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Floor Speech

Now, this bill purports to empower and support women and families facing fertility challenges--something that I would certainly agree with. But instead of protecting access to IVF services and other assisted reproductive technologies, what it would do is to direct the government to actually steer people away from using evidence-based services like IVF in favor of ``restorative reproductive medicine.''

Now, let me be clear, women and their families deserve the freedom and the autonomy to decide for themselves how to start and grow their families in consultation with their doctors, and they don't need politicians deciding what kind of care they should or shouldn't be getting.

But if you need more evidence, the Republicans are trying to distort their record on these issues, look no further than section 2 of this bill, which would declare that Congress finds that ``in vitro fertilization and other assisted reproductive technologies are not under threat at the Federal level or in any State or territory of the United States.'' That is in section 2.

I would say: Tell that to the families in Alabama who saw their fertility treatments interrupted by the Alabama Supreme Court's ruling.

Just last week, all but two Republicans voted against a bill that would have provided comprehensive protections for American families trying to start or grow their families through IVF.

So when they present bills like this one as evidence that they care about women's reproductive health, they should remember that in these situations, actions speak louder than words.

And their message here is clear: Republicans will do anything, except the most obvious things, to protect women, pregnant women, mothers, and families.

By overwhelming majorities, Americans support protecting acts such as contraption, IVF, assisted reproductive technologies, and safe, legal abortion care. Republicans know that they are out of step with the American people, and that is what we are seeing here today.

Ever since President Trump's Supreme Court overturned Roe with the disastrous Dobbs decision, women's healthcare in this country has been thrown into chaos, and every day we hear more stories of the cruelty brought by these Trump Republican abortion bans across the country.

The solution to this problem is simple and obvious: Congress should pass comprehensive protections for contraption, for IVF, and for reproductive freedom. But, instead, Republicans have been blocking those bills and are putting forward bills like this one, which would create a Federal Government website, among other things, that functions basically as a crisis pregnancy center. To be clear, healthcare providers who provide information about the full range of their options to women, including abortion care, would be blocked from this website.

This website would allow women to put into the website their ZIP Code, and they could then find a list of resources for adoption agencies and crisis pregnancy centers, which, I think we know, can intentionally mislead and pressure and shame pregnant women against seeking abortion care and sometimes even block them from accessing that care.

I want to be clear that this bill does not require anybody to put in their contact information, but it also does not include any restrictions on how the Federal Government could use or share that data that people input.

I don't think Americans need another government website. What they need is for their government to respect their freedom and their dignity and their autonomy to make their own decisions about if, when, and how to grow their families.

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Ms. SMITH. The solutions to this crisis are obvious, and I am sorry to see that our Republicans are blocking those solutions at every turn.

This bill claims to protect healthcare workers if they refuse to participate in abortion care due to moral or religious obligations, but, of course, we know that those protections already exist in Federal law. And I think this bill would actually go well beyond that. It would, in fact, create a pathway for providers to object to providing other critical prevention and treatment services--for example, treatment to HIV.

So I think this is another effort to distract Americans from the core fact that Republicans are trying to restrict access to reproductive health care and reproductive freedom while Democrats are trying to protect them. I, for those reasons, Mr. President, object.

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