By Ariela Migdal, ACLU Women's Rights Project

Until today, official United States policy banned all women from being assigned to ground combat units. The policy was military-wide and covered our whole gender – no exceptions for women who were fast, strong, excellent marksmen, good at keeping calm under fire, or able to take and give directions in a high-octane situation. It was one of the last remaining relics of official government exclusion of women. Among the many problems with this policy was the fact that it bore little relationship to the reality of modern warfare. The people who shot down Major MJ Hegar’s combat helicopter during a rescue mission and engaged her crew with heavy ground fire in Afghanistan apparently hadn’t read the policy. The military leaders who sent Marine Corps Captain Zoe Bedell and First Lieutenant Colleen Farrell to Afghanistan to command teams of women who would live, work, and fight with ground infantry troops in tiny combat outposts must have known about the policy, but got around it by assigning the women into so-called “Female Engagement Teams,” instead of to the infantry units themselves. And the commanders who plucked Army Staff Sergeant Jennifer Hunt from her regular job in Civil Affairs and put her in helicopters over the Afghan mountains, to be dropped off with platoons of ground soldiers going on door-kicking missions, seem to have disregarded the policy altogether because they had missions to accomplish. Today, the Pentagon will finally get rid of the antiquated combat exclusion policy. This is a historic moment that came about because women like the plaintiffs in the ACLU’s lawsuit challenging the policy had the guts to do double duty for our country. First, they gave their blood, sweat, and tears in the military, slogging through the mountains and the deserts and, in the cases of Major Hegar and Staff Sergeant Hunt, sustaining combat injuries. Then, when they came home to find that official policy insisted that their combat service didn’t even exist, they performed a second service, by coming forward to tell the nation what they and other women have been doing on the battlefield, and to insist that the policy be changed. Eliminating the combat exclusion policy is a huge step forward for our country and for our military. No longer will commanders be limited to a talent pool that excludes thousands of ready, willing, and more-than-able soldiers. No longer will an outdated policy interrupt operations and dictate who can do which job in the thick of the fight. No longer will women volunteer to put themselves in harm’s way, only to be told that entire career fields and more than 238,000 positions are off-limits to them. We can finally get rid of the brass ceiling that keeps the top military leadership overwhelmingly male. We, along with our four clients, our client the Service Women’s Action Network, and thousands of servicewomen and veterans, will be keeping a close eye on the armed services as they implement this change. Now is not the time for foot-dragging or more games about which jobs women are officially permitted to do. For more than a decade, women have been risking and, in more than a hundred instances, giving up their lives in combat. It’s long past time for the policy to catch up.

By Jennifer Dalven, Reproductive Freedom Project

Forty years ago today, the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, the landmark case that recognized that a pregnant woman has a right to make her own decision about whether to have a child or have an abortion. Since then, some politicians have been trying to take that decision out of a woman’s hands. But over the past two years, these efforts have reached record levels. In those two short years, our elected representatives found the time to pass almost 140 provisions designed to interfere with a woman and her family’s private decision about abortion.

If you’ve had the feeling things have been getting worse, you are right.  In fact, more than half of all American women now live in a state where the legislature is hostile to a woman’s access to abortion. (That’s up from less 1/3 just a decade ago).
Now, of course, we don’t all feel the same way about abortion and we don’t have to. But we should be able to agree that this incredibly important and personal decision is better made by a woman, her family, and her doctor than by politicians sitting in the state legislature or on Capitol Hill.

Indeed, the American people have shown they don't want politicians to interfere in personal, private decision-making. Who can say whether it was the bills that require a woman to have an ultrasound and look at the picture before she has an abortion? Or that all-male panel that testified before Congress about whether a woman’s insurance plan should cover her contraception? Or that telling comment about “legitimate rape?” Or perhaps it was those 140 new restrictions? Regardless of what the tipping point was, one thing is clear: the American people have had enough.

This year, across the country, people came together to speak out against these restrictions and those who pushed them. In states like Virginia, Oklahoma, Michigan,and Idaho, women and men took time out of their busy lives to go to their state capitols and tell their representatives to leave these decisions where they belong: with a woman and her family.

And these folks aren’t just talking, they are voting. Recently, voters in states as diverse as Mississippi (yes, Mississippi!) and Colorado, Florida and North Dakota all rejected ballot measures that would have interfered with a woman’s ability to make her own decisions about pregnancy and abortion. And this year, politicians with extreme views on abortion lost at the polls, even in conservative states. In fact, Americans are so fed up with politicians trying to interfere with a woman’s private health care decision, that a Gallup poll found that 39 percent of women in 12 battleground states said abortion was the most important issue for women in the election.

Incredibly, however, some politicians still haven’t gotten the message. Right after the election, in a lame-duck session in Michigan, with the public locked out of the statehouse, politicians snuck through onerous and unnecessary regulations on women’s health centers. And, over the holidays, the governor of Virginia quietly advanced new restrictions designed to shut down all women’s health centers in the state -- you know, the very restrictions that the Health Commissioner resigned over because they were based on politics rather than protecting a woman’s health.

These stealth attacks notwithstanding, two things haven’t changed. First, Americans have had enough of politicians trying to take that decision away from a woman and her family. Second, if we continue to speak out, we can stem this tide. We can stop politicians from interfering in a woman’s private health care decisions. We can get them back to working for American women and their families instead of against them. Forty years after Roe, it’s about time.