But there are some things moms shouldn’t have to worry about. Moms shouldn’t have to worry that they have to choose between paying the rent and keeping their families healthy, between food and a trip to the doctor.

But these are just the types of impossible situations many immigrant mothers find themselves in every day. As a country, a few years ago, we recognized that all individuals should have access to quality and affordable health care, for themselves and their families. We recognized that mothers shouldn’t have to choose between putting food on the table or taking a sick child to the doctor. As a result, Congress passed the Affordable Care Act (ACA)and most residents of the United States from children to adults to seniors will have access to high quality, affordable health care beginning in 2014.

But this isn’t the case for undocumented immigrants, even if they’ve lived and worked in this country for years. While about two out of five undocumented Californians do have health care already, largely through their employers, many of the rest of these aspiring citizens are the least likely to have employer-sponsored coverage and will be ineligible for other types of coverage under the ACA. As the debate around immigration reform advances, we have an opportunity to ensure a more inclusive health care system. The Senate will be considering amendments to their initial immigration reform proposal in the weeks to come, and they should ensure pregnant women and children on the pathway to citizenship have access to Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and other available coverage. All immigrants on the pathway to citizenship, which could potentially take a decade or more, should be eligible for Medicaid and other programs, perhaps with a waiting period similar to other immigrants if necessary.

But this is not just a federal issue. States that have been leaders in integrating immigrant communities and implementing the Affordable Care Act, such as California, also have a critical role to play in extending health care to new Americans. In California, legislative leaders are coalescing around a proposal to ensure existing county services remain available for the uninsured after January 2014, about a third of whom will be undocumented. California can and must lead the way in extending health access to uphold our values of equal treatment of all individuals and children; to ensure an efficient and cost-effective health system that benefits us all; and to strengthen the integration of immigrant communities who benefit our state today and will be on the pathway to citizenship tomorrow.

This is a critical moment in deciding how we treat aspiring Americans in the decades to come. The fact is, there is no “line to get in” for the vast majority of undocumented Americans, many of whom have been here longer than my own children have been alive. Immigration reform is our first opportunity in a generation to create a process for longtime residents of our country to become citizens. But this is also the moment to ensure we don’t have unequal treatment of communities in our health care system. Our country and states have the chance to demonstrate leadership by upholding our American values of equality and fairness.

Because like all of us, immigrant moms have a lot of things to worry about. Health care shouldn’t be one of them.

Originally posted at Huffington Post.

As a parent of a child with autism, the most important thing I can do is make sure that my daughter continues to receive critical early-intervention therapy. Medical research clearly shows that early and consistent therapy can make a dramatic difference in the kind of future autistic children can lead.  My family, and our whole community,  have a stake in this treatment.

For that reason, I am both shocked and concerned by California’s lack of regard for children with autism.  As the state rapidly move families covered by the Healthy Families Program over to Medi-Cal it is still unclear whether children will have the necessary medical services they need.

My daughter is 5 years old and has been receiving autism support services under Healthy Families since she was 27 months.  With this support, she receives hours of Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) therapy; the leading treatment for children within the Autism Disorder Spectrum (ASD).

When she was first diagnosed, my daughter had regressed to zero eye contact and was living in a world of her own. Watching her progress through therapy has been a Godsend.  Soon, my daughter was making eye contact again and even communicating with us.  Here progress has affected our entire family, decreasing our stress level and increasing our quality of life. This treatment has been more than a therapy for my daughter, it has and continues to literally change her life for the better.

Unfortunately, all of these gains and the future benefit for her may be at risk.

Starting in January of this year – despite an outcry of concern by autism advocates, children’s health advocates and legislators – California officials began to move to move all children covered by Healthy Families over to the Medi-Cal program.  They did so with the assurance that our, “children would not lose any benefits or services they had under Healthy Families.”

After initially hearing about the transfer,  I immediately reached out to my insurance provider to find out the details of the transition and how it would affect our coverage.  I was excited to hear that I, and in turn my daughter,  would “not lose any therapy through this transition.”  However, when I reached out to Medi-Cal directly, they told me the opposite. To my surprise and ultimate confusion, I was told that Medi-Cal “WOULD NOT” cover ABA.

