Restoring American's Healthcare Freedom Reconciliation Act of 2015

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, I want to thank my colleagues from Oklahoma and California for this exchange of views, and most particularly I want to thank my colleague from the State of Washington for the amendment that she has offered that would, in effect, remove or eliminate a harmful provision in the budget reconciliation bill, a provision that would eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood and other providers of reproductive health services for women. Very importantly, it would also establish a fund to assist the Department of Justice in monitoring and combating violent opposition to women seeking access to lawful reproductive health services.

We can have a broad and comprehensive debate on a great many of the subjects that are related to the amendment offered by Senator Murray, but the simple fact is that funding for Planned Parenthood helps with women's health care. It provides services such as cancer screening, birth control, and STI testing and treatment that simply are inaccessible and unavailable to those women anywhere else. For all the talk about alternatives to Planned Parenthood, the women who receive services through Planned Parenthood have nowhere else to go in so many instances. In the majority of the care provided by Planned Parenthood, cancer screenings, birth control, and STI testing and treatment result in pregnancies that are wanted and intended and produce healthy children, as opposed to pregnancies that are unintended and unwanted, which certainly in this body and in America generally, no one wants to see.

So I hope that we have common ground here, that an organization such as Planned Parenthood, which does so much good, and the men and women of Planned Parenthood, who have so much courage and fortitude in the face of threats and intimidation that confront them every day, should be supported, not demeaned or dismissed. Their funding should be enhanced, not diminished. So far as enforcement is concerned, the Department of Justice should be doing more and doing better. It should be provided with those funds that will assist in combatting and monitoring the violent opposition to women who are seeking services. We have seen in just the past few days the impact of that violence, tragically, in death and injury in Colorado. But that tragedy is simply the tip of ongoing and apparently unceasing threats and intimidation at many of those clinics and health care services around the country. So I say with sadness--not anger but grief--in seeing the horrific impact of this violence, that the services are necessary, health care should be supported, and violent opposition should be monitored and prosecuted wherever it occurs.

Today I pay tribute to clinicians, professionals, volunteers, escorts, and all those who support Planned Parenthood and who continue their work in the face of the dangers that confront them day in and day out. I hope my colleagues will support me in endorsing Senator Murray's amendment so we can ensure women continue to have access to these necessary basic health care services.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I yield the floor.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source