Whole Womens Health v. Hellerstedt

Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, tomorrow the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt. The central issue of this case is an attack by the State of Texas on women's health and the clinics that provide abortion services.

I wish to begin by stating clearly that in our country women have a constitutionally protected right to make their own choices about their bodies. That is the law of the land, as guaranteed to women in Oregon and nationwide by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade.

The 2013 Texas law at the heart of this case, HB2, is a thinly veiled attempt to block women's choice by setting unjustifiable and burdensome requirements on the doctors and clinics that offer abortion care. Despite what HB2 supporters say, it doesn't have anything to do with protecting women's health. And the reality is, complications from abortion procedures are exceedingly rare. In fact, the numbers show that abortion care is far safer than colonoscopies. Yet Texas law doesn't go out of its way to impose comparable requirements on facilities providing colonoscopies. HB2 unfairly targets women's health clinics.

To make this point directly, I wish to briefly quote from an amicus brief filed by the trusted experts on these matters at the American Medical Association and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, among others. Their briefs said that the requirements imposed by the State of Texas ``are contrary to accepted medical practice and are not based on scientific evidence.'' The brief continued: ``They fail to enhance the quality or safety of abortion- related medical care and, in fact, impede women's access to such care by imposing unjustified and medically unnecessary burdens on abortion providers.''

HB2 tells clinics, ``comply with these new requirements, or close.'' So in the months since the law passed, the number of clinics that provides such services has, in fact, plummeted across the State. According to reports, if HB2 is upheld, the total will drop by more than three-quarters. Texas, obviously, is a big State, and under HB2 many women are going to have to travel for hours on end to exercise a right guaranteed to them by the U.S. Constitution. The fact is, a lot of working women don't have the luxury of taking a day off or cannot afford a long and expensive trip to a faraway clinic. In effect, women are going to be denied care.

You are going to hear people on both sides of the aisle say again and again how vital it is that Americans have access to medical treatment and advice from doctors they know and trust. But HB2 flatly denies many women that protection.

I personally find it very troubling that HB2 has become a blueprint for similar restrictive laws around the Nation, bills that masquerade as women's health safety measures. For example, the State of Louisiana now has a nearly identical law on its books.

In January, 162 of my congressional colleagues and I wrote the following in an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court: ``A woman's right to decide whether to carry a pregnancy to term or to seek critical medical services, including abortion, should be insulated from the shifting political rhetoric and interest groups whose sole purpose is to erode the right to choose to bring a pregnancy to term afforded to women under Roe.''

So here is my bottom line: A limit on the exercise of a woman's right is a limit on the right itself. It is wrong and it is un-American to restrict a person's right because it conflicts with your own views. Texas HB2 should be struck down. The rights guaranteed to women following Roe v. Wade ought to be protected, just as all the others that are guaranteed by the Constitution. My hope is that this ongoing crusade against women's health care, which I have spoken about repeatedly on the floor of this Senate, ought to end here, and it ought to end now.

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