Families that have already been transferred are reporting that the type and quantity of support has been severely cut under Medi-Cal. Recently over 200 children transitioning from Healthy Families to Medi-Cal — like my daughter — were informed that they will no longer be able to access critical behavioral health services once transferred to a Medi-Cal health plan without an answer to why or any alternative to this abrupt discontinuation of services.  Although the transfer has not yet happened for my child, I have a growing concern that we won’t continue to get the treatment she deserves.  Today, my daughter continues to reach all her goals, gain skills and now attends a regular preschool with an aide.  My hope is to have her attend school independently but without the therapy I don’t think her chances will be as great.

I am calling on Governor Jerry Brown and his administration to seek a solution immediately or suspend the future phases of the Healthy Families transition to prevent any further children from losing vital services.  Lawmakers, advocates and parents were all told that this transfer would not result in a change in services for our children.  It’s time for them to make good on that promise.

A Special Thanks from the MomsRising Team to Jennifer for sharing her story!

California’s communities of color have a large stake in state efforts to expand the Medi-Cal program. The landmark federal health care reform law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, provides federal funding to expand Medi-Cal to over 1.4 million uninsured Californians in 2014, over two-thirds of whom are from communities of color and over one-third of whom speak English less than very well. Our state legislators have been working hard to expand Medi-Cal which is 100% federally funded over the next three years and have pushed proposals through both houses. But Governor Brown’s administration has yet to endorse these efforts.

We need Governor Brown to join the legislature in expanding Medi-Cal as soon as possible. Any more delays in implementation will make it extremely difficult to get everyone who is eligible for the program covered on January 1st. It’s time to take a stand for the health of our communities and our state.

At the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network (CPEHN), we work to eliminate health disparities in communities of color. As part of these efforts, we are a participant in the It’s Our Healthcare Coalition, a consumer-based advocacy campaign that seeks to gather stories and experiences from Californians and use those stories to inform health care reform policy debates.

Cary Sanders is Director of Policy Analysis at the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network and Director of the Having Our Say Coalition.

That was the day I joined the Paul Ryan Fan Club.  While I don’t agree with him on policy issues, any elected official who can laugh with a former staffer is more than OK in my book. My encounter with him continues to remind me that good people can disagree on policy, and they can advocate for different ideas and policy proposals but still respect and laugh with each other. Now that Chairman Ryan is a star in his party – he was a Vice-Presidential nominee after all – it is even more important for me to remember that encounter. Because the truth is, while I do like him, I don’t like his latest proposals very much.

Last week, Representative Ryan released his budget plan for Fiscal Year 2014. In my position here at the YWCA, focused on economic issues that impact women and families, I have spent a lot of time reviewing these kinds of plans from both sides of the aisle. In many ways, Ryan’s plan is the same one we have seen from him for the past few years, dusted off and with a few minor changes: tax cuts that benefit the economically well-off, and structural changes to Medicare, Medicaid and SNAP/food stamps, which will hurt women and children who rely on them the most.

Here is a brief summary of what the Ryan Budget does:

• It turns SNAP/food stamps into a block grant, a fixed amount of funding administered by states, instead of a safety net program support by the federal government; places time limits on the benefits; and requires recipients to work in order to receive benefits.
• It offers subsidies for Medicare, so middle-aged people would eventually get a coupon to afford a certain type of healthcare coverage, or opt to pay more for a different plan.
• It turns Medicaid into a block grant, cutting its funding, and repeals the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which means that women and girls would lose the preventative benefits with no co-pays and that insurance companies would be able to rescind coverage based on pre-existing conditions, like domestic violence or cesarean sections.
• It protects defense spending from sequestration cuts.
• It cuts the top tax rate for individuals from 39.6% to 25%, even though, in poll after poll, the public supports ending tax cuts for the highest earners in our nation to help pay for our nation’s debt. Yet, the Ryan budget would cut taxes for households with annual incomes over $200,000 by about $34,500, and cut taxes for households with annual incomes of more than $1 million by about $330,000, on average.  To fully finance these tax breaks for high earners, women and families whose incomes are under $200,000 would see their taxes go up by more than $3,000, on average.
• It locks in the sequester for years to come, with 5% across-the-board cuts  to federally-funded programs in 2013, and includes additional cuts on top of it – resulting in significant cuts to human needs programs like those run by the YWCA. And, the Ryan budget shifts cuts that were allocated to defense programs over to programs that help women and children, like housing and job-training programs, childcare and Head Start programs, and domestic violence and sexual assault services and programs.
• It freezes the maximum Pell Grant award for 10 years, leaving millions of female students with less money to pursue education and job training.

