National Advocates-Pregnant

Address:

15 W 36th St, New York, NY 10018

Phone:

(212) 255-9252

Other Details:

About NAPW National Advocates for Pregnant Women ( NAPW ) seeks to protect the rights and human dignity of all women, particularly pregnant and parenting women and those who are most vulnerable including low income women, women of color, and drug-using women. NAPW uses the lessons learned from the experiences of these women to find more effective ways of advancing reproductive and human rights for all women and families. Our work encompasses litigation, litigation support and legal advocacy ; local and national organizing ; public policy development, public education and outreach. Two principles guide all NAPW activities: to build bridges and align agendas across diverse public health and social justice movements, and to leverage and connect local organizing and activism with national advocacy and policy work. To that end, NAPW is actively involved in ongoing court challenges to punitive reproductive health and drug policies and provides litigation support in cases across the country. NAPW engages in local and national organizing and public education efforts among the diverse communities that are stakeholders in these issues, including the women and families directly affected by punitive policies, as well as public health and policy leaders. By focusing on the rights of pregnant women, including those who are continuing their pregnancies to term, we hope to broaden and strengthen the women's rights and progressive movements in America today. For many years, the pro-choice movement has been criticized for its overwhelming focus on abortion issues and for failing to be more inclusive. Abortion is the defining women's rights issue for many women because the ability or inability to control pregnancy means the difference between full participation in society or not. But for poor women and women of color, the ability to end a pregnancy is most likely not the factor that determines their ability to be full and equal participants in our society. Rather, for them, salient issues include the ability to access health care and to have the opportunity to bring children into the world that they can love, support, and raise in a safe environment. Thus, there are many groups of women who are allied but for whom the right to an abortion is not the key to their reproductive and human rights. By choosing to focus on pregnant women and the full range of attacks on their rights including the efforts to establish fetal rights under the law and attacks made through the war on drugsNAPW is making new allies and building new strength from a broad based and integrated approach to reproductive and human rights. Although it is generally accepted that adults can decide what medical treatment they will or will not have once a woman becomes pregnant others may be able to make that decision for her. Angela Carder was forced, against her will, to undergo surgery because it was believed it would help her fetus ; in fact, it failed to save the fetus and contributed to her death. Pregnant women may be punished for informed refusal of HIV treatment and are often denied recommended forms of drug treatment. And, while many states now permit adults to determine whether and what treatment they will accept if they become critically ill or incompetent, some states exclude pregnant women from this right of self-determination. Employers in some high-paying industrial jobs have told fertile women that they need not apply, claiming that these were fetal protection polices. Other employers have simply told women holding minimum wage jobs that they would lose their jobs if they became pregnant. In the last twenty years, over 200 pregnant women or new mothers have been arrested in a concerted effort to deny women liberty. At least nineteen states now address the issue of pregnant women's drug use in their civil child neglect laws, and many of these states make it possible to remove a child from the mother based on nothing more than a single positive drug test. These cases an

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