Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act

Floor Speech

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Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, I am pleased to join my colleague from Washington to talk about the challenge that women both here in the United States and across the world are facing from the excesses of this administration.

What we have seen time and again is that the Trump administration has exhibited a dangerous obsession with rolling back women's reproductive rights here in the United States and abroad. Just in the past 14 months in office, this administration has launched a multipronged and aggressive assault on women's rights. One of President Trump's first acts in office was to reinstate and greatly expand the global gag rule, which prohibits U.S. funding for international women's health organizations that so much as mention abortion. What they did was to say that this is not going to just affect those organizations but any health organization that the United States puts funding into. This action will cause a significant increase in unsafe abortions and maternal deaths across the developing world. The administration has proposed budgets that would eliminate all Federal funding for Planned Parenthood, and, going even further, would prohibit States that on their own would direct Federal funds to Planned Parenthood for those same health services. They would prohibit States from doing that.

Most recently, the State Department reportedly removed data on reproductive healthcare from its annual human rights report. So is the idea that if you don't give people access to data, then it doesn't happen? The administration instructed career employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to remove words such as ``fetus,'' ``diversity,'' ``evidence-based,'' and ``science-based'' from their official vocabulary.

Well, if we are not basing decisions at the CDC on evidence-based and science-based data, then what are we basing it on? As Senator Murray says, they are basing it on ideology. Well, that is a lousy way to make a decision about where to put our healthcare money.

This administration has even attacked women's access to birth control, issuing new rules that allow almost any company to opt out of the birth control benefit in the Affordable Care Act.

Simply put, you cannot support women's empowerment unless you support women's access to family planning. Recently, the United Nations Population Fund's ``Family Planning 2020'' report explained why women's access to all healthcare services, including abortion, is so vital both to women's advancement and to their country's economic development. The report says:

Every woman and girl must be able to exercise her basic human right to control her own reproductive health. Access to safe, voluntary family planning is fundamental to women's empowerment. It's also fundamental to achieving our global goals for a healthier, more prosperous, just, and equitable world.

The report goes on to say:

Rights-based family planning programs have a greater ripple effect than almost any other development investment, from saving lives and improving health to strengthening economies, transforming societies, and lifting entire countries out of poverty. It is the surest path to the future we want.

Well, I couldn't agree more. Study after study demonstrates that access to comprehensive healthcare services is closely correlated to the economic success of women and their families. By contrast, lack of access to basic healthcare services, including family planning counseling and all birth control options, is a major factor in perpetuating the dangerous, life-threatening cycle of poverty.

Now, I think it is really ironic that those who seek to outlaw abortion do so under what they say is the pro-life banner. I think it is ironic because we know from experience that outlawing abortion doesn't end abortion, it simply drives it into the shadows and unsafe conditions. Like many in this Chamber, I remember the days before 1973, when abortion was against the law. An estimated 1.2 million women each year resorted to illegal abortions, typically performed in unsanitary conditions by unlicensed practitioners and often resulting in infection, hemorrhage, and even death. Just about every woman of my generation has a story about a friend or an acquaintance who had to resort to this kind of risky, dangerous abortion or who thought she had to resort to that.

Well, I don't think we want to go back to those days. We know that right now in the United States, we have the lowest level of abortions that we have had since 1973. That is a success that is directly attributed to the increased access to contraception that is in the Affordable Care Act.

We know that again and again, studies have found that policies to limit or ban abortion outright have the unintended consequence of dramatically increasing abortion overall. Conversely, when family planning services are accessible, the rates of unplanned pregnancies and abortion go down. Again, according to the Guttmacher Institute, we are seeing success in terms of reducing the number of abortions and unintended pregnancies.

Now, what we have seen internationally is that the global gag rule has had especially lethal consequences. It denies access to safe abortions and, in doing so, it dramatically increases abortions overall. A Stanford University study of implementation of the global gag rule during the George W. Bush administration found that the number of women having induced abortions more than doubled in countries that were most impacted by the policy.

Today, in Nigeria--which is the one country we have data on to date, based on the expansion of the global gag rule in the Trump administration--health workers on the ground estimate that because of the administration's new global gag rule, there will be an additional 660,000 abortions in Nigeria from now through 2020, and that could result in nearly 10,000 additional maternal deaths.

The Trump administration claims it wants a smaller government. The President ran on a platform promising to get the government out of people's lives. Yet it is doing everything possible to inject the government and law enforcement into some of the most intimate, difficult, and personal decisions a woman has to make.

This is not only insulting, but it is condescending to all women. We don't need guidance from the government for an adult. We need to be able to consult those we choose to consult and make our own decisions about the healthcare we need.

To take away women's access to full reproductive health services, including abortion, is demeaning and unacceptable. We cannot allow the Trump administration to turn back the clock and put women's lives at risk.

Thank you.

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