Today, the House will vote on Representative Ryan’s plan. It will pass the House. It will most likely not pass in the Senate. But for advocates concerned about the well-being of YWCA clients, women and children, the Ryan budget is one that we cannot support. Conversations in Washington about how to address our nation’s debt and deficit are ongoing; elected officials on both sides of the aisle, including the President, want to come to an agreement on a broad debt deal – one that would cut over a trillion dollars from the federal budget, and could include changes to the sequester, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and other programs. Representative Ryan’s budget is important, because it is the starting point with which he and his fellow House Republicans, will approach these conversations about the debt. This is their framework.

Now is the time for advocates to speak up and reject this budget and this approach. You can start by asking your members of Congress to stop the sequester. Trust me when I say that Representative Ryan is a great guy. He’s also tough. He can take people disagreeing with his ideas. Because this isn’t personal; we just don’t agree on the policy.

Want to learn more about the Ryan Budget and how you can get involved? Join a webinar with the Coalition on Human Needs this Thursday.  

- See more at: http://www.ywcablog.com/2013/03/19/why-i-like-paul-ryan-but-not-his-budget/#sthash.6j6kPm99.u63qniOr.dpuf

It’s one thing to start something but another to finish the job without leaving a mess.

Right now, our California legislators need this reminder. Despite strong protests from children’s health advocates, California began moving children getting health coverage through the Healthy Families Program over to the state’s Medi-Cal health coverage program on January 1st. In this first stage, 180,000 children were moved and over the coming months over 650,000 more will follow.

So far, it looks like there may be problems with this transfer already. While the state is required to monitor this transition to ensure no child loses access to coverage in the process, the California Department of Health Care Services’ first report about how the transition affected kids’ access to care was inadequate and incomplete, leaving it unclear whether children are getting what they need now or if they will in the future.  In fact, children’s health advocates are worried that the state’s current monitoring and oversight process is completely inadequate to identify problems that might arise, and that children might fall through the cracks.

We need to stand up for California’s children. Click here to tell California legislative leaders: “Let’s get the job done right. We urge you to strongly oversee the transfer of children’s coverage to ensure no children lose access to vital health services.”

http://action.momsrising.org/go/2724?t=5&akid=3954.1819415.Saf6wF

We need to act fast! This Thursday, legislators will hold a hearing to review the Healthy Families transition progress and recommend further action.  We’ll present this open letter and your signatures to legislators at this hearing to send a strong message that California’s parents are watching this process to make sure children are not harmed.

For months, California’s children health advocates and legislative leaders have expressed concern about the state’s swift transfer of these children from Healthy Families to Medi-Cal.  In fact, last December, Senate President pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg and 22 Members of the California congressional delegation wrote letters to California’s Secretary of Health and Human Services Agency, Diana Dooley, expressing serious concerns about the timing of the transition and urging the state to move cautiously to protect children’s health. Despite these concerns, the state moved forward with the transition on January 1st.

Now that the transfer is underway, we need to make sure it’s done right so that all children have access to a doctor, dentist or mental health provider when they need one.  It is critical that we get good information and carefully review this transfer process because hundreds of thousands more children and their families will be facing this change in the coming months, including children in rural California where there are a limited number of doctors and dentists and the transfer might mean these kids lose their access to a doctor nearby.

Let your legislators leaders know that they need to keep a close watch on California’s children:

http://action.momsrising.org/go/2724?t=7&akid=3954.1819415.Saf6wF

It takes just a minute of your time to make a difference in this process and stand up for our kids’ health!

While enormous medical and technological advancements have been made over the last century, it is only very recently that there have been similar rates of development in health information technology (HIT). These developments have a lot of potential, but in order to effectively improve health care for all, HIT implementation must respond to the needs of all populations. Used effectively, HIT can enhance access, facilitate enrollment, and improve quality in a way that does not worsen existing health disparities for the most marginalized and underserved.

Equity in the Digital Age: How Health Information Technology Can Reduce Disparities examines the latest in HIT and offers recommendations for how it can be used to improve the health of communities of color. For example, we look at how online enrollment forms can make the application process for programs like Medicaid easier, and how using mobile technologies like cell phones and texting might be the best way for physicians to reach low-income communities.

