Devastating Anti-Choice Bill

Floor Speech

Mr. QUIGLEY. Madam Speaker, I rise today because in a few short days this body will consider an extreme and devastating anti-choice bill. H.R. 3 attempted to redefine rape, aims to ban private insurance coverage of reproductive health care, and imposes tax penalties on plans that include care.

These unprecedented provisions have been widely debated, and it is my hope that the American people will realize the severity of this bill and that their Representatives will stop it. But my fear is throughout this debate, a dangerous provision of H.R. 3 has been overlooked, making permanent the Medicaid abortion ban, or the Hyde amendment. It is dangerous because if the extreme provisions are stripped out as a ``compromise,'' we are left with a ban that permanently bars poor women from accessing care, and we have still lost.

Let's call the abortion ban what it really is: a ban on constitutionally protected health care that poor women cannot afford on their own. I encourage my colleagues to stand with poor women struggling to make ends meet around the Nation, in staunch opposition to any Medicaid abortion ban and H.R. 3.

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