MoProBono - Spring 2018 Update

7 MoProBono Spring 2018 Our legal teams continue to lead the charge for women’s reproductive rights and contraceptive access, standing at the forefront of this landscape to ensure all women can exercise their constitutional right to make their own childbearing decisions without government interference or coercion. Representing the American Association of University Women, several unions that represent health care workers, and other parties, we filed amicus briefs in the district courts of Pennsylvania and California to object to newly proposed federal rules that would have allowed employers and colleges to assert religious or moral objections to providing no-cost contraceptive coverage to employees and students. In rejecting the rules, these courts cited our briefs to demonstrate how many hundreds of thousands of women could lose access to contraceptives that are instrumental to women’s ability to participate fully in education and the economy. Jamie Levitt, Janie Schulman, Rhiannon Batchelder, and Andrea Kozak-Oxnard prepared the briefs. Led by New York’s J. Alexander Lawrence, MoFo’s legal teams also joined forces with the Center for Reproductive Rights to block restrictions affecting the availability of and access to abortion in Texas. We won injunctions against a regulation that would have required the burial or cremation of fetal tissue after abortion and a statute that would have severely burdened access to second-trimester abortion. REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS