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Floor Speech
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Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Madam President, I have been really awed and humbled by the eloquence of the women Senators who have preceded me, and I hesitate to add to what they have stated so powerfully already. But, of course, I am a man, and this bill is about women's reproductive care and women's rights, but it is also about the rights of all of us. The name of the act is the Access to Family Building Act. It is about families. It is about men, like myself, whose most awesome moment in life was the time they held their newly born child.
Men have an equal stake in the issue that brings us here today. Men should be as scared and angry as women are about this trend, which is so destructive to basic rights and liberties. Women's rights are human rights. The rights at stake here are rights that are American. What could be more American than wanting to bring a child into the world?
And what could be more heartbreaking? We have all been through it, through friends, neighbors, maybe our own family. A man and woman in love, wanting to have a child, miscarriages, other obstacles that prevent it, and there is a hole in their hearts, a hole in their homes and their families, as they struggle with issues of fertility and childbirth. This measure very simply guarantees the right for women and families everywhere--in Alabama, in Connecticut, in every State in this country--to access the fertility care they need to bring children into the world.
You know, over 3 years ago, before Dobbs was decided--and we never could have imagined that Roe v. Wade would be overturned--and the Republican Party eviscerated access to abortion care, I posed what I thought was a really easy question to a Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett. I asked: Is it constitutional to criminalize IVF treatment? She dodged. She dodged. She refused to answer. I thought it was self-evident. It is not constitutional to criminalize IVF treatment. That was before Dobbs. That was before the legal landscape was volcanically uprooted by this Supreme Court, which has been captured by a far-right fringe.
Some may have wondered why at that time I asked what seemed like a very far-fetched, obtuse, arcane question. A lot of people probably didn't even know what it meant, and they may have also wondered why Justice Barrett refused to answer such an obvious question with such a self-evident answer. Wasn't it settled that IVF treatment is not only legally protected but also a scientific miracle? Think of it for a moment, the science here that is now accessible to every American, everyone in the world. Wasn't IVF pro-family, having children, parents who wanted a child? And they may have wondered as well, wasn't IVF the last, best hope for so many people struggling with infertility, desperately seeking to experience the miracle of childbirth for themselves? Who could possibly object to that miracle in the lives of a family who would not only relish but raise a child to contribute to our great country?
What has become devastatingly and tragically clear is that the Republican Party's animosity toward women's health and women's rights doesn't stop at abortion. It is why I asked that IVF question in 2020, and it is why I didn't get a clear answer from a Republican nominee for the Supreme Court. The war on women and on reproductive choices by women and the war on families hasn't stopped at abortion or even IVF.
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Mr. BLUMENTHAL. So I conclude by thanking my colleagues who have brought this measure to the floor, particularly Senator Duckworth, and I regret that Republicans have blocked this measure.
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