The Kansas Senate Judiciary Committee recommended a bill yesterday that would effectively allow doctors to lie or withhold information about debilitating genetic conditions or birth defects in order to influence women’s decisions about their pregnancies.

Kansas SB 142 provides blanket protection from “wrongful birth” lawsuits to doctors, with section 1(a) reading:

“No civil action may be commenced in any court for a claim of wrongful life or wrongful birth, and no damages may be recovered in any civil action for any physical condition of a minor that existed at the time of such minor’s birth if the damages sought arise out of a claim that a person’s action or omission contributed to such minor’s mother not obtaining an abortion.”

The Arizona State Senate passed a similar law in 2012, but that proposal contained a provision absent from the Kansas bill allowing wrongful birth suits in the event of “an intentional or grossly negligent act or omission.”

The proposal was included as a provision in an omnibus anti-abortion bill last year, but was so controversial that it ending up being submitted as a standalone bill in this cycle, according to Kansas NOW lobbyist Elise Higgins. Despite Kansas’s dismal reproductive rights record, Kansas legislators have already introduced over 90 pages of anti-choice legislation in 2013.

In a letter sent to the White House on Tuesday, 22 Republican senators are demanding that President Obama propose Medicare cuts before the chamber considers Treasury Secretary nominee Jack Lew.

The letter is part of an ongoing GOP smear campaign against Lew alleging that, during his tenure as director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Lew and the Obama Administration failed to comply with a law requiring the White House to submit Medicare cost-cutting proposals “whenever the program’s trustees express concerns about its solvency in their annual report.” The senators suggest that Lew should have known about that legal requirement and spurred the Administration to take action by formally proposing Medicare cuts:

“We find it stunning and noteworthy that so far Mr. Lew has not provided adequate responses to congressional inquiries on the matter,” the senators wrote to Obama Tuesday.

“Congress needs a clearer understanding about his role in the violation of this law, including exactly when Mr. Lew first became aware of this legal requirement and what counsel, if any, he provided the administration on whether it should comply with this law.”

But there are some glaring falsehoods in the senators’ claims and their subsequent demand for an Administration plan to curb Medicare cost growth.

First, calling for Medicare cuts to ensure the program’s long-term solvency is based on the assumption that inflation in medical services — and, consequently, spending on health care entitlements like Medicare — will continue to balloon at staggering rates indefinitely. But the key to reducing national health expenditures is to reduce the actual price of consuming care — so if forces in the health care market facilitate cost reductions in medical technology and services, then entitlement spending will drop accordingly. Recent evidence shows that that is exactly what is happening, as the recent slowdown in health care cost growth has reduced Medicare’s future projected spending by over half a trillion dollars, all without a single policy change. Furthermore, a just-released GAO report found that if Obamacare and its cost-containment mechanisms are fully implemented, then future spending on Medicare would decrease “from 6.2 percent of GDP in 2035 in the simulations run before [Obamacare] was enacted to 4.7 percent in the simulations run immediately after enactment.”

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Ohio Gov. John Kasich is one of eight Republican governors who have so far said their state will participate in Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. But as the Huffington Post points out, Kasich stands apart in one respect: Of those Republican governors, he is so far the only one to explicitly tie his decision to the values of his religious faith.

While he remains opposed to Obamacare as a whole, the Ohio governor indicated his support for the Medicaid expansion in his annual State of the State remarks last week, pointing to the public health insurance program’s potential to help care for the most vulnerable residents in his state:

The Bible runs [Kasich's] life “not just on Sunday, but just about every day,” he said in his annual State of the State address Tuesday.

“And I’ve got to tell you, I can’t look at the disabled, I can’t look at the poor, I can’t look at the mentally ill, I can’t look at the addicted and think we ought to ignore them,” he told the audience of about 1,700 lawmakers, state officials and other guests. […]

“Put it in your family,” Kasich said. “Put somebody that is in your family who becomes the wayward child. And they come home one day, they can’t get a job. Put it on your doorstep, and you’ll understand how hard it is.”

