If sequestration is allowed to take effect as scheduled on March 1, $1.2 trillion will be automatically removed from the federal budget in across-the-board spending cuts that would potentially reverse our economic recovery. These cuts — which take money out of critical investments in education, public health services and research, disaster preparedness, and national security — would have devastating consequences in communities around the country and would harm all Americans in a number of ways.

Sequestration also institutes several cuts to key public investments that would disproportionately harm women. Low-income women and women of color will be hit hardest by the sequestration. Here are the top five ways in which the sequestration harms women:

1. Sequestration cuts $424 million from Head Start and Early Head Start.

More and more women and single mothers are heading their households, and they are struggling to balance work and motherhood in the absence of a universal child care system. Head Start and Early Head Start provide education, health, and nutrition services to low-income women and their families, and they are critical child care providers for women who could not otherwise afford care for their children. These programs aim to ensure that limited parental income does not get in the way of a child’s early education or inhibit women from being able to work. As soon as sequestration takes effect, however, 70,000 children will be cut from Head Start and Early Head Start programs due to the eliminated funding for the program.

2. Sequestration cuts $86 million from key women’s health programs.

Between two and three women die each day from complications of giving birth. Black women in the United States die in childbirth at three to four times the rate of other racial and ethnic groups. The infant morality rate in the United States is twice as high as that of other wealthy nations, and rates are highest for low-income women of color, who often lack access to quality health care.

Sequestration cuts $4 million from the Safe Motherhood Initiative, which helps prevent pregnancy-related deaths; $8 million from the Breast and Cervical Cancer Screening Program, which provides cancer screenings to low-income women; $24 million from Title X family planning and reproductive health services; and $50 million from the Title V Maternal and Child Health Services Block Grant. The cuts to the Maternal and Child Health Services Block grant alone would mean 5 million fewer low-income families would be provided with prenatal health care and other services that help eliminate disparities in infant mortality and maternal health.

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Lindsay Rosenthal is a Research Assistant with the Women’s Health and Rights team and the Health Policy team at the Center for American Progress.

Former surgeon general C. Everett Koop has passed away at the age of the 96. Koop — who described himself as “the health conscience of the country” — was a surprising advocate of comprehensive sex education, despite the fact that he was a staunch social conservative, as a method of combating the HIV/AIDS epidemic. He also championed anti-smoking campaigns and hoped to reach a day when smoking was completely eradicated in the United States.

Appointed under Ronald Reagan in 1981, Koop brought valuable exposure to an HIV epidemic that Americans were only slowly becoming aware of. In 1988, he orchestrated the largest public health mailing in history by sending an educational AIDS pamphlet to more than 100 million U.S. households — without the Reagan administration’s blessing. Although Koop himself remained “opposed” to homosexuality, he insisted that Americans deserved accurate medical information to safeguard their sexual health and avoid preventable deaths from AIDS.

Koop’s legacy lives on, and the public health campaigns he pushed have seen huge successes over the past few decades. Teen smoking rates have recently dropped to record lows, and the United Nations now believes an end to the global HIV/AIDS epidemic is “in sight.”

A college sophomore at the University of North Carolina is being sent to the school’s “Honor Court” and may be expelled for speaking publicly about her rape.

University officials are alleging that Landen Gambill is being “disruptive” or “intimidating” her alleged rapist by going public with her story of sexual assault, despite the fact that Gambill has not even publicly identified the assailant.

Most likely, UNC’s action against the student is revenge. Gambill’s story first came to light as part of a case against the school in which a former assistant dean accused UNC of intentionally under-reporting cases of sexual assault. Gambill was one of three students providing evidence to prove the dean’s case. After it went public, Gambill publicly addressed the failings of UNC’s system, reporting that they “were not only offensive and inappropriate, but they were so victim-blaming… They made it seem like my assault was completely my fault.” The school even tried to leverage her suicide attempt, which happened after her sexual abuse, against her.

Calling her into the Honor Court can be seen as the latest attempt to silence the young girl. Jezebel reports that Gambill received her first threat from a school attorney about one month ago, on January 29th. On February 22nd, Gambill received a formal accusation calling her in to the court:

Accordingly, you are being charged with the following Honor Code violation(s):

II.C.1.c. – Disruptive or intimidating behavior that willfully abuses, disparages, or otherwise interferes with another (other than on the basis of protected classifications identified and addressed in the University’s Policy on Prohibited Harassment and Discrimination) so as to adversely affect their academic pursuits, opportunities for University employment, participation in University-sponsored extracurricular activities, or opportunities to benefit from other aspects of University Life.

