Providing Surviving Military Spouses WIth Mortgage Protection

Floor Speech

Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. I thank my friend, the gentlewoman, for yielding to me. I rise in support of her point of order.

The American people are begging us to work together to create jobs to bolster the economy. Instead, we're here once again to consider legislation that endangers and attacks the right of women and is far out of the mainstream of American priorities.

H.R. 358 is extreme legislation. It is another attempt to unravel the health care law while at the same time expanding anti-choice laws that will harm women's health. It would take away a woman's right to make her own decisions about her reproductive health--even with her own money. It would allow public hospitals, as you heard, to deny emergency abortion care to women in life-threatening situations. It would expand the existing conscience objection to allow providers to avoid providing contraception. We're talking now about birth control.

This legislation revives a debate that has already been settled. There is no Federal funding for an abortion in the health care reform law. Legal experts have said it, independent fact-check organizations have said it. Yet Republicans continue to insist that the possibility of funding remains.

Federal funds are already prohibited from being used for abortions under the Hyde amendment--at the expense, I should add, of poor women, Federal employees, women of the District of Columbia, and women in the military. But this bill goes way beyond that law. The attention Republicans are focusing on the private lives of women--what American families do with their own money--makes it clear that their real goal is to ban all abortions and end access to birth control and contraceptives.

Republicans don't want government to protect the water we drink--oh, no--or the air we breathe or the food we eat, but they do want to intrude in a woman's right to choose.

We are now at 280 days into this Congress without passing a jobs plan, yet the Republican majority has consistently managed to pass extreme and divisive legislation targeted at women's health. The administration strongly opposes H.R. 358, and this bill has no chance of becoming law. Now is the time to work on the issues that are most important to Americans--creating jobs and improving the economy--rather than restricting reproductive choice and access to family planning.

American women will suffer if this bill becomes law, but we're just wasting time here because it will not. And it just shows how mean spirited and extreme this legislation is. It's a way to roll back women's health and rights. It's too extreme for women, too extreme for America, and we should reject it right now.

Source