Women's Health Care

Floor Speech

Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President I come to the floor today with a number of my women Senate colleagues to talk about what happened yesterday at the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. They held a hearing on the administration's decision to make sure that women have access to affordable contraception, but guess who was missing. The women. This is a picture of the first panel from yesterday's hearing. Not one woman was seated at this table, not one woman at the table, yet the topic was women's health.

What is more difficult to understand is that when female members of the House committee asked for a woman to testify along with the men, they were denied. Their request was simple: to allow Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown Law School student, to testify on this panel of all men. As a woman she could speak firsthand about how this rule would impact women. But their request was denied because the chairman said Sandra Fluke was unqualified.

How can a woman be unqualified to talk about women's health care? Yet every one of these men on the panel was deemed to be qualified to talk about women's health care. I am disappointed. I know it is a disappointment that is shared by millions of women across this country. I am saddened that here we are, in 2012, and a House committee would hold a hearing on women's health and deny women the ability to share their perspective.

Time and time again, women have been silenced in this discussion, a discussion about our own very personal health care decisions. In fact, a recent analysis of the leading cable news channels showed that almost twice as many men as women were invited to join the conversation.

I think it is critical to understand that the underlying issue here is about affordable access to contraception--something that is basic to women's health. Birth control is something that most women use at some point in their lifetime and something that the medical community believes is essential to the health of women and their families. Research shows that access to birth control is directly linked to declines in maternal and infant mortality, that it can reduce the risk of ovarian cancer, and that it is linked to overall good health outcomes.

Some women, 14 percent of them, use birth control not as contraceptives but to treat serious medical conditions. That is about 1.5 million women.

When the administration first announced its decision to require employers to offer health insurance coverage for contraception, there was a robust conversation about religious liberty. In response to that, the President modified his decision last week, preserving the religious liberty of those religiously affiliated institutions, such as hospitals or universities, but also protecting the women who work for them. His decision ensured that all women have access to contraceptive coverage, and if a woman's employer has a religious objection, women can get that critical coverage directly from their health plans.

The Catholic Health Association has supported this policy, and yet, as we saw yesterday, some attempt to continue to politicize this issue. We cannot lose sight that this is at the most fundamental level of debate about women's preventive health.

Women deserve a voice in this debate because, after all, in the end this is about our health and it is about a health care decision that is between women, their families, their doctors, and their own faith.

I yield the floor.

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