We also highlight the technology gaps that still exist, particularly among communities of color, immigrants, and people who do not speak English well. If we don’t do anything about these gaps as HIT use increases, this “digital divide” could actually lead to greater disparities as people in these communities are left further behind.

CPEHN, in partnership with the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum, Consumers Union, and the National Council of La Raza developed this report to ensure that the use of emerging technologies will optimize the use of health information by patients and providers to improve the quality of care and help to reduce health disparities.

Ellen Wu is CPEHN’s Executive Director.

Recently, after months of silence, New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez became one of several Republicans to blur the Right’s anti-socialist line in the sand by adopting Medicaid expansion. As New Mexico is surpassed only by Texas in its ranks of uninsured, and leads almost every list of scary medical conditions known to humanity, adding 170,000 insured out of a population of 2,000,000 is obviously good for our statewide health.

But health wasn’t the primary reason Martinez bucked her party. Her decision is rooted in New Mexico’s economy.

I live and work in Rio Arriba County. Like most of New Mexico, it is rural. Forty-one thousand people inhabit a County that is larger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined, often in remote mountain villages.

New Mexico leads the US in drug overdose deaths, while Rio Arriba’s death rate surpasses New Mexico by 2.5 to 1.

Several years ago, in an attempt to understand the causes of the epidemic, I compared demographically similar northern New Mexico villages.

Contrary to popular belief, overdose deaths in these communities did not correlate with poverty: Taos and Tierra Amarilla experience lower death rates than nearby Chimayo and Española despite lower median incomes.

The communities with higher overdose death rates shared two important  but unexpected distinctions. These towns bordered New Mexico’s wealthiest counties; a large percentage of adults thus commuted more than 30 minutes to work in Los Alamos or Santa Fe (or even Albuquerque),  often as much as 60 to 90 minutes one way.

If an adult commutes more than 30 minutes one way, the commute exceeds the lunch hour making him or her unavailable to social networks during working hours. If a high enough percentage of adults are traveling more than 30 minutes one way to a job in a given community, then there is nobody left behind to care for children, bring soup to a sick neighbor, or retrieve forgotten homework assignments.

We are emptying southern Rio Arriba County of healthy adults during daytime hours for relatively low-paying jobs. Because we lack monetary resources, we have very little public or private afterschool programming. Gangs are targeting middle school age children, offering them drugs and alcohol to act as mules.

It appears that the best community-wide resolution to the drug epidemic in Rio Arriba may be the the return of good jobs to the County.

Health Care is the fastest growing sector of New Mexico’s economy, and its largest source of local wages. Twenty-five percent of all Rio Arriba wages can be attributed to healthcare-related jobs. These are also the best-paying jobs, and tend to include benefit packages. In our most remote villages, often, the local clinic is the largest, or even the only employer. Northern New Mexico College, located in Española, offers several health care degrees and certificates. The local hospital and clinics are among the best in the state. Rio Arriba is perfectly situated to expand employment through health care.

Medicaid expansion is one several important ways the Affordable Care Act (ACA) makes it possible to bring health care jobs home. Another has to do with the state-based Medicaid Reform prompted by the ACA.

In New Mexico, the health care delivery system is fragmented. In fact, use of the word ‘system’ in the same sentence as ‘healthcare’ is an oxymoron. Trying to make sense of the cacophony is like trying to put together a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle in which few of the pieces fit.

In 2008, the Rio Arriba Community Health Council produced a report demonstrating that, while the State of New Mexico spent $6.6 million providing behavioral health services to residents of Rio Arriba over 18 months, 75% was spent out-of-county, much of it on youth residential services in Texas or southern New Mexico without family involvement or aftercare based in our own community.

Basic services remained unavailable in-county because this huge expenditure was draining the budget. Local government has been forced through mandatory sentencing and other laws, to spend extraordinary amounts of money on law enforcement and preventable emergency room costs. Medicaid reform offers us the opportunity to build a health care system that focuses on producing health over profit, and enables us to provide basic preventive care close to home. Working with state government to return $3.3 million per year to our county for badly needed preventive care could result in 60-70 jobs. We will keep people healthy while enabling an additional 70 adults to remain close to families and neighbors during daytime hours.

