SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE. 
This Act may be cited as the ‘‘Women’s Health Pro-
tection Act of 2021’’. 
SEC. 2. FINDINGS AND PURPOSE. 
(a) FINDINGS.—Congress finds the following: 
(1) Abortion services are essential to health 
care and access to those services is central to peo-
ple’s ability to participate equally in the economic 
and social life of the United States. Abortion access 
allows people who are pregnant to make their own 
decisions about their pregnancies, their families, and 
their lives. 
(2) Since 1973, the Supreme Court repeatedly 
has recognized the constitutional right to terminate 
a pregnancy before fetal viability, and to terminate 
a pregnancy after fetal viability where it is nec-
essary, in the good-faith medical judgment of the 
treating health care professional, for the preserva-
tion of the life or health of the person who is preg-
nant. 
(3) Nonetheless, access to abortion services has 
been obstructed across the United States in various 
ways, including blockades of health care facilities 
and associated violence, prohibitions of, and restric-
tions on, insurance coverage; parental involvement 
laws (notification and consent); restrictions that
shame and stigmatize people seeking abortion serv-
ices; and medically unnecessary regulations that nei-
ther confer any health benefit nor further the safety 
of abortion services, but which harm people by de-
laying, complicating access to, and reducing the 
availability of, abortion services. 
(4) Reproductive justice requires every indi-
vidual to have the right to make their own decisions 
about having children regardless of their cir-
cumstances and without interference and discrimina-
tion. Reproductive Justice is a human right that can 
and will be achieved when all people, regardless of 
actual or perceived race, color, national origin, immi-
gration status, sex (including gender identity, sex 
stereotyping, or sexual orientation), age, or disability 
status have the economic, social, and political power 
and resources to define and make decisions about 
their bodies, health, sexuality, families, and commu-
nities in all areas of their lives, with dignity and 
self-determination. 
(5) Reproductive justice seeks to address re-
strictions on reproductive health, including abortion, 
that perpetuate systems of oppression, lack of bodily 
autonomy, white supremacy, and anti-Black racism. 
This violent legacy has manifested in policies includ-
ing enslavement, rape, and experimentation on Black 
women; forced sterilizations; medical experimen-
tation on low-income women’s reproductive systems; 
and the forcible removal of Indigenous children. Ac-
cess to equitable reproductive health care, including 
abortion services, has always been deficient in the 
United States for Black, Indigenous, and other Peo-
ple of Color (BIPOC) and their families. 
(6) The legacy of restrictions on reproductive 
health, rights, and justice is not a dated vestige of 
a dark history. Presently, the harms of abortion-spe-
cific restrictions fall especially heavily on people with 
low incomes, BIPOC, immigrants, young people, 
people with disabilities, and those living in rural and 
other medically underserved areas. Abortion-specific 
restrictions are even more compounded by the ongo-
ing criminalization of people who are pregnant, in-
cluding those who are incarcerated, living with HIV, 
or with substance-use disorders. These communities 
already experience health disparities due to social, 
political, and environmental inequities, and restric-
tions on abortion services exacerbate these harms. 
Removing medically unjustified restrictions on abor-
tion services would constitute one important step on 
the path toward realizing Reproductive Justice by
ensuring that the full range of reproductive health 
care is accessible to all who need it. 
(7) Abortion-specific restrictions are a tool of 
gender oppression, as they target health care serv-
ices that are used primarily by women. These pater-
nalistic restrictions rely on and reinforce harmful 
stereotypes about gender roles, women’s decision- 
making, and women’s need for protection instead of 
support, undermining their ability to control their 
own lives and well-being. These restrictions harm the 
basic autonomy, dignity, and equality of women, and 
their ability to participate in the social and economic 
life of the Nation. 
(8) The terms ‘‘woman’’ and ‘‘women’’ are used 
in this bill to reflect the identity of the majority of 
people targeted and affected by restrictions on abor-
tion services, and to address squarely the targeted 
restrictions on abortion, which are rooted in misog-
yny. However, access to abortion services is critical 
to the health of every person capable of becoming 
pregnant. This Act is intended to protect all people 
with the capacity for pregnancy—cisgender women, 
transgender men, non-binary individuals, those who 
identify with a different gender, and others—who
are unjustly harmed by restrictions on abortion serv-
ices. 
(9) Since 2011, States and local governments 
have passed nearly 500 restrictions singling out 
health care providers who offer abortion services, 
interfering with their ability to provide those services 
and the patients’ ability to obtain those services. 
(10) Many State and local governments have 
imposed restrictions on the provision of abortion 
services that are neither evidence-based nor gen-
erally applicable to the medical profession or to 
other medically comparable outpatient gynecological 
procedures, such as endometrial ablations, dilation 
and curettage for reasons other than abortion, 
hysteroscopies, loop electrosurgical excision proce-
dures, or other analogous non-gynecological proce-
dures performed in similar outpatient settings in-
cluding vasectomy, sigmoidoscopy, and colonoscopy. 
(11) Abortion is essential health care and one 
of the safest medical procedures in the United 
States. An independent, comprehensive review of the 
state of science on the safety and quality of abortion 
services, published by the National Academies of 
Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in 2018, found 
that abortion in the United States is safe and effec-