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Floor Speech

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Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I rise today, on the third anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision to shred nearly five decades of precedent protecting a woman's right to make her own healthcare decisions, to say that now is the time to protect freedom.

I appreciated the words of Senator Hassan from the State of New Hampshire, a State grounded in freedom, for her focus on freedom. I also thank Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester for bringing us together today.

In the 3 years since the Supreme Court went against the 70 percent of Americans who believe that healthcare decisions should be made by a woman, with her family and her doctor, instead of by politicians, women have been at the mercy of a patchwork of State laws that are creating chaos when it comes to accessing reproductive healthcare.

Today, 20 States partially or fully ban abortion, affecting more than 31 million women across the country. I ask why women in Minnesota should have different rights--different fundamental rights--than women in Texas, why a woman in Oregon should have different rights than a woman in Georgia.

Women are also being forced away from emergency rooms and left to travel hundreds of miles for healthcare, and doctors are being threatened with prosecution for just doing their jobs.

In Texas, a pregnant teenager died after being denied care at three different hospitals. I will never forget the gut-wrenching testimony I heard from another woman, Amanda Zurawski, at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. She nearly died from sepsis after being forced to carry her stillborn daughter Willow to term due to Texas's abortion ban. It was a heartbreaking story.

President Trump has made clear that he was and is, in his own words, proudly the person who ended Roe v. Wade, and his administration is continuing its assault on women's reproductive freedom. The Trump administration has rolled back policies that protect access to lifesaving abortion care during medical crises. It has announced it will be putting mifepristone under review despite the fact that the American Medical Association stated that ``there is no evidence that people are harmed by having access to this safe and effective medication'' that has been on the market, I would add, for more than two decades and is safely used in 90 countries.

But the Trump administration has decided: Well, we know better. We know better than the American Medical Association. We know better than the women of the country that have been using this medication safely. We know better than 90 other countries.

And the President is putting forward nominees to the Federal bench, including ones I have recently questioned, with a demonstrated hostility to reproductive freedom.

As if this wasn't enough, congressional Republicans are also seeking to pass a budget that would leave 1.1 million patients who rely on Planned Parenthood health centers for critical and lifesaving services like cancer screening, STI tests and treatment, and birth control, among other things, with nowhere to go.

We are at a pivotal moment for women's rights in this country. Are we going to continue to move forward or are we going to be sent further back in time? Enough is enough.

As my colleagues have made clear today, we refuse to back down. We refuse to give up. We will not settle for a world in which our daughters and our granddaughters have fewer rights than their moms and fewer rights than their grandmas.

We need to codify the protections of Roe v. Wade into law once and for all and guarantee the right to access care. That is why we must pass the Women's Health Protection Act--the first step in addressing the devastating reproductive healthcare crisis that Dobbs unleashed-- and keep fighting any effort to deprive women of the healthcare we need and deserve.

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