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Floor Speech

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Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, when I introduced the Women's Health Protection Act in 2013--yes, in 2013, almost 10 years ago--the idea that Roe v. Wade would be overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court was virtually unthinkable. We accepted 50 years of established precedent, long-accepted law in this country--as something that was virtually unimaginable.

Women relied on it. Our society took it as a core principle of our constitutional law, much as Brown v. Board of Education, Marbury v. Madison, Roe v. Wade, tenets and pillars of constitutional law in this country. And when we asked nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court, the three most recent of them--and I personally asked this question--is Roe v. Wade established law, they said to us that they would rely on stare decisis, which for everyday Americans is, basically, we will follow established precedent as articulated year after year by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The now well-reported Alito draft of an opinion overturning Roe v. Wade came like a thunderbolt, an earthquake, a seismic blow that constitutional scholars thought was unthinkable.

The draft itself is strident and brash. It is disrespectful in a way that Supreme Court opinions never are. It is unprecedented in its tone and approach, saying that Roe v. Wade was egregiously wrong, failing to accurately portray what it held and the reasons for its holding.

There is no question in my mind that the Court, in its final opinion, will smooth the edges of that draft. It will try to tone down the rhetoric. It will dress it up. But the result will be the same. No matter how the Court may try to dress it up, it will have the same impact on millions of Americans and their families because the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to issue the most radical ruling in recent history--perhaps in the entire history of the United States--the most extreme contraction of fundamental constitutional rights in the history of the United States.

Let's indulge ourselves for a moment in a belief in the American dream and the exceptionalism of America, which is to expand rights and liberties. The story of America is expanding freedoms and liberties for all of us, not reducing it, restricting it. But this Supreme Court is poised to eradicate a fundamental right that millions of Americans have relied on for half a century. The Court has signaled that it will inflict an enormous leap backwards, with incalculable costs and chaos for countless women and their families. If the Court indeed overturns Roe, 23 States have laws that would immediately go into effect to be used to restrict the legal status of abortion.

Today, 90 percent of American counties already lack a single abortion provider--not one in 90 percent of American counties--and 27 cities have become so-called abortion deserts because people who live there have to travel 100 miles or more to reach a provider. Without the protections of Roe, this situation will become even worse for millions of Americans. Women in Louisiana, just to take one example, will be 630 miles from the nearest abortion clinic. Women in Florida, Texas, Mississippi, Utah, and many other States would be in a similar position. Access to reproductive freedom will depend on a woman's ZIP Code, not on her personal choices or her needs.

Abortion bans without Roe will disproportionately impact low-income women in those 23 States poised to ban abortion.

Justice Alito--perhaps not surprisingly--fails to address the ways that the Court's ruling will disproportionately impact communities of color all around the United States. There is an issue here of racial justice because these restrictions disproportionately affect Black women and other racial minority communities. Today, fewer than 1 in 10 abortion providers are located in neighborhoods where the majority of residents are Black. That is a simple, straightforward fact of life. And the closure of clinics will make it only worse.

The simple fact is that Dobbs will turn back the clock. It will roll back protections relating to fundamental rights.

May I say that the same people who argue that mask requirements designed to protect public health infringe on their fundamental liberties are perfectly happy sending the government into a hospital room as a couple makes an incredibly difficult, personal life decision. The same people who see masks as an infringement on bodily autonomy are perfectly happy with the government telling a woman who comes to a hospital, possibly in mortal danger of internal bleeding from an ectopic pregnancy: You will have to die. No doctor can help you.

That is not bodily autonomy; that is not liberty.

After the Court's final decision in Dobbs, today's young women, the young women of 2022, will have fewer rights than their grandmothers. Young women today will have fewer rights than two generations ago. To someone who recalls the seminal decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973 and the promise of that moment, it is unacceptable.

I was a law clerk to the author of Roe v. Wade in the term after he wrote the opinion. Justice Blackmun and the Court decided by a 7-to-2 majority--7 to 2; Justice Blackmun was appointed by a Republican President--that this right is fundamental. Whether you criticize the decision--and there have been plenty of people who criticized that opinion--it has been established law, relied on, incorporated in precedent after precedent. And now, in the Women's Health Protection Act, we ask that it be incorporated in statute, that the Roe v. Wade standard be enshrined and embodied in a statute, just as Connecticut did in its State statute in 1990--a law that I championed when I was in our Connecticut State Senate.

In lieu of well-established Supreme Court precedent, Justice Alito relies on a 17th-century English jurist who advocated for marital rape and who tried women for witchcraft. This isn't just judicial activism; this is extremism. This is fringe history cloaked in a judge's robe.

And do you know what is conspicuously absent from Justice Alito's radical draft opinion? What is absent is women. Justice Alito gives absolutely no credence to the empirical evidence before the Court-- evidence offered by health experts and economists who demonstrate the ways in which women have relied upon abortion access to make decisions about their health, their lives, their careers, and their future. Instead, he gestures at the fact that women have the right to vote as evidence they don't need the right to control their lives and their own bodies. I am sorry, but the right to vote is where rights begin; it is not where they end.

And we know the truth, whether or not Justice Alito acknowledges it: The Court's world without Roe would not just impact one segment of society, one demographic, one geographic area; it will affect all of us. One in four American women will undergo an abortion in her lifetime--one in four.

To the men of America, all of you love someone, you know someone, you treasure someone who has had an abortion, who has needed an abortion. You can't sit this one out.

It is all of us, men as well as women. We all have a stake in this radical decision that will affect all of America and make us a lesser nation with fewer rights and liberties.

