Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015--Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. PETERS. Madam President, yesterday Republicans in the Senate put forward legislation to defund Planned Parenthood. Unfortunately, this bill was a clear partisan attack on access to health care for women, and especially women in rural and underserved areas.

One in five American women have relied on Planned Parenthood health centers at some point in their lifetime. Often, Planned Parenthood is the woman's only option for basic, preventive health care, including prenatal care, physicals, and cancer screenings.

For example, take Mary, a 20-year-old student in my home State of Michigan, who went through her campus health center when she found a lump on her breast. They told her it was nothing and not to worry. When she visited Planned Parenthood a year later for an unrelated matter, the clinician expressed concern that the lump was still there. Through Planned Parenthood she got referred to a program for low-income women with breast cancer, and she received the treatment that she needed. Today, Mary is thankfully cancer free. Planned Parenthood provides upward of a half million breast cancer exams every year and can save the lives of women just like Mary across the Nation.

Planned Parenthood also provides about 400,000 potentially lifesaving cervical cancer screenings annually. Katie, another young woman from Michigan, went in for her annual exam at a Michigan Planned Parenthood center. Her exam revealed that she had cervical cancer, and Planned Parenthood helped her weigh options to cover the biopsy and subsequent surgery. Today she, too, is thankfully cancer free.

The doctors and nurses at these facilities provide affordable, potentially lifesaving health care to 2.7 million people per year. Michigan has 21 Planned Parenthood health centers, 11 of which are located in rural or medically underserved areas. These numbers mirror national numbers, with over half of their 700 health care centers located in areas with limited access to medical care. Federal funding for Planned Parenthood supports access to treatment at these health centers for women like Mary and Katie in States all across this country.

Let's be clear. Federal funding for Planned Parenthood or any other organization is not used for abortion. Let me say this again because it is a very important fact. Federal funding for Planned Parenthood or any other organization is not used for abortion. This has been settled Federal law for decades.

Despite this fact, we have seen the adoption of extreme measures that restrict a woman's fundamental right to make her own decisions about her reproductive health, including in Michigan. A woman should have access to reproductive health services and the freedom to make her own decisions about her health care, and I will fight to protect this right each and every day that I serve here in the U.S. Senate.

Yesterday evening I voted to stop the Senate from moving forward with legislation to defund Planned Parenthood. This bill would have jeopardized access to health care for 2.7 million men and women who rely on Planned Parenthood for their health care needs. While I am pleased that the Senate did not move forward with the bill, it is clear that we have not seen the end of these types of partisan attacks on Planned Parenthood.

I urge my colleagues to move away from efforts to restrict access to health care and, instead, focus on crafting bipartisan agreements to fund our government, provide certainty to American employers and workers, support small businesses, and grow our middle class.

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