Women's Healthcare

Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, we are running a little bit behind, so I would ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 10 minutes, which reflects the amount of time we are running behind.

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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, this week, the Senate is having yet another debate on legislation to restrict healthcare for women, and I am going to take just a few minutes to talk about what this debate is really all about.

The old Republican slogan was ``a chicken in every pot.'' The new Republican slogan is ``a Republican in every examining room.''

The Senate has done remarkably little legislating while under the recent control of the other party, but somehow, some way, there always seems to be time to have an attack on women's healthcare. It has come up again and again, and it is always the same basic proposition on offer: Republican politicians trying to somehow squeeze themselves in between women and their physicians.

My view is that the government ought to make sure that women can get healthcare from the doctors they trust and that politicians ought to stay out of things. Roe v. Wade says that is supposed to be the law of the land when it comes to access to abortion. More than four decades of settled law says that these are choices to be made by women and their doctors, and the ideological agendas of politicians ought to have nothing to do with it. The legislation up for debate this week, based on yet another far-right cause, says the opposite. Amongst other problems, one of the proposals on offer this week would actually criminalize the practice of intensely personal healthcare. It would essentially say to doctors: Just throw out your training. Throw it away. Discard your medical judgment, and forget what is in the patient's best interest.

Rightwing politicians are going to call the shots in the exam room. Doctors who provide necessary medical treatment and care that can be lifesaving could be thrown in jail if they run afoul of these new ideological government standards.

Now, this isn't a debate just here in the Senate. There have been hundreds of bills brought forward in States across the country restricting women's healthcare, including safe and legal abortion. Among the people hit hardest by these proposals are the millions of women in this country who are every single day walking an economic tightrope. If they can't see the doctor they trust and if their local Planned Parenthood clinic is forced to shutter its doors because of these harsh new rules, they may not have anywhere else to turn to for vital healthcare. It is another way in which the far right and the Republican agenda supporting it goes back to the days when healthcare was really just for the healthy and the wealthy.

Bottom line: This debate is fundamentally about whether the government gets to control women's bodies. It is a dangerous, in my view, unconstitutional proposition that just throws in the garbage can decades of settled law. This Republican majority has proved that we can always find time here in the Senate to go after women's healthcare with ideological bills, regardless of what other healthcare challenges Americans are facing at home.

I guarantee that across this country right now there are persons lined up at pharmacy counters with every last penny they have who know they are about to get mugged when it comes to paying for the cost of prescription medicine. Millions of Americans struggle to pay for their medications, but the majority leader of this body has blocked our best efforts to give them a hand. Instead, the Senate is debating yet another ideological attack on women's healthcare that really has no chance of becoming law.

The likelihood is these attacks, in my view, based on what we know, are going to keep coming. It will only get more serious in the months ahead. Four more years of Donald Trump would mean the end of Roe v. Wade. It would guarantee more healthcare discrimination against women, and it would mean a whole lot more government control over women's bodies. Again and again, we would see the government in the exam room. I urge my colleagues to reject these proposals when they come up.

Cloture Motion

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