Executive Calendar
Floor Speech
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Ms. HIRONO. Madam President, I thank Senator Murray for organizing all of us to come to the floor in honor of Mother's Day. I will take time to talk about the ongoing attacks on women's health in this country.
I feel a sense of urgency about the increasingly hostile, escalating, and unrelenting attacks on women's health by Donald Trump and Republicans. From continuous efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, to the taking away of title X funds, to trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act--all programs that support healthcare for millions of women in this country--I have to ask, why? What is the motivation to take away healthcare services for millions of women in this country? It is not clear why they are doing this. What is clear is the harm they are causing women.
Repealing the Affordable Care Act would mean that insurance plans would no longer be required to cover maternity care and birth control. Insurance companies would be able to discriminate against people with preexisting conditions. Astoundingly, for women, this would include pregnancy.
Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are proposing trillion- dollar cuts to Medicaid. If implemented, this could endanger tens of millions of women in this country who rely on Medicaid for coverage during pregnancies and births. Do they even care that these cuts to Medicaid are particularly cruel in the face of an infant and maternal mortality crisis in our country, particularly for Black women?
By establishing a gag rule, Donald Trump is forcing healthcare providers to choose between providing full and accurate information on all available healthcare options for women, including for abortion, and hundreds of millions of dollars in Federal title X funding. States like Hawaii are refusing to succumb to this unjustified coercion by refusing title X funds and are replacing them with hard-earned State funds so that providers in our State, for example, can give the necessary healthcare to women.
By trying to pass onerous, new abortion restrictions in States across the country, conservative forces are working hard to undermine a woman's constitutional right to have an abortion. One institution that can stand up to this assault on women's rights and women's health is our Federal judiciary. Last month, for example, a Federal judge in Washington State blocked the implementation of the Trump administration's title X gag rule. In March, a Federal judge in Kentucky prevented a new law from going into effect that would have restricted abortion after 6 weeks of pregnancy. These two recent examples demonstrate the importance of our courts in upholding the Constitution and the law and in constraining radical rightwing assaults on women's health and rights.
To counter what independent judges are doing, Donald Trump, Leader McConnell, and Senate Republicans are packing our courts with ideologically driven conservative judges who will be on their ideological page. Over the past 2\1/2\ years, they have confirmed more than 100 new Federal judges, an overwhelming majority of whom was selected by two ultraconservative organizations--the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation.
Their efforts to pack the courts continue this week in an upcoming vote on a nominee for the Second Circuit in New York, Michael Park, who fought to restrict access to reproductive healthcare for women. In one recent example, Mr. Park defended Kansas's attempt to defund Planned Parenthood by terminating its Medicaid contracts. This would have ended the vital services Planned Parenthood provides to low-income patients, services such as cancer screenings and access to contraception. Fortunately, the judges who heard that case rejected Mr. Park's arguments. Yet, now, with his confirmation to the Second Circuit all but assured, Mr. Park is set to become the judge in these types of cases. It is no wonder that both of his home State Senators oppose his nomination.
In their not being satisfied with packing our courts with judges who have ideologically rightwing agendas, Donald Trump and Republican leaders are resorting to incendiary, reprehensible, and false rhetoric to inflame their base. We have seen this most recently in the debate around the so-called Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act and the vilification of women who seek abortions later in pregnancy. Infanticide is already a crime, but you would never know it if you listened to Republican politicians and their mouthpieces on FOX News and the conservative media.
In a FOX News op-ed, my colleague from Nebraska, for example, accused the Democrats of ``blurring the line between abortion and outright infanticide.'' During the debate on the bill, ultraconservative FOX News host Laura Ingraham compared Planned Parenthood--the Nation's largest maternal health provider that has saved thousands of lives--to Adolf Hitler. She said: ``Hitler, just like Planned Parenthood, practiced and defended mass extermination.''
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Madam President, it is outrageous and offensive that Donald Trump and his allies in Congress would seek to turn women like Kate into scapegoats for their political agendas.
I have been an advocate of abortion rights for decades, and I fear that one day soon, women in this country will wake up and realize they no longer have control over their own bodies. What could be more intrusive than the government's telling women what they can do with their own bodies?
In the face of these ongoing attacks on women's health and women's rights, we will continue to raise our voices. We will continue to fight back.
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