There are numerous provisions in the ACA that encourage hospitals to reduce readmission rates for preventable conditions. The ACA provides incentives to  hospitals to keep people healthy, and penalizes them for failing to connect discharged patients to follow-up care. The Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) tracks hospital quality, and assists the public to compare hospitals online at Hospital Compare. Rural hospitals that capture 75% of the Medicare market share qualify for substantial federal subsidies, adding a further incentive to improve care and build relationships in the community.

Instead of wasting money on billboards, Rio Arriba County is collaborating with Española Hospital to coordinate a series of immunization clinics designed to entice seniors with free preventive care including immunizations for pneumonia, influenza, tetanus, whooping cough and shingles; medication reconciliation clinics where a medical professional examines all of a patients’ medicines to insure they can be taken together; and enrollment fairs.

We hope the fairs will increase our share of the Medicare market, qualifying the hospital for a $1.8 million subsidy, decrease hospitalization rates through proper prevention, and increase payment sources through Medicare and Medicaid enrollment. It is much easier for me as a local government official to work with our hospital to improve care when the system incentivizes collaborative hospital behavior. Moreover, a further revenue capture of $2 million to our system could mean an additional 40 jobs.

Changing the shape of our healthcare system to one that produces healthy people strengthens communities by building community networks and community attachment.

It’s a win-win for everyone!

But a true solution must involve a serious examination of our mental health system. Even if Adam Lanza, Jared Loughner and Seung-hui Cho had no access to guns, they still would have been seriously mentally unstable and dangerous.

From the time of asylums, safety has been a primary purpose of psychiatric institutions. Treatment of mental illness was secondary, as antipsychotic and antidepressant medications were not invented until the 1950’s.

Why is our psychiatric system now failing to keep our communities safe? It’s not that treatments today don’t work. Medications for serious mental illness are better today than ever. In fact, they are so user-friendly that atypical antipsychotics (Seroquel, Abilify, etc.) outsell any other class of medication including antibiotics, anti-hypertensives, and even cholesterol-lowering drugs.

The problem is that many citizens in need often can’t access mental health care–or they look at the mental health system, and choose to avoid it.

Mental health care must be more accessible—and more desirable—than guns.

But here’s what happens before a patient sees a psychiatrist. First, he must navigate his insurance company to figure out which psychiatrist his insurance will cover. Next, he must find a psychiatrist who will see him.

Once he gets to a psychiatrist’s office, he is confronted with a tome of paperwork regarding privacy, and commitments to pay. He may be nervous about signing these contracts—but if he doesn’t, liability and malpractice concerns will keep the psychiatrist from seeing him. If he finally makes it into the shrink’s office, the patient may only get a diagnosis and pills. Or, as some patients put it—“I’ll be told something’s wrong with me, and not the crazy world.”

All the while, he is likely to hear many phone recordings directing him to 9-1-1 or the nearest emergency room.
This kind of “caring” has put our whole nation into a state of emergency.

Here’s a solution.

Caring and compassion have been the foundations of medical care since ancient times. They work far faster than pills—and they just might make mental health care more attractive than guns.

Yet in today’s health care system, a doctor must devote one-third of his/her time to bureaucracy. The doctor-patient relationship may last one session, if at all.

Let the recent tragedies remind us that any community is only as stable as the least stable citizen among us. Then let’s ponder the numbers. One percent of any population is schizophrenic. That makes approximately 3-million citizens among the US population of 300-million. Another one to two percent, or 3- to 6-million Americans suffer serious bipolar disorder. That is not counting citizens with addictions, other mental disorders, and people who are just plain crazy.

How much can gun control do?

This momentous Supreme Court decision protects both women’s right to have an abortion and women’s right to continue a pregnancy. And yet, the reality of women’s lived experience often falls short of the rights pronounced 40 years ago.

Roe built on a series of decisions throughout the 20^th century dealing with marriage, procreation, and childrearing, including a 1972 case about the right to use contraception which said that if the right to privacy means anything, it is the right “to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.”

In political circles, the meaning of Roe v. Wade is usually talked about as “the right to choose” or reduced to the shorthand of “choice.” This simplistic rhetoric not only diminishes the profound and fundamental nature of decisions about parenthood, it begs the question whether it make sense to talk about “choices” unless women have alternatives to choose from. For example:

• to get pregnant or prevent pregnancy
• to continue or terminate a pregnancy
• to raise a child or make arrangements for someone else to do so

Forty years after Roe, the reality for too many women is that these possibilities are severely constrained

Constraints on abortion

One of the biggest constraints is money. For the millions of women of women who use Medicaid for their health care, for example, the Hyde Amendment bans federal funding of abortion. Although the Hyde Amendment initially targeted women who use Medicaid, its reach has extended over the years to virtually every woman whose health insurance is part of the federal budget.

