(6) Many State and local governments are imposing restrictions on the provision of abortion that are neither evidence-based nor generally applicable to the medical profession or to medically comparable procedures. Though described by their proponents as health and safety regulations, many of these abortion-specific restrictions do not confer any health benefit. Also, these restrictions interfere with women’s personal and private medical decisions, make access to abortion more difficult and costly, and even make it impossible for some women to obtain those services. (7) These restrictions harm women’s health by reducing access not only to abortion services but also to the other essential health care services offered by the providers targeted by the restrictions, including contraceptive services, which reduce unintended pregnancies and thus abortions, and screenings for cervical cancer and sexually transmitted infections. These harms fall especially heavily on low-income women, women of color, immigrants, and women living in rural and other medically underserved areas. (8) The cumulative effect of these numerous restrictions has been to make a woman’s ability to exercise her constitutional rights dependent on the State in which she lives. Federal legislation putting a stop to harmful restrictions throughout the United States is necessary to ensure that women in all States have meaningful access to safe abortion services, a constitutional right repeatedly affirmed by the United States Supreme Court, most recently in 2016. (9) Congress has the authority to protect women’s ability to access abortion services pursuant to its powers under the Commerce Clause and its powers under section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution to enforce the provisions of section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment. (b) Purpose It is the purpose of this Act to protect women’s health by ensuring that abortion services will continue to be available and that abortion providers are not singled out for medically unnecessary restrictions