Women's Reproductive Rights

Floor Speech

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Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Madam Speaker, I thank my sister and my colleague, Congresswoman Maloney, for taking the lead always on issues to protect women's rights.

I want to declare right now that women are not going back. Women will not tolerate being second-class citizens. I will not tolerate that my granddaughters will not have the rights that women have today. That a fundamental, basic threshold right in the United States of America, in the 21st century, will be snatched away is something not only unthinkable but something that doesn't need to happen.

Let me tell you a story that was told to me. I have a dear friend, an adult man, who told me about his mother, Shirley. When he was 11 years old, his mother, Shirley, was told that if she was going to carry to term the fetus that was in her womb right now, she would not survive.

This tragically was just before Roe v. Wade was passed, just a couple of months before Roe became the law of the land.

The only place that abortion was legal was in New York. This single mom had to put the money together to finally get herself to New York, and she did. She scrounged that money. She saved. She borrowed.

But when she got there, she was told at the clinic: Too late. She was too far gone in the pregnancy.

She came home and celebrated the Fourth of July with her children. When she went to deliver, she died, leaving an 11-year-old son and two little girls to be orphans.

I have a button that I have had for a long time that I wear that says: Roe was not the beginning of women having abortions. Roe was the end of women dying from abortions.

Do you think that in this country the majority of Americans support the idea of allowing women to die? We know they don't. We know that the majority of Americans--the vast majority of Democrats, three-fourths of Independents, and, yes, a majority of Republicans--say no, that Roe v. Wade, the right to access an abortion, may not--should not--be overturned. We have an opportunity right now in the United States of America, and it is called the vote.

We have what I would consider a rogue Supreme Court right now. The filibuster was eliminated, the requirement for 80 votes, in order to get the current Justices of the Supreme Court there so that they could do this dastardly deed. But if we just go to the polls, we can change that, not someday in the future but in this next election.

Hopefully, we can get the Senate to do it. But I will tell you that Mitch McConnell has already said if they were to win the Senate, he wants to suspend the filibuster, the 80-vote requirement, and make a prohibition on abortion the law of the land, not just for the States to decide.

I will tell you something: This is not going to happen. There is a tsunami out there of opposition to this. It is not just women; it is men and women alike. It is about families who don't want to see a 13- year-old girl who has been raped be forced to carry that pregnancy to term. Are you kidding me?

I am putting out a warning right now and an invitation to all people who think that women deserve that right to control their own bodies to say: No way. Hell no.

Mrs. CAROLYN B. MALONEY of New York. Omar).

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