Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act - Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Madam President, I want to second the very powerful remarks made by my colleague from Indiana. In Connecticut, what I hear again and again is the need for this body to address jobs and the economy. They are talking about putting people back to work and moving our economy forward. That is what I have sought to do from day one in the U.S. Senate and what I will continue to fight to do. That is what we should be doing through reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank, creating more jobs in an infrastructure program worthy of the name, and repairing and reinvigorating our roads, bridges, ports, airports, and our railroads which need to be made more safe and reliable. That is what we should be doing in programs for veterans--particularly in veterans health care--putting our veterans to work, programs that provide for skill training and job opportunities for them.

There are so many momentous issues facing our Nation today, and that is the challenge we should be facing in the U.S. Senate. Yet tomorrow we will be voting on a bill that is divisive, dangerous, and doomed to failure. Even today, we are spending valuable time debating it.

The bill before us is both unconscionable and unconstitutional. It is a waste of time because tomorrow it will be defeated, in effect. We are engaged in a political charade here. The timing may not be accidental, but there is no good time for a blatantly and plainly unconstitutional proposal. Sadly, it is only the latest in a long line of unconstitutional proposals since the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade which enshrined a woman's constitutionally protected right to make her own reproductive decisions. There have been incessant and constant attempts by politicians to substitute their own judgment for hers, for her doctor's, her family's, and for her religious advisers. These decisions should be a woman's to make.

The onslaught on women's health care, unfortunately, has been a fact of life in this Nation. The bill before us now will ban abortion care after 20 weeks of pregnancy except for so-called exceptions. The inadequacy of those exceptions alone doom this bill to unconstitutional status. The legislation represents an unconstitutional interference as a matter of policy and law with the woman's right to choose the care that is best for her and the failure to recognize the many complex factors that may be involved in that decision, medical complications that often lead to a woman's decision to seek a late-term abortion. The bill would place in her way a host of unnecessary, unwise, and burdensome requirements.

In effect, this bill would force women--including all who have been through the traumatic experience of rape or incest--to meet a combination of a myriad of reporting and recordkeeping requirements. In many cases, the bill would require survivors of heinous crimes to make multiple appointments with multiple providers before having the right to reproductive care and force her to relive her traumatic experiences before having the benefit of those services. It would place numerous nonmedical requirements on doctors, such as forcing them to determine whether survivors of rape or incest have reported their experience to appropriate law enforcement entities, essentially forcing doctors to choose between criminal penalties and doing what is best for patients' health, which is why the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists oppose this measure. None of these requirements placed on women or their doctors are rooted in science, health, or safety. None of these requirements are consistent with the constitutionally protected right to access reproductive care and abortion.

Simply put, women's health care decisions should be left to women, their families, themselves, their doctors, and themselves. That is the essence of the constitutionally protected right of privacy that underlies all of these rights. It is the right to be left alone from men and women in this Chamber who would intrude and invade that right.

This measure also implicitly encourages an ongoing and indeed intensifying assault on women's health care among the States. Many other unconstitutional and unconscionable attacks on women's health care are increasing at the State level and making it harder for women to access reproductive health care in general. There is an increasing drumbeat of regulations and restrictions that attack women's health care and make it harder to access as State governments pass more regulations. Those regulations number now 230 in the past 5 years. They are nothing more than embarrassing attempts to deny women's health care in the guise of invasive and unnecessary medical tests, arbitrary building regulations, and financially unsustainable procedures. That is why Senator Baldwin and I have proposed the Women's Health Protection Act, joined by 31 of our colleagues, to make sure that those State laws are stopped before they cause the costs, fear, and uncertainty, as they are bound to do and as they have done in many States around the country. These State laws are beyond wrong. They are dangerous to women's health care.

My hope is that we will be proactive in protecting a woman's right to care, not encourage the worst of State practices that are embodied in these restrictive State laws.

Finally, I am dismayed that the House of Representatives actually has taken a step toward gutting a measure designed to help veterans. The Border Jobs for Veterans Act of 2015--a bipartisan measure that I cosponsored with my colleague Senator Flake designed to do just what the title says: to utilize the skills and expertise of our veterans to help fill vacancies at our borders, to use veterans to stop illegal immigration--that bill has been gutted and unfortunately has been made a vehicle to deny health care to women. The provisions of this transformed legislation are a disservice to our veterans. I thought veterans legislation would be out of bounds for this fight. Sadly, apparently not.

I urge my colleagues to find more productive ways to use our time, to address the needs, to expand job opportunities, to move our economy forward, and to drive economic growth. A bipartisan goal we should all share is to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank and to make sure we serve the best instincts of this Nation and preserve our Constitution from these unwarranted attacks.

I yield the floor.

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