Kasich was raised Catholic and worships regularly in an Anglican church. For more than 20 years, he has met every other Monday with a small group of men to study the Bible. And he has written a book about how the experience has helped him in his search for answers.

That’s a theme in keeping with a broader push that’s been made in the expansion’s favor. Earlier this year, religious and community leaders in Ohio held a rally at Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland, calling on their state to participate in the Medicaid expansion. And back in September, over 100 national, state, and local faith leaders released a statement employing Republican governors as a whole to accept the expansion. Sister Simone Campbell, the executive director of the Catholic social justice group NETWORK, said in conjunction with the release that, “My strong support of Medicaid expansion comes out of my pro-life stance because it is the right and moral thing to do.”

Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) wasn’t as explicitly religious as Kasich when he announced his own support for Medicaid expansion, but he did come close. As the Huffington Post noted, Scott said his mother, who passed away last year, taught him that “America’s greatness is largely because of how we value the weakest among us.”

Because the federal government will fund the first several years of the Medicaid expansion, reports have estimated that Ohio will actually enjoy $1.43 billion in net fiscal savings to its state budget over the next eight years if it participates. And failing to expand Medicaid would actually cost the state about $8 billion in additional health care costs, largely because a higher uninsured population would mean greater spending on uncompensated care.

The Indiana senate advanced a measure on Tuesday to require all women to undergo an unnecessary, and potentially invasive, ultrasound procedure before taking the RU-486 abortion pill.

The original version of the bill actually mandated two tranvaginal ultrasounds — before and after women took the pill. Yesterday, before the Senate vote, GOP lawmakers agreed to remove the second ultrasound requirement to ensure the legislation’s passage. Their efforts were successful. Despite bipartisan opposition as four Republican state senators broke from the rest of their party to oppose SB 371, the measure will now advance to the GOP-controlled House:

The bill passed on a 33-16 vote despite a chorus of complaints from opponents who said it’s a step too far into doctors’’offices without improving their patients’ health.

“This bill is not about patient safety. It’s about patient harassment,” said Sen. Vaneta Becker of Evansville, who was one of only four of the Senate’s 37 Republicans to join the 12 Democrats who opposed the bill.

Now, Senate Bill 371 heads to the House, where Republican Speaker Brian Bosma of Indianapolis said he expects it to win passage as well — perhaps after some changes.

And this legislation has another anti-choice provision tucked into it, too. SB 371 also seeks to over-regulate abortion providers — requiring health clinics that prescribe the abortion pill to adhere to all of the same standards as surgical clinics, even though medication abortions are not surgical procedures — which threatens to shut down a Planned Parenthood clinic in the state.

“This bill is directly targeted to Planned Parenthood in Lafayette,” state Sen. Becker (R) pointed out in the debate on the floor. “When you do this, you’re not doing anything that will improve the health and safety of low-income women in the state of Indiana. All you’re doing is forcing them to go other ways — in particular, to the Internet — to get this same particular drug that you’re talking about regulating.”

Spurred by thousands of American women who were being injured due to faulty IUDs, President Gerald Ford signed the Medical Device Amendments of 1976 into law, granting the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) greater regulatory oversight regarding the safety and effectiveness of medical devices intended for widespread distribution. It was a historic consumer protection law intended to preserve public health and safety — but the legislation was also riddled with regulatory loopholes, particularly with respect to products that were already out in the market. Now, almost forty years later, Americans are still feeling the impact of the incomplete legislation as they encounter a multitude of common medical devices, including lethal products, that haven’t undergone adequate testing.

As The Atlantic reports, the medical device regulation bill contained lax provisions for classifying the safety of devices that are similar to products already available on the market, meaning that many contemporary devices do not have to undergo thorough testing simply because they were considered safe enough back in 1976:

The legislation created varying safety standards for devices that the FDA would deem as low, medium, and high risk. Medium-risk products, like surgical stitches, could be sold without first being tested on people under most circumstances, provided the device was “substantially equivalent” to one already on the market. For high-risk devices, like artificial hearts, companies were generally required to test their products in people and demonstrate to FDA that the products were safe and effective.

