The Woman's Preventative Health Awareness Campaign Act

Floor Speech

Mr. BERA of California. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to talk about core American values--values of liberty, values of freedom, values of individual rights.

Today, a bill is going to come before this body that is a blatant attempt to take away those individual rights, those individual freedoms--freedoms that are core to who we are. This bill aims to take away individual decisions from America's mothers, America's sisters, and America's daughters. This bill is a travesty and a slap in the face of those core values of individual liberty and individual freedom, and this bill criminalizes doctors for doing our jobs.

Now, I'm a doctor. Core to the oath that I took was to sit with my patients, answer their questions and empower them to make the decisions that best fit their faith circumstances, their individual circumstances, their family circumstances. That's core to the oath every doctor in the United States of America has taken. That's core to my job. The bill that's coming to the floor today takes those values and slaps them in the face. They put the government right in the middle of my exam room, but the government has no place between the doctor and the patient.

What we should be debating is how we empower our patients, how we promote women's health, how we try to keep women healthy and help them plan their pregnancies, how we empower families. As a husband and as the father of a daughter, keeping women healthy is extremely important to me, and helping empower parents and families to plan those pregnancies is not only smart; it's good medicine.

The legislation I am introducing later this week, the Women's Preventative Health Awareness Campaign Act, will direct the Department of Health and Human Services to educate women about the importance of the preventative wellness exam. This is a piece of legislation that will help address the issue of planning families, of planning when you want to be pregnant. It will help address the issues of undiagnosed heart disease. It will help us diagnose cancer, and it will save thousands of lives.

I would urge my colleagues in this body on both sides of the aisle to join us in this bill. It's not only smart medicine; it will get to the core of empowering patients, of empowering women and of empowering families to make the decisions that best fit within the context of their lives.

That's the oath that I took as a doctor; that's the promise that I make to all of my patients; and that's the oath that we take in this body--to protect those individual freedoms and the individual rights of all Americans and of all America's women.

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