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Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, women and families across the country are confronting impossible choices because of Republican extremism on abortion.

Do you risk your own health with a high-risk pregnancy or do you risk being thrown in jail for trying to get an abortion? Do you stay in a State that forces you to carry for months a nonviable pregnancy to term? Do you travel hundreds of miles in secret to get access to a legal abortion in some other jurisdiction?

If these choices sound awful, it is because they are.

The chaos and the suffering created by Republicans is not just limited to red States. These attacks affect everyone.

Take Hawaii, which legalized abortion over 50 years ago and has some of the strongest protections in the country. Yet there is a case before the Supreme Court right now trying to prevent people from accessing medication abortion by telehealth. That means, if you live on an island like Kauai and rely on telehealth to get reproductive care, you would have to take off work and get on a plane to access services.

So, if you are in a blue State, thinking ``I am safe,'' you are not. Republicans are coming after all of it, and no one and nothing is off limits. Attacks on abortion threaten the entire system of reproductive care, including things like contraception, family planning programs, and early miscarriage care. Hospitals and doctors are terrified of providing care that will cost them their licenses or land them in jail.

For instance, if you are an OB/GYN in a State like Texas, you might be forced to delay or deny treatment to a patient with an ectopic pregnancy because there is enough gray area that the State can arbitrarily decide that you broke the law and punish you for providing lifesaving care. Doctors are not lawyers, and many in these States are understandably either retiring early or quitting or moving to a State that doesn't make criminals out of them simply for doing their jobs.

I am joined here in the Gallery today by an OB/GYN resident from Hawaii, Dr. Olivia Manayan. Born and raised in Honolulu, Dr. Manayan is currently a chief resident at the University of Hawaii, and next year, she will begin her specialization in complex family planning--focusing on abortion training, complex contraception, and reproductive justice. We need more people like Dr. Manayan, not fewer--people who are passionate about providing accessible and equitable care to their communities. We ought to be celebrating their contributions, but, instead, Republicans are hard at work criminalizing the whole profession.

Republicans are coming after all of it, and they are not going to stop. They have said what they are going to do, and now they are doing it. I think the challenge for those of us on this side of the aisle is that what they are doing is so bananas; it is so offensive; it is so cruel; it is so unpopular that, when we describe it accurately, it sounds like we are being hyperpartisan and freaking out for no reason. That is what it sounds like--I grant you that--but it is literally what is happening: IVF, banned. Contraception, not sure. Ectopic pregnancy, you have got to carry that to term. A nonviable pregnancy, you have to carry that to term and prove that it is nonviable even if your doctor says it is nonviable.

The cruelty knows no end. So, if you are a person who thinks, ``Hey, you know, I am kind of uncomfortable with abortion, and so maybe I think I am pro-life,'' I want you to understand what it means to be pro-life in the context of this 50-year fight to eliminate women's control over their own bodies. They are not stopping at Roe. They are not stopping at IVF. They are not stopping at contraception. They are not stopping. They want to control people's bodies.

Stopping all of this means fighting with as much coordination and passion as the anti-abortion movement has been doing for decades. And that includes men too. This can't solely be a women's issue. We don't get to sit this one out. These extreme policies affect everybody and everyone wishing to start a family or caring for someone who is pregnant, and so we all need to get involved.

When and if we have the House and the Senate and the Presidency, we should enshrine all of these reproductive freedoms in Federal statutory law.

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