BLUMENTHAL DELIVERS FLOOR SPEECH ON ANTI-ABORTION LEGISLATION
PASSED YESTERDAY BY HOUSE
Video of Blumenthal’s floor speech is here.
(Washington, DC) – Today, U.S. Senator
Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) delivered a floor speech on an anti-abortion
bill passed yesterday by the House of Representatives. The bill – H.R. 1797 –
would prohibit all abortions beyond 20 weeks with very limited exceptions.
I come to the floor today to discuss
H.R. 1797. A number of my colleagues, Senators Murray and Boxer, have been
here this morning to talk about the bill passed yesterday in the House of
Representatives that would prohibit all abortions beyond 20 weeks with very,
very limited exceptions. This topic is critically important to the women of
Connecticut and our country, and the bill is yet another example, lamentably
and regrettably, another example of legislation that feigns concern for
women's health when actually it would endanger the lives and well-being of
women across this great country.
The
bill would take decisions regarding health care away from women and their
doctors and would force the doctors to decide between incurring criminal
penalties and helping their patients. That choice is unacceptable
–professionally and morally. The decision to have an abortion is a serious
decision that a woman should make in consultation with her doctor. When those
decisions are made later in a pregnancy, they are most often the result of
serious health risks to the mother or the discovery that the fetus is not
viable.
Political
interference is abhorrent and unacceptable in these personal and private
decisions, and it violates the constitutional right of privacy. The other
scenario in which a woman may seek an abortion later in a pregnancy is due to
an inability to access such services earlier – whether due to financial
restrictions or lack of access to health care or other extenuating
circumstances. In fact, 58 percent of abortion patients say they would
have preferred to have an abortion earlier. Low-income women were more than
twice as likely than their wealthier counterparts to be delayed because of
financial limitation and difficulty in making arrangements. As politicians,
we should not be placing additional restrictions on women in these
circumstances.
The
House bill blatantly ignores constitutional protections that are vitally
necessary to protect the health of women as decided in Roe v. Wade and
Planned Parenthood v. Casey because these kinds of restrictions place
limitations that interfere with constitutional rights and have no place in
these personal and very private decisions. The limited exceptions in this
bill would require a woman to report a rape or incest to law enforcement or a
specific government agency when she is seeking much-needed health care
services. Those restrictions affect women when they have been the victims of
a crime or face serious health risks and will have no effect on reducing
abortions.
That's
their purported purpose, to reduce abortions, but that purpose will be in no
way served by these restrictions. Victims of incest or rape may be too young
or too fearful of retaliation to report to a law enforcement agency. Why
create a needless, lawless obstacle to vital health care? We should be
working to ensure that women have the ability to access safe and affordable
contraception so there are fewer unintended pregnancies in this country. And
yet supporters of this bill would also restrict access to contraception and
they're the ones who have tried to make it more difficult to get access to
the information and services necessary to prevent unintended pregnancies.
We
need to do more. Our nation needs to do better to ensure that women have
access to preventive and maternal health care so they can be prepared to face
the responsibility of pregnancy and parenthood. This bill would do very
little, if anything, to actually help women to protect their health care and
the health care of their families and so I urge my colleagues to reject any
consideration of this ill-intended, and I hope also ill-fated, measure that
endangers women's health across the country. I urge my colleagues to focus on
the real priorities that face this Congress – job creation and economic recovery,
for example – and stop this attack on women's health.
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