The Trump Administration’s war on women continues in strong force this week. President Donald Trump is not just content with naming Neil Gorsuch — who, according to a March 20 NPR article, once told law students that employers should be allowed to ask prospective female employees if they are planning on having children — to the U.S. Supreme Court. Our current administration has signed off on two extremist anti-woman health measures this week.

On Oct. 3, the House of Representatives passed the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, an act endorsed by the White House that would ban abortion after 20 weeks, with the only exceptions being rape, incest and the danger to the life of the mother. According to the Clerk of the House of Representatives, the vote passed 237 to 189, largely on party lines. This proposed law is abhorrent for a number of reasons, not least because it violates constitutional jurisprudence. The 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, which ruled that abortion is a constitutional right and explicitly rejects the concept that a fetus, in its early stages, is a person with a right to life, did not set a hard and fast week limit on abortion. Rather, it says states can only limit second-trimester abortions in the interest of maternal health and can only consider a fetus’s potential life in the third trimester. In the 1992 decision of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the Supreme Court affirmed that the marker for fetal viability was 24 weeks or near the end of the second trimester. Based on past rulings, banning abortion before 24 weeks for any reason other than maternal health concerns — such as if the abortion procedure would endanger the mother — therefore violates decades of Supreme Court rulings.

But it is not just the blatant unconstitutionality of this bill that is upsetting. The title itself is deeply misleading. There is no scientific evidence that a fetus is capable of feeling pain at 20 weeks. According to a 2005 study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association, fetuses do not even develop the neural networks to feel pain until 23 to 30 weeks of pregnancy, and all evidence shows that fetuses are incapable of perceiving pain until 29 to 30 weeks of pregnancy. This bill’s claims have no basis in accepted scientific fact.

But some might argue that 20 weeks is very late to have an abortion. If one does not want to be pregnant, why not have the abortion in the first trimester before it becomes a two-day procedure?

According to the Guttmacher Institute, around 90 percent of all abortions in the United States occur in the first trimester. Just over one percent of abortions occur after 21 weeks. Often, it is because severe fetal abnormalities cannot even be diagnosed until past 20 weeks of pregnancy; in a May 2016 Jezebel interview with a woman who had an abortion at 32 weeks, she explained that her ultrasounds were normal until 16 weeks, and only at 31 weeks did the doctor determine that her son would not be able to survive outside of the womb. Under this proposed law, however, this woman would not be able to get her abortion. Even though her son would have an excruciatingly painful, brief life, her own life was not at risk, and therefore, she would have to carry her pregnancy to term.

However, this is not the only anti-woman measure the Trump Administration has backed this week. According to an Oct. 6 article in the Washington Post, the administration announced that it was rolling back a provision in the Affordable Care Act that required insurance companies to cover all FDA-approved types of birth control. This mandate was controversial, as a number of religious institutions claimed that the requirement would violate their beliefs regarding premarital sex. In response to the controversy, the Obama administration created a waiver system for religious employers — the waiver would still cover birth control, but the government, not the employer, would pay for it. This waiver was expanded to cover certain non-religious companies in the 2012 Hobby Lobby v. Burwell decision, according to a Oct. 7 Vox article. However, the Hobby Lobby decision still did require that the government cover birth control for these employers. However, according to a Oct. 6 New York Times article, the new rules set forth by the Trump Administration would further expand the exemption to any employer who has moral issue with birth control and would not require the government to step in and cover the cost of contraception.

I have written on this topic before. In a March 7 article, I pointed out that two-thirds of American women of childbearing age currently use a regular birth control method that requires a prescription or procedure, and that the birth control mandate saved these women over a billion dollars since 2013. According to a Oct. 6 ThinkProgress article, prior to the mandate, around 20 percent of women with insurance through their employer still had to pay out of pocket for their birth control; after the mandate took effect in 2013, that went down to less than five percent. Without insurance coverage, the cost of birth control can be staggering. At Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts, where I work, the cost of getting a prescription and 3-month supply of birth control pills out of pocket is around $150, and the cost of a long-acting reversible contraceptive like an IUD or implant can be over $800.

To make the whole thing even more laughable, the Trump Administration’s guidance claims that requiring insurance companies to cover birth control might actually increase unplanned pregnancies and sexual activities among young people. Teen pregnancy rates have actually halved since 2007, according to a Sept. 27 Vox article, even though a recent study in the Journal of Adolescent Health found teens are only slightly less likely to be sexually active. The rate of consistent contraceptive use among teens has increased by ten points, and in 2012, nearly 90 percent of sexually active teens reported using at least one form of birth control during their last sexual encounter, according to the same Vox article. Access to birth control does not encourage teens to have sex, but it does allow them to have safer sex and reduce their risks for pregnancy.

As Gail Collins pointed out in her Oct. 6 opinion piece for the New York Times, it is impossible to square the circle of limiting abortion access while slashing access to affordable and effective birth control. It is one thing to oppose abortion on moral grounds or to personally not want to use birth control, but it is another thing to force those beliefs on all American women. Access to reproductive health care decisions, including birth control and abortion, are key to making sure women have the right and the ability to live their lives as they see fit. It is needed to thrive in school and in the workplace and to maybe, some day, achieve meaningful equality to Donald Trump and his gray-faced cronies who see us as little more than pussies to be grabbed or walking wombs.