Women who serve in the military or Peace Corps or work for the federal government – out of luck. Women who rely on the Indian Health Service – out of luck. Women who are sentenced to federal prison or immigration detention – out of luck. Women who qualify for Medicare because of disabilities – out of luck.

(So, too, are women who live in the District of Columbia, because Congress has say over D.C. policy, even over how the District spends its own tax revenues.)

All these groups of women, no matter how few resources they may have, must figure out how to pay for an abortion on their own, even when their very poverty is what qualifies them for government health assistance in the first place.

(The official definition of poverty is living on less than $12,000/year for an individual and less than $18,000 for a family of three.)

Because of the racial distribution of poverty, women of color are disproportionately likely to be low-income and rely on government sources of health insurance. Women who are young typically have few resources of their own, and women who live in rural areas, on reservations or in small towns, face the added difficulty of getting to an abortion provider whose office may be many miles away.

It would be bad enough if money were the only significant barrier women had to deal with. But thanks to decisions in which the Court backtracked from Roe, states have enacted a slew of restrictions that turn the path to abortion care into an obstacle course littered with hurdles like biased “counseling” and mandatory waiting periods designed to dissuade women from going through with their decision.

Constraints on parenthood

Despite how difficult politicians have made it to get an abortion, they haven’t made it particularly easy to raise children. Consider some of the challenges:

• ongoing discrimination against pregnant students

• ongoing discrimination against pregnant women on the job

• no federal policy guaranteeing paid parental leave

• the worst conditions for single mothers

• high rates of maternal mortality

Race and economics matter here, too. The maternal mortality rate for African American women is three times higher than it is for white women, for example. Discrimination and policy failures take an especially heavy toll on women of color, young women, rural women, and all women working low-wage jobs.

Among the groups for whom motherhood poses the biggest challenge are women in jail, prison, and immigration detention. Misguided drug policy and harsh sentencing rules have fueled a dramatic rise in the imprisonment of women since 1973. Increasingly, women risk arrest and imprisonment because they are pregnant.

A majority of incarcerated women have children with whom they struggle to maintain relationships, both in terms of preserving their emotional bond and in terms of preserving their legal rights as parents. If they are pregnant, they face medical neglect and the prospect of being shackled when they are in labor and giving birth.

Moving forward: supporting women’s decisions

Women go to school, work, have sex, form families. One in three women has an abortion at some point in her life. Six in ten women having an abortion have at least one child.

Because of Roe, abortion is one of the safest medical procedures. This is one of the most important benefits of legalization.

After 40 years, the availability of safe medical care is the minimum we should expect. To fulfill the promise of Roe, we still need public policies that truly promote women’s right to decide whether and when to become mothers, including policies that ensure access to abortion and policies that support raising children.

Beginning January 1, 2013, the new law will prohibit shackling women around the belly, at the ankles, or with handcuffs behind their back throughout pregnancy. The law also prohibits shackling women in any way at all when they are in labor, giving birth, or recovering from childbirth. Medical providers can also order the removal of shackles.

The only exception is if corrections officials determine that an individual woman poses a security threat.

These new protections are important because they recognize that shackling is not only a problem once women go into labor. The law reflects a growing consensus that shackling jeopardizes women’s health, safety, and dignity throughout pregnancy, putting women and their fetuses at risk of injury.

Karen Shain, Policy Director at Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, one of the primary forces behind the new law, can’t wait to visit pregnant women and rejoice with them that the Governor finally heard their concerns “about having to wear chains around their bellies while going to court, about being shackled around their ankles while waiting to see a doctor, about standing in countless lines waiting to get on countless buses while handcuffed behind their backs.”

On a more sober note, Shain also reminds us that a law is only as good as its implementation and invites people to join in monitoring implementation to ensure that all state prisons, county jails, and juvenile detention facilities respect women’s rights under the law.

Today, 16 states have laws against shackling: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont, Washington, and West Virginia.

If your state isn’t on this list, read more about the twists and turns over seven years in California and the faster road to legislative success in Colorado and get inspired to start a campaign where you live!

Image via Strong Families.