The Court's draft opinion in Dobbs is just the next step in a multidecade fight which the Court has waged on abortion access. It has already shown willingness to dramatically curtail the right of a pregnant person to decide whether and when to have a child. Just ask women in the State of Texas. They are living in a State without the protections of Roe v. Wade, with a dangerous anti-abortion law, SB 8, which contains a 6-week abortion ban. Six weeks is far before many women even know they are pregnant, as all of us in this Chamber know.

Texas's dangerous law deputizes private citizens to enforce the State's onerous abortion law. In Texas, a rapist can sue a doctor if they provide an abortion to a rape survivor. Someone who drove their sister to a healthcare clinic where she has an abortion could be sued, again, by anyone in the United States--anybody--with a $10,000 government prize money waiting for that bounty hunter. This is extremism--extremism--in a judge's robes.

I am proud to say that the State of Connecticut today has a law-- literally, the Governor signed this law today--making sure that people are protected in Connecticut against those kinds of bounty hunters. My hope is that other States will follow Connecticut in providing that kind of basic protection.

It has never been more urgent for the Congress at the Federal level to pass the Women's Health Protection Act. The Women's Health Protection Act would protect rights established by 50 years of Court precedent, protecting the right to an abortion prior to fetal viability. It would put an end to laws like the 15-week ban on abortion that is now before the Court in the Dobbs case.

Importantly, as well, the Women's Health Protection Act would put an end to medically unnecessary restrictions posing as health restrictions that single out abortion care with one goal in mind: to block and impede access to safe, needed healthcare--laws like the so-called TRAP law, or targeted regulation of abortion providers; such as minimum measurements for room size or hallway width that have no rationale other than the transparent desire to curtail access; laws that require providers to offer medically inaccurate information when providing abortion care, like in Alaska, Kansas, Mississippi, Texas, and West Virginia, where healthcare professionals are forced to tell women--give them medically inaccurate information about links between abortion and breast cancer. It would put an end to a reality where our doctors are required by law to lie and mislead about the risks of a safe medical procedure, and it would restore an evidence-based approach to informed consent.

In short, it would essentially guarantee the right that exists now, and it will exist until the Supreme Court rules that you can decide whether and when to have children.

Let us be very clear about what the Women's Health Protection Act does and what it doesn't do. It does not force any unwilling medical provider to perform abortions if they wish not to do so. It says that doctors, nurses, and hospitals may provide abortion care, not that they must do so.

This measure is an evidence-based, scientific approach to the protection of women's healthcare, and it restores a future where all of us are free to make personal decisions that shape our lives, our futures, and our families with dignity and respect, without political interference in a decision made between a patient and a doctor, much as all healthcare decisions should be.

The implications of the Court's draft decision in Dobbs and what we are expecting from the Court in coming weeks simply can't be overstated or exaggerated, but it would be foolish to believe that the Court's conservative supermajority will stop even at Roe.

Justice Alito's draft opinion, even if it is never issued by the Court, is the road map where this Court will go in the future. It is permeated with support for the notion that ``fetal personhood,'' a dangerous theory furthered by States like Louisiana that seek to make abortion a crime of homicide from the moment of fertilization, if adopted, the Court's novel, invented theory of personhood could and may well lead to nationwide prohibitions on abortion. And most recently, just over the weekend, the minority leader of the Senate has made clear that in a post-Roe world, a Federal ban on abortion is on the table; so did State officials who spoke over the weekend.

It is more than a cloud on the horizon; it is an impending, real, imminent storm upon us. A ban nationwide on abortion, that would override even the States like Connecticut that are seeking to legislate protections for women that will make us a safe harbor and haven.

The draft opinion also invites challenges to a host of fundamental rights that were also not widely recognized in 1868, the moment in which Justice Alito freezes us in time. He literally freezes constitutional rights regarding reproductive liberties in that long- gone moment.

The draft opinion cast invites challenges to a host of fundamental rights, including contraception, Griswold v. Connecticut; interracial marriage, Loving v. Virginia; same sex marriage, Obergefell v. Hodges; and sexual intimacy between consenting adults, Lawrence v. Texas.

You don't need to be a constitutional scholar to understand the clear and present danger to American democracy in this draft opinion.

This Court may dress it up, but the results and the reasoning will be the same: radical extreme fringe--and directly contrary to what three nominees testified in their confirmation hearing. Oh, we respect established precedent, of course, stare decisis, fundamental principle.

The legitimacy and credibility of this Court is deeply in peril at this moment, and our democracy really depends on the credibility and respect that the American people accord the Supreme Court of the United States. It has no armies or police force. It has no power of the purse. Its authority depends directly on trust and credibility, the sense of legitimacy that the American people accord it.

In the United States, public support for legal access to abortion is at the highest it has been in two decades, a cruel irony for this Court. And today the overwhelming majority of voters believe that everyone should have access to the full range of reproductive healthcare, including annual screening, birth control, pregnancy tests, and abortion. It is a matter of health.

And at the same time, millions of Americans across this country are absolutely terrified. They are angry and horrified about what the Supreme Court is poised to do because they depend on accessible women's healthcare. If the Supreme Court overturns Roe and we have taken no legislative action, we will find ourselves in a nation where young women of this country, not only have fewer rights than their grandmothers, they have fewer rights than any of them thought possible.

We have to resolve that we are not backing down, we are not going away, we are not going back in time. It has never been more urgent to elect people, Members of this body, who will protect fundamental rights. And I guarantee that in elections to come, reproductive rights will be on the ballot. The women and men of America will mobilize. They will be galvanized on this issue because the Women's Health Protection Act will be on the ballot, and we will have more votes in this body so that Members will be held accountable for what they do or fail to do. And, ultimately, the American people and the world are watching.

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