Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, earlier today I joined a number of my colleagues outside the Supreme Court to work with advocates who were gathered there, thousands of people, including many young people. Looking into their faces, I realized that for them Roe v. Wade is history, but my mind went back to 1974, the year after Roe v. Wade, when I was a law clerk to Justice Blackmun. I heard similar voices from the serene, contemplative chambers of Justice Blackmun and thought then--in fact all of us thought then--that Roe v. Wade would settle for all time, at least for the next decades, the reproductive rights of women in the United States of America, and we were wrong. We were wrong that the law would be settled, that rights would be protected, that Roe would be accepted, and that privacy would become enshrined as a matter of constitutional law or at least accepted politically. We were wrong.

Today, in a historic case, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on a challenge to the basic fundamental right of privacy with practical implications that will alter the lives of women in Texas, where the case rose, and throughout the country.

I know firsthand from my experience as a law clerk, but even more so in the decades since as an advocate for reproductive rights and women's health care, as U.S. attorney, as a member of the Connecticut General Assembly, first as a member of the House and then in the State Senate, and as our State attorney general, working and fighting to enshrine in State law the rights protected by Roe v. Wade and then protect them from physical threat and intrusion at the clinics where those rights were made real.

Those rights mean nothing if they are unprotected. If women need to travel hundreds of miles, if women need to leave their jobs and their children for days, if women have no access to those rights, they are unreal for them. That is the net fact of the law that is underchallenged in the case before the U.S. Supreme Court, Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt. That law, HB2, in effect, so restricts the availability of reproductive rights in practical, real terms as to place an insurmountable burden for many women on the exercise of those rights. Those rights are prevented from being real for them, for countless others, and they will be put out of reach for countless women across the country if this law is not struck down.

That is what we are asking the Supreme Court to do: to strike down this law that under the pretense of protecting women's health, imposes restrictions that deny rights, rights to privacy that are basic to the human condition. They are constitutional rights, but nothing is more basic than the right to control your own body. Nothing is more essential than protection of rights to decide when to have a child. These issues of control over one's body involve control over one's faith, rights of privacy, and power to make basic life decisions.

That is what it means to have a right to privacy. It is the right to be left alone--as one of our Supreme Court Justices said, the right to be left alone from unwarranted and unnecessary government intrusion. The Supreme Court will have to make a judgment about whether the burden placed on that right is justified by this supposed protection of women's health.

Anybody familiar with this case knows that supposed reason for these laws that require many privileges for doctors or particular widths of hallways in clinics is a ruse, a pretense, in fact, a falsehood.

My view is the outcome should be clear in this deliberative battle before the Court, but the ramifications, the practical impacts, are severe for those women in Texas who would have no access to reproductive health care, and for women around the country because the simple stark fact is, since 2011, State legislatures have enacted 288 laws like the one in Texas, designed to restrict access to reproductive rights. We are not talking about a situation limited to Texas. In State after State, legislature after legislature, these rights would be restricted by similar laws.

That is the reason I have introduced the Women's Health Protection Act, to stop this invasion--it is truly an invasion--of women's reproductive rights. The measure I have introduced would, in effect, strike down such measures, prevent them, so as to reduce, and hopefully even eliminate, the cost and the time required for litigation challenging them in State after State, like what happened in Texas where women have been denied the certain assurance, the basic security of knowing that this care will be available to them, because of the continuing litigation, the costs of lawsuits, and the time-consuming contention and controversy that arises from it.

The arbitrary and arcane restrictions imposed by the Texas law concerning admitting privilege requirements and building specifications are unrelated to health and safety and clearly create an undue burden on women's right to choose. That is the legal principle, the core tenant that needs to be upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

I joined with a number of my colleagues, and in fact led the amicus brief to the Supreme Court, which urges them to reach the right result and strike down this law. My hope is that the outcome will not only be right for Texas and the women of Texas--and the people of Texas because the right of privacy is not guaranteed only to women, it is to men, and the decisions that women make affect families and children as well as their spouses. I hope the Supreme Court finally does what Roe v. Wade was thought to do in clear, bright-line text that will prevent States from intruding with these pretense, ruse laws, supposedly protecting health when, in fact, all they do is restrict the right to privacy.

I am proud to join with my colleagues in fighting these attacks on women's health care. But I hope that the clerks, as I once was, in the Supreme Court will look from those windows today and think to themselves that this case will, in fact, finally settle these issues, finally give women the assurance and security they need.

There is no need to keep returning and relitigating these issues. There is no need for this body to consume time and energy on defunding Planned Parenthood. There is no need for these kinds of repeated battles over rights that should be secure and unchallengeable in 21st Century America. Rehashing this fight simply costs us in time and other precious commodities that we should be spending on jobs, economic progress, veterans, national security, investment in infrastructure, investment in our human capital, and college affordability. All of the present issues--those and others of this day--are what should occupy us on this floor and occupy the country as we move forward, hopefully guaranteeing that the rights in Roe will be real for every American woman.

Thank you, Mr. President.

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