The law applied immediately to new types of devices and directed the FDA to retroactively classify existing ones, with one caveat: Products that were already on the market when the law passed would effectively be regulated as medium-risk until FDA officially classified them. The unfortunate result has been that some high-risk devices have won approval without being tested in people.

This interim solution was not supposed to last 37 years. Yet nearly four decades since Congress passed the Medical Device Amendments, the FDA still has not classified some of the temporarily “grandfathered” devices. As a result, potentially high-risk devices are continuing to reach the market without ever being tested in people.

The contemporary high-risk products that still have not undergone human testing due to the loophole include aortic balloons for heart surgeries and automated external defibrillators (AEDs). After thousands of faulty hip replacements caused a public health outcry over the last several years, Congress finally took action in 2012 to give the FDA more authority to re-classify the so-called “grandfathered” products. But while the FDA has taken action to re-label hip replacements, “19 grandfathered device types remain unclassified.”

Unfortunately, congressional procrastination on public health and safety measures is depressingly standard, as the FDA’s regulatory powers consistently lag behind until a crisis erupts to force lawmakers to make a change. Last year’s deadly deadly meningitis outbreak stemming from lax standards at a Massachusetts-area compounding pharmacy illustrates the trend perfectly. Lawmakers eventually responded to that crisis by introducing legislation to give the FDA more power to oversee the largely unregulated compounding pharmacy industry — but only after the outbreak resulted in the deaths of over 30 Americans, and the FDA director Margaret Hamburg begged a Senate health committee to give the agency more oversight.

Anti-choice Republicans are chipping away at reproductive rights from all angles, particularly on the state level. Often, lawmakers advance several different abortion restrictions simultaneously — as is currently the case in Arkansas and North Dakota — and it can be difficult to unwrap the rhetoric to figure out exactly what all of those proposed measures would mean for the women in their state. Underneath all the euphemisms intended to disguise Republican affronts to women’s health, here’s what anti-abortion lawmakers really mean:

1. Fetal pain laws

Nebraska was the first state to pass a 20-week ban on abortion, relying on the medically disputed assumption that fetuses can feel pain after that point. Since then, seven other states have followed suit and passed similar types of restrictions — which came to be known as “fetal pain” laws. But don’t be fooled. The idea that fetuses can feel pain at 20 weeks of pregnancy is junk science, even though the anti-abortion community continues to tout it as fact. In reality, fetal pain bans represent a dangerous step toward rolling back women’s constitutional right to an abortion. Under Roe v. Wade, legal abortion is guaranteed until the point of viability, which generally occurs around 24 weeks of pregnancy — but 20-week bans move the goalposts, seeking to narrow the window when women may legally terminate a pregnancy. Two fetal pain laws are currently being blocked in court for overstepping Roe, but anti-abortion lawmakers keep pushing them anyway.

2. Heartbeat bans

Heartbeat bans go even further than fetal pain measures do, seeking to outlaw abortions as soon as a a fetal heartbeat can be detected — which can occur as early as six weeks, before many women even realize they’re pregnant. Fetal heartbeat bills are clearly unconstitutional, since they would narrow women’s window to access legal reproductive services by about 17 weeks. Nonetheless, heartbeat measures popped in states across the country at the beginning of this legislative session. And it’s important to remember that this type of legislation would also necessitate an invasive, unnecessary transvaginal probe for women seeking abortions. Transvaginal ultrasounds are the only way for doctors to clearly detect a fetal heartbeat so early in a pregnancy.

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In constructing the sequester — a series of automatic, across-the-board spending cuts that will go into effect unless Democrats and Republicans can come to an agreement on the federal budget — lawmakers intended to design cuts that would be equally painful for Democrats and Republicans, by mandating cuts to both social programs and defense spending.

But the reality of the sequester cuts, which will begin taking effect this Friday unless Congress acts, is that they will actually have devastating effects on all Americans. Sequestration would have a disproportionate effect on some of the nation’s most vulnerable populations, particularly women and children, while still retaining wasteful military spending on some outdated projects. Here’s how the numbers stack up:

Melissa Boteach is the Director of the Half in Ten Campaign at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.