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Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, this is not the first time we have considered this measure on the floor nor the first time I have spoken about it.

I want to thank Senator Murray for leading this conversation on a very serious topic.

I want to thank Senator Schumer for joining in this conversation as well. I couldn't agree with him more when he said: What we are trying to do with this bill is to make illegal what is already illegal.

I am going to make an invitation to anyone following this debate who wants to judge for themselves, to reach their own conclusion, as to whether or not there are laws existent in America today which cover the situation described in this bill.

I am going to give you the name of a physician in Philadelphia who is serving a life sentence in prison for having violated the current law, and I want you to look it up and read it yourself. Don't take my words for it. His name is Kermit, K-E-R-M-I-T, Gosnell, G-O-S-N-E-L-L. Write that down if you want to follow this debate and want to draw your own conclusions by doing some personal research. Look it up on the internet: Kermit Gosnell. I will tell you his story in a moment, but it proves the fact that we have existing laws that make this current bill unnecessary.

Tomorrow marks the 52nd year since our Nation's highest Court issued a rule recognizing a woman's constitutionally protected right to choose. Roe v. Wade enshrined into law something that should have been a given in America: In America, women have the right to make decisions about their own bodies. And, as a result of Roe, America's women took a giant leap forward in gender equity. The decision in Roe afforded women the right to choose whether, when, and how to start a family.

But after nearly 50 years of progress, in June 2022, the Supreme Court overruled Roe with Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, dragging women's rights half a century backward. Following that decision, we saw Republican-led States open the floodgates to abortion restrictions--laws that, in some cases, have had deadly consequences for women who could not access critical healthcare that they needed.

Instead of addressing the healthcare crisis that Dobbs has unleashed, Republicans are now instead looking to make it even harder for women to access comprehensive and compassionate healthcare.

Tomorrow, they will attempt to bring to the floor the so-called Born- Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. They want to bring it to a vote--this bill that, as Senator Schumer said, is already covered in law.

The bill, they say, creates new standards of care for physicians providing reproductive healthcare that are not based in medicine, fact, or science.

The goal of the bill that we will consider, introduced by the Republicans, is to target and intimidate reproductive healthcare providers and make it harder for women to access comprehensive and compassionate healthcare. This bill offers a poorly drafted and dangerous solution to a problem that simply does not exist.

The authors of this bill will tell you that this legislation simply ensures that all children born alive as a result of a so-called attempted abortion are provided the same medical care as any other newborn of the same gestational age. They say that is all it does. But we already have a law on the books that ensures that any child born in America, regardless of the circumstances surrounding that birth, is afforded equal protection under the law.

In 2002, the House and Senate passed, on a bipartisan basis, the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act. Do you know who signed that into law? Then-President George W. Bush. Put simply, it is already illegal to kill a child born alive in America. And in rare cases where a doctor does harm a baby in violation of State and Federal laws, they are held legally accountable.

The year was 2013. Dr. Kermit Gosnell, a Pennsylvania doctor, was convicted on three counts of first-degree murder for murdering babies after botched abortions. Gosnell was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole under existing law, and he is currently serving that sentence at Pennsylvania's State Correctional Institution at Huntingdon.

Do you know what else the authors of this legislation didn't tell you and won't tell you? Abortions late in pregnancy are incredibly rare. And when they do occur, it is most often because of a heartbreaking, late-breaking, fatal fetal diagnosis or because a woman's doctor has told her that she may not survive the pregnancy or because a woman lives in a State that prevented her from getting an abortion earlier. No, Republicans would rather have you believe that vast numbers of women are intentionally waiting until the final days of their pregnancy to have abortions.

This is a cruel political contrivance. These are women who often already have had their baby showers, picked out names, persevered through morning sickness, back pain, swollen ankles, countless doctors' appointments and tests. These are women who wanted their babies.

And what is the response from the actual doctors on this legislation? Ask the professionals to respond to the Republican bill that is coming to the floor, the so-called Born-Alive bill. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said this when the House passed the bill last year:

The offensively named ``born-alive'' legislation is another cruel and misguided attempt to interfere with evidence-based medical decision making between patients and their physicians.

Laws that ban or criminalize evidence-based care and rely on medically unsupported theories and misinformation are dangerous to families and their clinicians. This bill negatively affects all obstetric and gynecologic care.

What I just read to you is a quote from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Given this reality, what would happen if this bill were signed into law by the new President?

Take the case of Meredith Shiner, a constituent of mine in Illinois who was thrilled to learn a few years ago that she and her husband were going to have a little baby boy. However, at 22 weeks and 6 days, Meredith woke up with a terrible abdominal pain, rushed to the hospital thinking she had a bladder infection. She didn't realize the seriousness of what was happening until the doctor told her she was in labor. The prognosis was grim. Having the baby at 22 weeks and 6 days meant although the baby would be born alive, the chances of survival were almost nonexistent.

Knowing medical interventions would be futile, Meredith and her husband made the difficult decision to take the minutes they had with their son to hold him, to touch him, to look at him until he gently passed away, as doctors provided palliative care.

This bill is written in such an overly broad way, vague way, that had it been the law, those same doctors that provided compassionate care to Meredith, her husband, and their son could be subject to 5 years in prison.

In these heartbreaking situations, it is not the time for politicians to dictate the course of medical treatment, as this bill would do. Those wrenching decisions, those personal tragic moments, must be left to medical professionals and the individuals in their care. It is the only compassionate outcome.

This week, we lost a lifelong advocate for women's rights, Cecile Richards. She spent her life fighting to keep politics out of healthcare and defending every woman's right to decide when and how to start their family. We lost Cecile to glioblastoma--the same brain cancer that took John McCain, Beau Biden, and Teddy Kennedy.

If Senate Republicans truly cared about saving lives, they would be working with us to expand access to healthcare, increase funding for medical research that results in new cures, and implement policies that address our Nation's abysmal record of infant and maternal mortality.

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