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Floor Speech

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Mr. MARKEY. Madam President, today is the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade. We should be standing here celebrating more than five decades' worth of access to essential reproductive health care--healthcare that is central to well-being, life, liberty, equality, and economic and social freedom for everyone; healthcare that is essential to equity for women, LGBTQ, Black, Brown, indigenous, rural, immigrant, low-income, and disabled Americans. But instead of celebrating, we are fighting-- fighting for Americans' freedom. We are fighting to protect the right to abortion.

Since the rightwing, extremist Supreme Court majority's Dobbs decision, women and millions of people across America have watched as States strip away their freedom to make decisions--decisions about their own bodies and their own families.

Taking Dobbs as a clarion call to rip away Americans' freedoms, rightwing Republicans across the country have marched forward to strip away the right to abortion State by State, with calls to expand that to a Federal ban on abortion. These politicians are more obsessed with interfering in the lives and decisions of the American people and their healthcare providers than actually fixing the healthcare system of our country to make sure that every American can get the care they need when and where they need that care. They are more obsessed with pretending they know more about the healthcare workers trained to support patient decision making than actually representing the American people who want to see their right to abortion being protected.

Americans across the country have suffered horrific pain and hardship, like Massachusetts resident Kate Dineen, who drove 500 miles to receive an abortion after her son experienced a catastrophic stroke in utero. This suffering especially affects those who do not have the means or the resources to travel across State lines. Tens of millions of Americans live in States where their reproductive health care is banned or restricted.

These rightwing extremists aren't finished. Dobbs was but a preview of coming atrocities by this Supreme Court and by rightwing Governors and State legislators all across our country. They have threatened the right to contraception. They have blocked access to birth control for teenagers at federally funded clinics. They have suspended emergency contraception payments for survivors of sexual assault. They will not stop at overturning Roe v. Wade.

On this anniversary of Roe, we must recommit to taking decisive action to protect millions of Americans' access to abortion care, remove unnecessary limits on reproductive freedom, and protect against coming attacks from rightwing Republicans and this extremist Supreme Court. We must abolish the filibuster, a Jim Crow-era relic impeding the will of the American people. We must pass the Women's Health Protection Act to restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land, protect patients' rights to an abortion, and protect healthcare workers providing these services. We must guard against coming attacks on our freedom by passing my Right to Contraception Act and pass the Judiciary Act to expand the Supreme Court and bring balance and fairness back to the Supreme Court before they make more and more decisions that overturn precedents that have been protecting the American people for generations.

We have a moral duty to act. There is no more time to waste. Supreme Court Justices may serve lifetime appointments, but we cannot wait a lifetime to right injustices. Congress can step in to protect the American people from the overreach of this radical Supreme Court majority. We must rise up and meet this moment with everything we have.

I ask my Senate colleagues what other rights Americans must lose before we act. What vulnerable communities in their States will be left without healthcare, without autonomy, without freedom? There can be no justice without healthcare justice in our country, and there can be no health justice without reproductive freedom in the United States of America being once again restored.

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