By TGP Staff
Give us an R! (R)
Give us an H! (H)
Give us an A! (A)
What’s that stand for? The Reproductive Health Act!
And what should we do? Pass it, damn it.
The Reproductive Health Act would get rid of many restrictions to abortion care in Michigan. You see, even though voters overwhelmingly approved Prop. 3 in 2022, legalizing abortion care despite the hatchet taken to Roe v Wade, there are still laws on the books that are solely intended to make actually getting an abortion as hard as possible.
Restrictions include: A ban on Medicaid covering abortion, a ban on private insurance covering abortion (unless one purchases a separate abortion rider with their insurance policy), a 24-hour delay, biased counseling. There are also laws mandating that facilities meet unnecessary guidelines like needing to be freestanding clinics and mandating the sizes of procedure rooms and the widths of hallways.
Unsurprisingly, these laws affect BIPOC people, people who live in rural areas, and the poor the most. The RHA is good legislation and everyone at TGP wants to see it passed.
Which is why it was so awesome to work with the Michigan ACLU and Michigan Voices on campaigns getting the word out about the RHA.
For the ACLU campaign, we focused on the hardships these laws blocking abortion care cause to people who live in Northern Michigan. A person in Houghton would need to drive 7 hours to reach the nearest procedural clinic in Saginaw. And once there they have to sign a document and wait 24 hours before they can receive care.
This is something that could be done in advance by printing it out and signing it at home, but a lot of people don’t even know they have to do this and arrive at a clinic after driving for hours only to be told they’ve either got to spend the night – in a hotel if they can afford it, in their cars if not – or in or drive back home without care.
Then there's the fact that Michigan law prohibits Medicare and even private insurance from covering abortion. Costs for care must come out of the patient’s pocket. All of these costs add up, making abortion care prohibitively expensive. Whether or not you have access to essential health care shouldn’t depend on your zip code or the size of your bank account. The campaign urges legislators to choose healthcare over hardship. View the ACLU video here.
We also did a campaign for Michigan Voices in which we show that the laws blocking abortion access aren’t just words on a page but are real obstacles that try to prevent abortion access. Not only that, but these laws were written by real people who don’t trust patients to make their own decisions and want to literally hold patients back. Each arm reaching out to grab the woman in the video represents one of the many laws on the books that make care inaccessible. A patient shouldn’t have to run the gauntlet in order to access health care. In this campaign we emphasize the fact that if you aren’t trusted to make your own decisions, you aren’t free. We’re proud of how this turned out. Also TGP staff Tori and D’Anne make an appearance in the video. Well, their arms do, anyway. View the Michigan Voices video here.
In other important health care matters, did you know that if you end up in a Michigan hospital you very well might be taken care of by a nurse who is responsible for way more patients than is safe and/or is on the 15th hour of a 16 hour shift? Nurses in Michigan have been asked to do more and more with less and less and many are leaving the profession.
So when the Michigan Nurses Association asked TGP to do a video to communicate how dire the situation is and to urge viewers to contact their legislators to pass the Michigan Safe Patient Care Act (SPCA), we came back to them with three options. They liked them so much they ended up choosing two!
In one video real nurses speak to the fact that they’re not superheroes, they’re human, and as much as they want to provide the best care, high patient to nurse ratios and forced overtime are making that nearly impossible.
In the other video we focus on the sounds that nurses hear in the hospital and how just about every sound is a demand on the nurse. But what happens when there isn’t a nurse to respond to these demands? With nurses leaving the profession in droves due to unsafe and unfair working conditions, cries for help go unanswered and patients die. It’s a sobering fact.
Everyone at TGP knows a friend or family member who is a nurse and/or have had experience with nurses during times when they were sick or injured. We want our nurses to be able to work safely. Everybody should. We’re proud of our work here and it’s an honor to be part of getting this crucial legislation passed.
We’ll be following the RHA and the SPCA closely and taking note of which legislators support abortion access and care about nurses. And which ones don’t. At TGP we believe in kicking ass and taking names. Trust.