Women's Reproductive Rights

Floor Speech

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Ms. OMAR. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding, and I join my colleagues in thanking her for her leadership.

Mr. Speaker, today, I rise to speak against the cruel and unconstitutional leaked Supreme Court decision overturning settled law of the land, Roe v. Wade. To be clear, controlling decisions about our bodies is a basic human right. The government has no right to regulate what we can do with our bodies.

Overturning Roe v. Wade is about control. It is about religious supremacy. It is about harming women. It would fly in the face of decades of precedent and the overwhelming majority of public opinion if this decision is to hold.

We know this decision will fall hardest on the most vulnerable in this country: women who have been abused, women who are the victims of incest, and those who have been raped. But its consequences will be even more far-reaching than we can imagine. This will be a blow to everyone who believes in the 14th Amendment, to anyone who believes there is a limit to how much the government can control the decisions we make in our private lives.

We will be leaving our children and the next generation in a world with less freedom than we have enjoyed ourselves.

It is shocking to me that all of this is being championed by and is coming from a party that believes in small government, a party that talks about freedom, liberty. This is the party now that wants to do everything that they can to tell women what decisions they can make about their reproductive rights.

They want somebody like Senator Ted Cruz regulating your uterus.

They want Senator Chuck Grassley having authority over your body.

We have to say no. We have to stand up, and we have to fight back.

If you care about women's rights, you should be outraged by this decision.

If you care about a woman's right to choose, you should be outraged.

If you care about women having access to healthcare, you should be outraged by this decision.

If you care about economic justice, you should be outraged by this decision.

If you care about our basic freedoms, you should be outraged by this decision.

It is heartbreaking to hear some of the stories shared by my colleagues, to hear about some of the stories shared by my constituents. But it will be even more heartbreaking to hear about the stories that will be shared if we do not protect a woman's right to choose.

I think about many countries that I visited where women are locked up, serving 20 years in jail for having an abortion, where we hear about stories of women who die in back alleys because their families forced them to have that baby.

We hear about the stories where rape victims are forced to carry their babies to full term.

This is shocking, and it is shocking because those stories are about to become the stories of young women in the United States of America, a country that is supposed to be a symbol of freedom, a country that believes and exports what it means for women to be celebrated as an equal, a country that talks about how glorious its Constitution is in guaranteeing the rights of its citizens.

Now, this is about to become a country where women are crying out in pain because their freedoms are being impeded by Republicans, who only say they believe in freedom but do not want to guarantee freedoms to women in this country.

As an immigrant, I am proud to be an American. I am proud to be a woman living in this country. I am proud to be a mother of four children and to have given birth to three of them. I am proud to have been given the ability to make choices for myself that I might not have been allowed in the country that I was born in.

But it pains me today to know that those who believe in religious superiority, those who don't believe in the fundamental rights for people to choose as they please in this country, might have the last laugh, and we might not be able to do anything about it.

Not only do we have a narrow window of enshrining and codifying Roe v. Wade into law, but we also have only a couple of more months to make sure that this body and the Senate are not lost to religious extremists and that our country will be in their hands as they govern us to the gutter.

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

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