Washington, D.C. — Today, the Women’s Initiative at the Center for American Progress released a new column that reveals how repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would prolong and worsen the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic for women and their families, threaten women’s financial security, and augment gender inequities in accessing essential health care services. The piece comes in the midst of hearings to consider Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court and less than four weeks before the court will hear oral arguments in a Trump administration-backed lawsuit to terminate the ACA during a pandemic.
The column warns that repealing the health care law amid compounding public health emergencies—COVID-19 and a maternal mortality crisis that is killing Black and Native American women at alarming rates—could yield disastrous consequences. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data indicate that pregnant people with COVID-19 have higher rates of hospitalization,
