The ACLU is back in court today once again to stop Kentucky’s attempt to block access to abortion. We’ve been here before. Over the past three years, the Kentucky General Assembly has passed bill after bill that limits — and even bans — a person’s ability to get an abortion. And time after time, we’ve gone to court to protect people’s rights to get the care they need.    

At issue this week is a law that makes it a crime for doctors at Kentucky’s last remaining abortion clinic to perform an abortion procedure that is the standard of care. In reality, the law is nothing more than a backdoor abortion ban: It would bar the only procedure available in the state after about 15 weeks of pregnancy.

Following a trial last year, a federal district court blocked the law, finding that it imposed “a substantial obstacle to a woman’s right to an abortion”—as other courts around the country similarly found.  But the Commonwealth of Kentucky appealed, and we are arguing the appeal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit today.

The commonwealth’s opposition to this type of procedure is blatantly political, not medical. Leading medical experts such as the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists oppose these bans, saying they interfere with a doctor’s ability to provide the best possible care for their patient.

This restriction is part of a national and statewide strategy to push abortion out of reach. Since Jan. 2011, state lawmakers around the country have enacted more than 400 new restrictions on abortion that force patients to delay care, shut down clinics, and make abortion care unaffordable.

Because of regulations like these, today Kentucky has only one clinic left in the entire state. And the state is trying to force that last clinic to close its doors, leaving Kentuckians with no abortion provider at all. It’s only because we went with the clinic, EMW Women’s Surgical Center, to get a court order that the doors are still open; this case is on appeal. 

Kentucky politicians have passed yet more attempts to block abortion access: a flat-out ban on abortion from the earliest weeks of pregnancy, and a ban based on the patient’s reason for deciding to have an abortion. The ACLU and the clinic went to court, and those laws are all blocked.

Kentucky politicians are determined to stop people who have decided to have an abortion from getting one. But we won’t turn from this fight. We will continue this battle so Kentuckians can get the care they need, and the right to decide what happens to their bodies.

Amber Duke, Communications Director, ACLU of Kentucky

Reconstruction gave citizenship and the right to vote to Black men in the state, and it was power that they knew for only a few short years. Following the enactment of Florida’s 1868 constitution, the state would install a Black secretary of state and elect a Black congressman to the United States Congress. It would take a century for another Black person to be seated in a statehouse or congressional office.

Some who read this may ask, “Why make this a ‘race’ thing?” Race was the institution on which America was founded. Yes, the Founding Fathers intended to create a government free from monarchical rule. But, the business that America sold for the first century of the constitutional republic was primarily in crops and textiles harvested and manufactured for free by the forced enslavement and labor of Africans.

These facts matter particularly because of the recency with which many of us view the lens of history in our fractious and fast-paced media environment.

It’s easy to forget after President Barack Obama became the first African American to hold the nation’s most powerful position, that African Americans have only experienced the full rights and protections of citizenship in this country since the 1968 Civil Rights Act also known as the Fair Housing Act. That was the last of the 1960s civil rights legislation to be enacted, a week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. This historic legislation was only passed a generation or two ago, part of our living memory.

It is easy to forget that African Americans in Florida were not represented in Florida’s statehouse after Reconstruction and the Great Nadir until the election of Gwendolyn Sawyer Cherry from Miami to the Florida Legislature in 1970. Florida also did not have any African American representatives in Congress in the years after Reconstruction until the general election of 1992. Several generations of Floridians never knew a local Black policymaker in state or national government.

We simply cannot “move on” or “get over it.”

As Americans and as Floridians, this is our shared history, mired in the uncomfortable topic of the normalized social construct of race that many of us may feel is impolite to discuss. But how can we heal the divisions in this country and acknowledge the impact of this period of legal racialized terror if we cannot address the issue and how it has impacted generations of Black people and the subsequent harms it has wrought? We simply cannot “move on” or “get over it.”

Black History Month reminds us that Americans of African descent have played a central role in the progress of this state and our country from the start, even if history books do not emphasize it.

Issues like voter suppression and disenfranchisement and economic immobility and the wealth gap remind us that, though we have achieved progress in leveling the playing field in access to life, housing, and employment, the work to achieve true equality was never completely won, nor will it ever really be in any of our lifetimes.

The work of securing full rights and true equality for not just Black Floridians, but all Floridians, is ongoing work to which each and every one of us is tasked. We cannot afford to defer creating an integrated society where everyone feels a true sense of belonging.

We must continue to work together to achieve true equality. It is our duty to each other if we are to really make this republic work for “we the people.”

The federal government recently proposed a rule that would strip graduate student workers of their ability to organize under the National Labor Relations Act, the law that grants most private sector employees the right to engage in collective bargaining. In justifying its proposed rule, the National Labor Relations Board, a government agency, asserted that allowing graduate student assistants to bargain collectively would “uniquely imperil[ ] the protection of academic freedoms.”

The government is wrong.

Like any other employee, student workers seek to organize to improve their working conditions — not to exert control over academic matters. “Protecting academic freedom” is just the government’s phony justification for limiting workers’ ability to unionize, and, as an organization deeply devoted to both academic freedom and free association, we won’t stand by it. That’s why we’re opposing the proposed rule.

Academic freedom is undoubtedly crucial to the spread of ideas on university campuses. The role of a university is to teach and encourage its students to freely engage with new topics, constantly inquiring, questioning, and evaluating different perspectives and perceptions. The ability to do so independently and freely is critical not only for students, but also for professors and other members of the campus community. An infringement on this essential aspect of education would be cause for concern, but there is no reason to believe that collective bargaining over employment conditions will have any effect on the academic freedom of schools.

To the contrary, student workers are seeking to bargain over their wages, hours, and health care — not over what topics will and will not be covered in a biology class. In recent collective bargaining agreements reached between universities like NYU, Tufts, Brandeis, and their student employees, the heart of the bargaining has focused on core economic issues and conditions of employment.

If anything, rather than requiring the exclusion of graduate student workers from the NLRA, the principles the First Amendment rest upon suggest just the opposite. The role of the First Amendment is to protect our ability to speak out, to join together on the issues we care about, and to rally for change. As the Supreme Court has long recognized, “The practice of persons sharing common views banding together to achieve a common end is deeply embedded in the American political process.” When employees form a union, they are doing just that: banding together over issues of mutual interest to guarantee their ability to communicate serious workplace concerns, and elevate their voices so these concerns are heard.

The ACLU has defended the associational rights of workers throughout the last century and continues to do so now. For example, in Farm Labor Organizing Committee v. Stein, we are fighting to protect the ability of North Carolina’s farmworkers to organize and join collective bargaining agreements with their employers. From farmworkers to graduate student assistants, all workers should be able to advocate for better working conditions, pay, and benefits for themselves and their families.

If particular schools remain concerned about the preservation of their academic freedom despite the fact that First Amendment principles actually weigh against this rule, there are precautionary measures they could take. Schools could explicitly exclude all academic decision making from the scope of bargaining, or state that the sole authority over all academic matters rests with the university. While by no means required by the First Amendment, provisions like these should reassure institutions that their academic freedom will be preserved through the bargaining process.

As the agency “vested with the power to safeguard employees’ rights to organize,” the National Labor Relations Board should be supporting — not undercutting — student workers’ ability to effect change in the workplace. Reconsidering this proposed rule would be a start.

Arianna Demas, Brennan Fellow, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project