculum. Teenagers in Fremont now receive medically accurate information about condoms, sexually transmitted infections and contraception – as well as abstinence.

In Sonoma County, we have asked school districts to comply with state law by replacing abstinence-only sex education with a comprehensive curriculum.

At the state level, we worked cooperatively with the California School Boards Association (CSBA) to develop a more robust model policy regarding sex education for school districts to adopt. Nearly all of California’s 1,000 school districts subscribe to CSBA’s policy service, so by improving CSBA’s model policy, we were able to provide guidance to hundreds of school districts in the state.   

Your Health Your Rights Does What Your iPhone Won’t
If you need movie tickets, takeout food, or even Viagra, iPhone’s Siri can help. But should you need basic reproductive health care like emergency contraception or an abortion, Siri is clueless. Fortunately for women in California, the Your Health Your Rights web guide can help you find the reproductive health care you need.
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When Will California Stop Shackling Pregnant Women?
On Sept. 27, Gov. Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill that would have ordered California county jails and prisons to stop shackling pregnant women. The bill, AB1900, required new guidelines on restraining pregnant women and would have encouraged counties to adopt these policies. It had overwhelming bipartisan support and passed the legislature without a single "no" vote.
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Ask The Experts! Comprehensive Sex Education
Abstinence-only-until-marriage instruction is still taught in a surprising number of Northern California school districts, despite an ACLU-sponsored state law that prohibits it in public schools. Sex Education Policy Director Phyllida Burlingame discusses the challenges of enforcing the law and what the ACLU is doing to help young people get the information they need to protect their sexual and reproductive health.
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The Other Front: U.S. Servicewomen Denied Abortion Coverage
Denying abortion coverage to rape survivors is a serious injustice to those who are honorably serving our country. This is especially true when a woman’s risk of being sexually assaulted more than doubles when she joins the military. Women who are deployed overseas or to remote areas of the U.S., like Alaska, face an added burden when there are no other safe medical facilities. The military is effectively asking women who serve to completely disregard their health and rights, no matter the circumstances.
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California's Sex Education Program: Ongoing Struggles Behind the Success Story
California's policies have undeniably made a positive impact on sex education in the state. But, unfortunately, sex education advocates can't dust off our hands and move on. Many California public schools are still providing abstinence-only-until marriage programs, in spite of policies that forbid them.
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U.S. Supreme Court Decision Undermines Roe v. Wade
The U.S. Supreme Court decision issued on April 18, 2007 upholding a federal law banning certain abortions will endanger women’s health and is a set back for all Americans who believe politicians should not legislate medical decision-making. The decision disregards the opinion of leading doctors and medical organizations that oppose the ban because it is harmful to women's health.
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Your Health, Your Rights
If you're a teen in California, you have rights. And that's what this booklet is about-your right to privacy and reproductive health care. It has lots of information about different things that may come up in your life.

To order more, click here.

ALSO:
In Spanish
Bilingual Wallet Card
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Sex Education in California Public Schools: Are Students Learning What They Need To Know?
Despite recent improvements, California teenagers continue to have rates of unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections (STI) that would be considered a crisis in many countries. In fact, teen birth rates for California are higher than those for every other Western democracy in the world.1 This raises the question of whether the state's public schools are adequately educating young people about their sexual health. This survey of middle and high schools indicates that parents want quality sex education, but that schools' efforts to provide it face many obstacles.
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