This decision was reached because the evidence provides a reasonable basis to believe that a violation of the Honor Code may have occurred. Please note that being charged with a violation does not imply guilt. It simply means that sufficient evidence of a possible violation exists to warrant a hearing before the Undergraduate Honor Court.

The Honor Code may also specify that rape falls under “the University’s Policy on Prohibited Harassment,” but Gambill’s rapist remains on campus. In fact, Gambill lives across the street from her assailant.

But while UNC’s administration’s reaction couldn’t be worse, Gambill’s peers are trying to bring attention to the issue. Students have organized protests at the school, and have vocally defended Gambill in college papers. Their power might not stand up against institutionalized biases, but they spark a much-needed conversation. After all, UNC is not alone in its mishandling of rape culture and its ineffective sexual assault policies; colleges across the country are failing on these same fronts.

Republicans have made Planned Parenthood into a top target in their ongoing War on Women, repeatedly attempting to strip funding from the national women’s health organization because some of its affiliates provide abortion services. Despite the fact that the Hyde Amendment already prevents taxpayer dollars from funding abortion — which means that Planned Parenthood’s federal and state funding simply goes toward providing preventative health care for women who often aren’t able to access those services elsewhere — GOP lawmakers still aren’t convinced. They’re still eager to find a reason to defund Planned Parenthood, and they’re willing to waste time and money to search for one.

Nearly 70 Republicans have signed onto a letter asking the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to take a closer look at the way Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers use taxpayer dollars. Even though there’s already a federal law that stipulates exactly how those funds may be used, they still claim the study is “critically needed to shine a bright light on how taxpayer funds are allocated” — but the GOP proponents of the effort admit their real goal is to justify stripping funding from Planned Parenthood:

Those spearheading this effort — Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.), Rep. Pete Olson (R-Texas) and Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) — are hoping the study confirms their suspicions that these groups are focusing more on abortion and less on other healthcare services. Black said this finding could be used to justify a reduction in federal funds to abortion providers. [...]

Black added that Planned Parenthood showed in its latest report that they are providing more abortions, and fewer other health services, all while federal funding has increased. “An independent study of the federal funding for abortion providers is necessary to further expose the truth of how these precious taxpayer dollars are truly being used,” Black said.

House Republicans are already tripping over themselves to attempt to defund Planned Parenthood, introducing two identical bills at the beginning of the legislative session that both target the nonprofit organization. They’re unconcerned about their doubled efforts because, as Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) explained to the Huffington Post, “The fact that there are multiple members interested in this issue proves that Planned Parenthood is not going to be let off the hook.”

But that message may not be particularly well-received by the American people. Post-election polling confirmed that women’s issues, including lawmakers’ stance on whether Planned Parenthood should remain fully funded, were decisive factors in the presidential election: 64 percent of all voters said they heard something about Mitt Romney’s intent to defund Planned Parenthood, and 62 percent disagreed with that position.

That’s apparently not enough to dissuade Republicans in Congress, who have a long track record of focusing on the same pointless issues — the 112th Congress unsuccessfully attempted to repeal Obamacare over 30 times, for example — rather than tackling their long to-do list on important polices like disaster relief, job stimulation, deficit deals, and resources for sexual assault victims.

A breakthrough in cancer treatment could potentially have a big impact on women who are battling advanced stages of breast cancer. The New York Times reports that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a new drug that, when used in conjunction with the popular breast cancer treatment drug Herceptin, will more effectively kill cancerous cells and appreciably extend late-stage metastatic breast cancer patients’ life expectancy while possibly alleviating some of the chemotherapy’s more debilitating side-effects:

The main clinical trial leading to approval of Kadcyla involved 991 patients with metastatic breast cancer that was worsening despite treatment with Herceptin and a taxane chemotherapy drug, like paclitaxel. Half the women were given infusions of Kadcyla and the other half took two pills now commonly used for such patients: Tykerb, also known as lapatinib, and Xeloda, also known as capecitabine.

The patients getting Kadcyla lived a median of 30.9 months, compared with 25.1 months for those getting the two pills. The median time before the disease worsened was 9.6 months for those getting Kadcyla, compared with 6.4 months for those getting the other drugs.

While having greater efficacy, Kadcyla also had fewer side effects. About 43 percent of patients on Kadcyla had serious side effects compared with 59 percent of those getting the two pills.

Kadcya is a first-of-its-kind drug for Americans suffering from more advanced and aggressive breast cancers, and holds great potential for increasing patients’ longevity and reducing suffering. But the drug is likely to cause considerable sticker shock, as “it would cost about $9,800 a month, or $94,000 for a typical course of treatment” — twice the amount of money that treating advanced breast cancer with Herceptin alone would cost.

