Date: 2015-05-13
Speaker: JACKSON LEE (democrat)
Chamber: H

Madam Speaker. I rise in strong opposition to the rule for the underlying H.R. 36. the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. because it would allow politicians. not women or medical experts to decide womens personal medical decisions. If it becomes law. H.R. 36 would ban abortion care after 20 weeks. This is a blatant attempt to deny all women their constitutional rights and it will pose an extremely serious threat to the health of many women in the most desperate of circumstances. To ban abortion care would block a womans access to safe health care and deny her ability to make decisions according to her physicians advice. Supreme Court precedent establishes that a woman has the unequivocal right to choose abortion care until the point of fetal viability. This twentyweek abortion ban brazenly challenges the Supreme Courts standards and deliberately attempts to push the law earlier and earlier into a womans pregnancy. This ban would cause a hardship for women in need of safe. legal. later abortion care for a variety of reasons including menopausal women not expecting to become pregnant and who may not discover it for many weeks. H.R. 36 interferes with the doctorpatient relationship. the sanctity of which is a cornerstone of medical care in our country. 25.000 women in the United States become pregnant as a result of rape here in the U.S. every year. Approximately 30 percent of rapes involves women under age 18. According to the Department of Justice. only 35 percent of women who are raped or sexually assaulted reported the assault to police. This ban requires women rape victims to report their ordeal before they can terminate pregnancy resulting from rape or incest. Our vote today on this legislation will have real life consequences. Take for example the case of Tiffany Campbell. When she was 19 weeks pregnant. Tiffany and her husband Chris learned her pregnancy was afflicted with a severe case of twintotwin transfusion syndrome. a condition where the two fetuses unequally share blood circulation. This news was devastating to the Campbells. The diagnosis was that one of the fetuses had a strained heart and acute risk of heart failure while the other had a blood supply that was insufficient to sustain normal development. The Campbells were told that without a selective termination. they risked the loss of both fetuses. At 22 weeks. in consultation with their doctors. they made the difficult decision to abort one fetus in order to save the other. Today. the lifesaving procedure for one of the fetuses would be illegal under the new 20week ban mode. Then there is the ordeal that Vikki Stella faced. Vikki is a diabetic who discovered months into her pregnancy that the fetus she was carrying suffered from several major anomalies and had no chance of survival. As a result of her diabetic medical condition. Vikkis doctor determined that induced labor and Caesarian section were both riskier procedures for Vikki than an abortion. The procedure not only protected Vikki from immediate medical risks. but also ensured that she would be able to have children in the futu re. As you see from each womans story. every pregnancy is different. In fact. none of us here is in the position to decide what is best for a woman and her family in their unique circumstances. H.R. 36 would deprive women the ability to make very difficult and extremely personal medical decisions. A womans health. not politics should drive important medical decisions and ignoring a womans individual circumstances threatens her health and takes an extremely personal medical decision away from a woman and her health care provider. The Administration urges Congress in its Statement of Administration Policy to oppose H.R. 36 because it would unacceptably restrict womens health and reproductive right to choose. Women. regardless of their status in life should be able to make choices about their bodies and their healthcare. and we as elected officials should not inject ourselves into decisions best made between a woman and her doctor. I yield back the balance of my time. and I move the previous question on the resolution. The previous question was ordered.