Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I come to the floor to join my colleagues who have been speaking this morning about the access to healthcare for women in America. Today, as women take action across the Nation to bring focus to this issue, I would like to join my colleagues, particularly the senior Senator from Washington, and I thank her for her leadership on this important issue. She knows better than most how many times the Senate and the Congress in the last decade have fought over access to healthcare for women. It seems like every budget debate, every fiscal cliff, every budget negotiation, and every issue had to have a debate about whether we were going to defund Planned Parenthood. So it is not a surprise that we are out here today as States across the Nation try to roll back access to healthcare. I guarantee you, I believe and my State believes that access to healthcare should be and is protected under the Constitution as a right to privacy. We believe that and codified Roe v. Wade into statute by a vote of the people in the 1990s. So any time anybody is going to take on access to healthcare for women and erode what is a basic right in our State and, I believe, a basic right protected in our Constitution, we are going to raise our voices. You are going to hear from us. So it is amazing to me that every budget battle and every debate here in the Senate comes down to rolling back access to women's healthcare.

Now we see Supreme Court Justices who may or may not uphold those basic rights as were established in Connecticut v. Griswold, as did a Supreme Court Justice, who just happened to hail from the State of Washington, who understood that the privacy rights protected in the Constitution are in the penumbra of rights. So, yes, I believe that our Supreme Court Justices should also continue that well-established practice of observing those privacy rights. So it is hard to say what all of these State actions will lead to, whether they will make it to the Supreme Court and what this Supreme Court will have to say about it. But I can tell you that we here in the Senate--women who understand the access to healthcare--are so emphatic that we not erode these rights.

I had the very unfortunate situation of having to speak at a funeral this weekend for a 28-year-old former staff member who died of cancer. I know how much fight she had in her, but it was afterward where one of her relatives said to me: Senator, you cannot leave this unaddressed.

Young women at college campuses are not getting the breast exams to do early detection that they should. They should be out there. We should do more to evangelize that young women need to pay attention to their healthcare. Yet we are here across the Nation having this debate, and I guarantee you that the access to healthcare to do those early detections in a lot of communities comes with the access that organizations like Planned Parenthood and others deliver. So while they are not what is immediately under attack by these States, I guarantee you that it is all a part of a larger debate that needs to stop.

Healthcare should be the right of women to be discussed with their doctors and continue to be protected under our Constitution.

I thank the President.

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