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Floor Speech

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Ms. HASSAN. Mr. President, I rise today to join my colleagues to stand up for the freedom of American women as we mark the anniversary of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, and I want to thank Senator Blunt Rochester and my colleagues for leading this effort on the floor this afternoon.

In New Hampshire, we proudly call ourselves the Live Free or Die State, and today, I would like to take a moment to reflect on what the Dobbs decision--a decision that represents the largest attack on freedom in modern American political history--means not only for the future of American women but, even more fundamentally, for freedom in our democracy itself.

It is difficult to keep up with the Trump administration's attacks on freedom, with attacks on our rights to due process, freedom of speech and expression, freedom to vote, and more. Perhaps the President hopes that with each cascading outrage, the American people will forget that he set in motion the events that led to the Supreme Court taking away freedom from half of our population--the fundamental freedom of a woman to make her own health decisions. But, of course, we haven't forgotten. We Americans have never been inclined to forget attacks on our liberties.

What did the Dobbs decision mean? It took away a woman's freedom to make deeply personal health decisions, the freedom to decide when and if to start a family, the freedom to get lifesaving care when a woman's health is imperiled while pregnant.

This is more than a freedom to get a specific medical procedure. In practice, we are talking about the freedom to chart one's own future--a freedom which should be enjoyed by all free and equal citizens in a democracy. But with the Dobbs decision, for the first time in our country's history, our daughters are now less free than their mothers were at their age. Since the Dobbs decision, we have become a country where a fundamental freedom can vanish once a woman crosses a State line. We have returned to a kind of sectionalism of bygone eras that history should have taught us to avoid where women who are pregnant and live in States with draconian laws banning abortion know that in the event of a dire medical emergency, they may have to make a long drive to cross State lines or run the risk of being thrown in jail for just trying to get lifesaving care.

This isn't hypothetical. Already, lives have been imperiled and even lost in experiences that we have heard from Georgia, Florida, Texas, and in States all across the country.

Indeed, at this very moment, Members of this body are seeking to pass legislation--the Republican budget bill--which would, among other measures, make it impossible for many women to get the care they need and shut down women's healthcare clinics all across the country. Their legislation is effectively the final step in establishing a backdoor national abortion ban.

So, to my Republican colleagues: Please stop singing the same song to us that the women of America are being alarmist--a song that we heard before Roe was overturned and that we have continued to hear since. I want to know just when exactly in the process of having one's freedom stripped away are we allowed to become alarmed. Are we only allowed to be concerned about losing a fundamental freedom once that freedom has become nothing more than a memory?

Ultimately, behind all of this talk of laws and precedent, of State statutes and Federal, behind all the medical discussion about women's healthcare, the anniversary of the Supreme Court overturning Roe begs us to ask a question as simple and as fundamental as they come, a question that the opponents of reproductive freedom and the President himself ought to answer: When our Declaration of Independence declared that all are created equal, does that promise belong to American women or do we believe that truth is not self-evident after all?

When the suffragettes at Seneca Falls wrote that they ``insist women have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States,'' do we still believe those words or were the suffragettes wrong?

Do we believe that we are better off when everyone gets to chart their own future? In the land of the free, do the full blessings of liberty belong to our daughters as well as our sons?

Can a democracy like ours persist when, divided by State lines, half its people live half-free? In the end, that is what this debate is really all about.

So what is it, on this anniversary, that America's women ask for? It is simple. They want what all Americans want. Their aspiration is to be free. And so long as we wish to call ourselves the world's greatest democracy, the President and this body would do well to remember our country's promise and heed their call.

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