Concord Monitor - My Turn: On Women's Health Care, Brown's Record is Clear

By Jeanne Shaheen

Throughout my career, I've represented New Hampshire as a state senator, as governor, and as a U.S. senator. Along the way, I've learned that as an elected official, what you do is much more important than what you say.

In every one of my campaigns, I've told anyone who asked that I was pro-choice, that I supported expanding health care access for women and that I would fight for women's rights. But those campaign promises didn't mean anything unless I lived up to them in office.

So when I got to Concord, I led the fight for women's health care in the state Senate, and as governor, I worked with Republicans and Democrats to pass a bill that required insurance companies to cover birth control for New Hampshire women.

When I got to the U.S. Senate, I voted to expand access to health care for women and opposed extreme legislation like the Blunt Amendment, which would let employers deny women birth control coverage. This summer, when the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision said that a woman's boss is allowed to decide whether she can get insurance coverage for birth control, I introduced a bill to change that.

Since my opponent Scott Brown moved to New Hampshire from Massachusetts in December, he's told women in our state that he's pro-choice, but his record says something much different.

When Brown was in the Massachusetts legislature, he cosponsored -- not once, but twice -- legislation that would force women considering an abortion to look at color photographs of fetuses.

As a lifelong women's health advocate, I've seen legislation like this before. It's designed to sound innocent enough, under the guise of giving women information before they make a decision about their health, but that's not what it's about.

This kind of bill is written to shame women, make it harder for them to access care, and chip away at the decades of progress we've made on women's rights.

Women don't take the decision on whether to terminate a pregnancy lightly. They don't need to look at government-mandated material to make this decision. Nor should health care providers be forced by the government to provide women with material they don't think is medically necessary. This is a private, very personal decision that should be made by a woman with the advice of her health care provider and family.

New Hampshire women deserve better. They deserve to know where the candidates running to represent them truly stand on women's rights.

When he ran for Senate in Massachusetts, Brown was endorsed by anti-choice groups who said they supported him based on his voting record in the Legislature.

And in addition to the extreme bill he cosponsored twice in Boston, he voted against women's health time and again when we served together in the U.S. Senate.

I voted to put a pro-choice woman on the Supreme Court. He voted against her.

I voted against the Blunt Amendment, which would have let bosses deny their female employees' access to birth control, mammograms and other cancer screenings. He voted for it.

And when five men on the Supreme Court sided against women in the Hobby Lobby decision this summer, he cheered, but I went to work.

I'm proud of my record fighting for women's health care. Over the next three weeks, New Hampshire women will hear Scott Brown and I say plenty about where we stand.

They deserve to know what we've done, too.

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