The fact that Kadcya is so expensive underscores the importance of early testing and prevention efforts, hopefully before diseases worsen and health care costs spiral out of control. The exorbitant cost of American medical care — including staggering fees for everything from simple blood work, to drugs, and to more advanced procedures — makes preventative care more important than ever.

But engaging in that sort of forward-thinking and preventative care is particularly difficult in the face of conservative lawmakers’ war on women’s care facilities such as Planned Parenthood, which is one of the main resources for breast and cervical cancer screenings — particularly for low-income women. While Obamacare mandates that mammograms and similar preventative screenings be provided free of charge, American women may have a difficult time finding adequate resources for such services in the absence of adequate facilities providing them.

2012 was a banner year for new state-level abortion restrictions, yet not a single state enacted a law to improve access to family planning services or comprehensive sex education. Although the nation’s rate of unintended teen pregnancies is dropping, the U.S. still has the highest teen birth rate of any nation in the developed world — yet 26 states still require high school health classes to emphasize ineffective abstinence education, rather than prioritizing comprehensive sexual health instruction that includes accurate information about methods to prevent unintended pregnancy and STD transmission.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any attempts to move the country forward. A national bill to expand access to LGBT-inclusive, gender balanced sex education was recently introduced by 34 Democratic politicians. And on a more localized level, these five states are also taking important steps to help ensure that teenagers have all of the information they need to better understand their bodies and their sexuality:

1. COLORADO: Lawmakers in Colorado are advancing a bill that would move the state away from its current abstinence-only curricula to include comprehensive sexual health instruction, including requiring health classes in public schools to use inclusive language about LGBT issues. As openly gay state Rep. Dominick Moreno (D) argued on the House floor, traditional sex ed programs don’t often have adequate resources to help students who are struggling with their sexuality. Republicans largely opposed the provision of the legislation that would require the state’s sex ed classes to be LGBT-inclusive, and the anti-gay Focus on the Family lobbied hard against the bill — but despite their objections, the measure was approved by the House on Friday.

2. HAWAII: The state’s House Committee on Education is currently considering a measure that would incorporate comprehensive sexual education into all of Hawaii’s public schools. The bill would require Hawaii’s public elementary, middle, intermediate, high, and alternative schools to include medically accurate sexual health instruction in their curricula. Rep. John Mizuno (D), who introduced the measure, pointed out that unintended pregnancies currently cost the state an estimated $22 million each year — and more comprehensive sex ed would be a better investment. “Comprehensive sex education will equip our young people with the knowledge and tools necessary to be conscious of their decisions when it comes to sex,” Rep. Mizuno pointed out.

3. ALABAMA: Alabama’s first openly gay legislator, state Rep. Patricia Todd (D), is doing her best to update the standards for sexual education for the teens in her state. At the beginning of the new legislative session, Todd re-introduced a measure to repeal Alabama’s 1992 abstinence-only education law, an outdated piece of legislation that requires health classes to teach students that homosexuality is illegal. Todd’s bill would put the Department of Education in charge of establishing more comprehensive, medically accurate sex ed classes — an important update, since the state legislature currently sets the standards for sex ed and has the power to turn students’ basic health instruction into a politicized battlefield.

4. ILLINOIS: The Chicago public school system is considering an overhaul of its sexual education program that would require health classes to discuss sexual orientation and gender identity for the first time. The city’s chief health officer notes that if the new policy is enacted, Chicago’s public schools would comprise the largest urban U.S. school district with a required minimum of sex ed instruction and a specific curriculum for each grade level — a move spurred partly by the fact that over half of Chicago teens are sexually active. Under the new program, students below fifth grade would learn about anatomy, healthy relationships, puberty, and HIV transmission. After fifth grade, students would receive age-appropriate, LGBT-inclusive instruction about human reproduction, healthy decision-making, bullying, and contraception.

5. NORTH DAKOTA: Republicans in North Dakota are currently advancing several attacks on women’s health, and at the beginning of this month, it looked like abortion opponents might also successfully block sex ed resources for at-risk youth. After North Dakota State University won a three-year federal grant to partner with Planned Parenthood to provide sexual health services for at-risk teenagers, anti-abortion activists threatened to derail the program simply because Planned Parenthood was participating. The school faced significant pressure to back out of the grant — but fortunately, now that the state’s Attorney General has confirmed that partnering with Planned Parenthood doesn’t actually conflict with state law, the program will be allowed to move forward. University officials are celebrating the victory, which will allow teens between 15 and 19 years old to receive the comprehensive sexual health and family planning resources they need.

