Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. FRANKEN. Madam President, I rise in strong opposition to continued attacks on women's access to health care. Today, the Senate majority leader is attempting to advance a bill to ban abortion after 20 weeks. This is a blatantly unconstitutional proposal that injects politics into a private and deeply personal decision, one that should remain between a woman and her medical provider and her family.
This bill is the latest--but not the last, I know--in a serious of unrelenting attacks on safe and legal abortion in this country. It not only represents a cynical affront to well-settled law, it poses a serious threat to women's health. Let me tell you why. Nearly 43 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Constitution protects, as a fundamental right, a woman's ability to decide whether and when to start a family. This bill is plainly at odds with that holding and plainly at odds with the Constitution, which is why Federal and State courts have found laws like this one unconstitutional time and time again, but our colleagues on the other side of the aisle are now pushing forward with this bill and doing it at the expense of women who need medical care in the most desperate of circumstances.
Bills like this one demonstrate a callous disregard for the risks women face during pregnancy--women like Danielle Deaver, from Nebraska, who went to the doctor in a desperate attempt to save her pregnancy when her water broke at 22 weeks. Tests revealed that Danielle's amniotic fluid had ruptured, and her doctors explained that the baby could not be expected to survive, but that was not all. The rupture also put Danielle at risk, at risk of an infection that could jeopardize her fertility and her ability to have children in the future. Together, Danielle and her husband made the heartbreaking decision to terminate her pregnancy, but because Danielle lived in a State with an abortion ban that made no exception for a woman's health and had not been challenged in court, her doctor was unable to help. Danielle endured 8 days of severe pain and infection before delivering a daughter who survived for just 15 minutes.
Christy Zink of Washington, DC, was 21 weeks pregnant when an examination revealed that her pregnancy suffered from a severe fetal anomaly--meaning, effectively, that the entire hemisphere of the brain was missing. Christy and her husband consulted her physician and other doctors in an attempt to save her much wanted pregnancy, but after hearing of a near inevitability that if delivered, their child would not survive, she and her husband ultimately made the very difficult personal decision to end her pregnancy.
The bill we are discussing today has no exception for cases where a woman's pregnancy experiences a fetal anomaly. If a ban like this were to become law, families like Christy's would have no options. As a father of two grown children, with one grandchild and another on the way, I know what it feels like to celebrate the news that your wife or your daughter or daughter-in-law is pregnant, to accompany them to doctor's visits and checkups, to look forward to welcoming a child or grandchild into your family, and to look on with hope and worry as the pregnancy progresses, but my family has been very fortunate. I can only imagine the pain and heartbreak a family experiences when they are faced with the kind of tragic news Danielle and Christy received when they learned something was wrong, but the idea that Congress should insert itself into those moments and act to limit the difficult choices available to women and their families confronting unimaginable pain and sorrow is unconscionable.
This bill ignores women like Danielle and Christy. It ignores the unique circumstances surrounding every woman's pregnancy. Instead, it substitutes the judgment of Congress for that of medical professionals, even going so far as to threaten doctors with a 5-year prison sentence for providing women with the care they need.
Make no mistake, this is an extreme proposal. Unfortunately, it represents just the latest salvo in an unending campaign to make safe and legal abortion virtually impossible to access. Since the 114th Congress was gaveled into session, we have seen no fewer than 65 legislative attacks on the right to choose. Just last month, the Senate voted on a measure that would have defunded Planned Parenthood, a health care provider that serves millions of Americans, including more than 54,000 people in my State of Minnesota. That legislation failed, but as the end of the fiscal year approaches, some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle--both in the House and in the Senate--have pledged not to support a spending bill that continues funding for Planned Parenthood. They prefer to see the government shut down rather than allow a single penny to support the family planning services, the cancer screenings, and tests for sexually transmitted diseases that Planned Parenthood provides.
My good friend from Alabama Senator Sessions--and he is a good friend--suggested that we instead send that money to community health centers. They do not have the staffing, they do not have the capacity to provide these needed services for the millions of people Planned Parenthood serves. That is why the public does not agree. According to a poll released last week, more than 7 in 10 Americans oppose shutting down the government to defund Planned Parenthood.
One of the reasons the public does not buy into these tactics is they understand that access to reproductive health services, including contraception and abortion, has a powerful effect on the decisions women and their families make every day, decisions about whether to start a job or how much a family can afford to save for college.
For the vast majority of Americans, this is not political; this is personal. It is not a place for Congress to interfere. I urge my colleagues to oppose legislation that would restrict the ability of women and families to make their own reproductive choices.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
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