69-year-old Rebecca S. Tomczak suffers sarcoidosis, a condition that leads to lung scarring and can devolce into a terminal disease if left untreated. The doctors told her that without a full lung transplant, her prognosis would be dire — and while Tomczak could have qualified for transplant lists at several hospitals, she had to scour through several providers before finding one that would take up her case, since she’s a practicing Jehovah’s Witness. Her adherence to her faith prevents her from receiving blood transfusions, which are typically necessary for transplant surgeries.

As the New York Times reports, Tomczak was finally able to track down Dr. Scott A. Scheinin of the Houston-based Methodist Hospital, who agreed to treat her on her own terms. The hospital had conducted several successful bloodless lung transplants before — specifically tailored towards Jehovah’s Witnesses — and had developed an innovative, seemingly safe medical approach to treating these patients while also respecting their closely-held tenets. As Dr. Scheinin put it, “At the end of the day, if you agree to take care of these patients, you agree to do it on their terms.”

Critics might balk that tailoring medical procedures towards a patient’s religious beliefs is impractical and costly. But the new system that the doctors at Methodist developed was more cost-effective than regular transplant procedures — and arguably more safe, as there has been some evidence that blood transfusions may actually be risky in certain cases:

The economy is also helping the blood management movement. Processing and transfusing a single unit of blood can cost as much as $1,200, and many hospitals are trying to cut back. Administrators at Methodist said their bloodless lung transplants typically cost 30 percent less than other lung transplants, partly because careful management of hemoglobin levels before surgery has resulted in fewer complications and shorter stays.

Experts say they are beginning to see a measurable impact on blood usage, although the data to support it are not yet available. Dr. Richard J. Benjamin, the chief medical officer of the American Red Cross, predicted that the numbers would show the first decline in use since the AIDS scare began in the 1980s, perhaps by one million units.

“We’re changing this culture, this knee-jerk transfusion reaction,” Dr. Scheinin said. “And I think that’s been a good thing for all our patients.”

While Tomczak’s story is intriguing for its implications on medical innovation and reducing health care costs, it also highlights a positive way to reconcile the tensions between modern medical technology and religious dogma. Rather than being a case in which a doctor imposes his or her conscientious biases on a patient — such as the Irish medical team that incited global outrage after denying a life-saving abortion to a woman who later passed away — Tomczak’s experiences are an example of a doctor keeping his patient’s health at the forefront while also respecting that patient’s ethical choices through creativity and innovation. That may not be achievable in every single case — but this particular story shows that it certainly is possible.

After Dr. George Tiller was murdered in 2009, his Wichita-area abortion clinic closed its doors — and ever since, women in the area have had no choice but to travel up to 200 miles to get to the nearest clinic. Now, women’s health advocate Julie Burkhart wants to change that.

But that decision isn’t without its risks. There is perhaps no greatest symbol of the dangers of anti-abortion harassment than Dr. Tiller, who was gunned down simply for providing Kansas women with reproductive services — and that type of violence hasn’t dissipated in the years since his death. As Burkhart works to re-open Tiller’s former clinic as the South Wind Women’s Center, security is one of her top concerns:

Safety and security have played significant roles in the decision to reopen this clinic and provide abortion services in Wichita for the first time since the murder of Dr. George Tiller in 2009.

“We will have a security company working for us after we open. We also have other security measures in place, just the typical things that businesses have these days,” say Burkhart. She is reluctant to provide to many details because of concern about possible threats from anti-abortion activists in the community.

Burkhart says during the long process of reopening the clinic she’s been scared at times. In recent weeks demonstrators have twice camped outside her home. She says her passion helping women make their own reproductive health decision outweighs any fear.

Anti-abortion groups are already doing their best to block Burkhart’s group from opening the clinic, attempting to delay construction by complaining to city officials that the building’s zoning contracts weren’t issued correctly. Some of the contractors working on the building have already been harassed. The site of the clinic, as well as Burkhart’s own home, have been picketed by abortion opponents.

And Burkhart has struggled to find abortion doctors who will agree to relocate to Kansas to put themselves in the middle of the fight. In areas like Wichita, where there are already tight abortion restrictions and a lack of women’s health resources, abortion doctors often aren’t willing to wade into a hostile environment to provide reproductive care. Rising levels of anti-abortion harassment, as well as increasing numbers of restrictions placed on abortion doctors that aren’t required for other types of medical professionals, have contributed to a problematic abortion provider shortage across the country.

Nonetheless, Burkhart is committed to finding a way to open the South Wind Women’s Center sometime this spring. Women have already been calling the clinic to ask when they can schedule appointments, and Burkhart — who used to think she would “never want to step foot back in the state of Kansas again” after her colleague Dr. Tiller was killed — is ready to take a risk to ensure those women get the care they need.