[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 119 (Friday, July 21, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H7448-H7452]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 THE WORST OF TIMES FOR AMERICA'S WOMEN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May 
12, 1995, the gentlewoman from Colorado, [Mrs. Schroeder] is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. Mr. Speaker, I must say this has been really quite a 
week. There was some question whether I wanted to stay and do a special 
order. The more I looked at what happened in this week, I really feel 
it is very historic and it is very important to take the floor and say 
to the American people that I hope they are digesting what is 
transpiring. Right now, if we look at all the things going on between 
Waco hearings, Whitewater hearings, all the trials on television and 
Bosnia, I think very few people realize what is transpiring to their 
rights here.
  This week ended with such a fitting end that really says it all. As 
we know, our Speaker kind of got elected as the prince of angry white 
men, and I think it is very fitting that he ended up celebrating the 
end of this week where he is now. We have our Speaker off at the 
Bohemian Club. Many people may say, ``what is the Bohemian Club? Why do 
we think we heard that name?'' We heard it a lot during the prior 
Republican administration, and then we have not heard it for quite some 
time. However, the Speaker has put it back into our whole lexicon.
  Herbert Hoover once called the Bohemian Club and its annual party the 
greatest men's club on Earth. The San Diego Union described it the 
following way:

       The Bohemian Club is known for its raucus campouts in the 
     grove. Their woods north of San Francisco are where powerful 
     politicians, executives, and many others, partially clad or 
     dressed in drag, meet each year for 2 weeks of carousing and 
     networking. The grove gatherings are known for raunchy skits, 
     speechmaking, sing-along, gambling, open urination on trees, 
     and other targets.


[[Page H7449]]

  I guess they are all there celebrating, because at the end of this 
week they will all say it probably is the best of times for rich white 
men in America, and so obviously that is where the Speaker belongs.
  However, I must say after this week, it is really the worst of times 
for America's women. This has been a week where issues on women have 
been absolutely pounded. Things we never thought we would see happen 
have happened on this floor, and I do not think America's women know 
it. Women, if you want to know why they are out there running around in 
the trees, partially clothed, no women are allowed, people are 
picketing, all sorts of noise going on in San Francisco, let me tell 
the Members what the Speaker and his friends are celebrating.
  No. 1, they passed a ban so that Federal employees cannot even 
purchase health insurance that would cover perfectly legal abortion 
rights. Even for rape and incest they cannot buy health insurance. That 
is pretty astounding, and for people who believe in individual rights, 
that is really amazing.
  No. 2, the 25-year-old family planning program that is known as title 
10, that provides all sorts of family planning services, pelvic exams, 
Pap smears, screening for sexually transmitted diseases, and many other 
things, that was zeroed out this week.
  Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, will the gentlewoman yield?
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. I yield to the gentleman from Texas.
  Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, do I understand, I would ask the 
gentlewoman, that, for example, Planned Parenthood of Boston and 
planned parenthood organizations and other community family planning 
across the country have not just been reduced in scope, like so many of 
the slash-and-burn efforts here in the Congress this week, but have 
been totally eliminated in the measure that came out of the 
appropriations bill?
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. The gentleman from Texas is absolutely correct.
  Mr. DOGGETT. The gentlewoman is not just talking about the 
controversial subject of abortion, that right being denied for all of 
our Federal employees and for all of their families, but the 
gentlewoman is talking about any form of Federal participation in 
family planning for families that want to plan, who do not want to face 
the choice of abortion, but want to actually have a variety of 
alternatives presented for family planning, they are going to get zero, 
zip, in the way of Federal support?
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. The gentleman from Texas has really hit the nail on 
the head. I think the gentleman from Texas probably also knows, because 
he has visited those family planning clinics, many of them are the 
primary care for many of America's low-income women during their 
childbearing age. That is where they go for their physical, their Pap 
smears, their breast checks, that is where they go for their entire 
range of health care services during that period in their life. To just 
zero it out, and say there will be no family planning, absolutely zero 
it out, which I still cannot believe it happened, but they did, because 
we heard so many people who were antiabortion saying, ``But I am always 
for family planning.''
  Mr. FARR. Mr. Speaker, will the gentlewoman yield?
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. I yield to the gentleman from California.
  Mr. FARR. Mr. Speaker, joining in with the gentleman from Texas and 
the gentlewoman from Colorado, this is a 25-year-old-program that the 
Federal Government has been involved in. Not only does it provide 
funding for organizations, private and nonprofit, like Planned 
Parenthood, but it also provides grants to public entities and 
agencies. Those agencies have served an estimated 4.3 million people in 
1995 through a network of 4,200 clinics provide key reproductive 
services. The gentlewoman has talked about those services, services 
that are screening for sexually transmitted diseases, for Pap tests, 
for pelvic exams, and other important tests. What essentially they are 
doing is cutting off health care, health care to women and to young 
ladies and to girls.
  I rise in consternation with what has happened this week, because I 
am a father of a young teenager. Telling her over the phone this week 
about this, she was absolutely shocked. She said, ``Daddy, does that 
mean because you buy Blue Cross health insurance from the Federal 
Government, that if I get raped, that your health care policy cannot 
take care of the medical exam that I would have to have and the 
services that I might need?'' And I said, ``Yes, isn't that 
disgusting?'' She said, ``I can't believe it. You mean that is what you 
have done in Congress this week?''
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. It was not a proud week. It is not a proud week, and 
it is very difficult to explain. I am glad the gentleman from 
California was awake and the gentleman from Texas was awake. I do not 
know how we get everyone else awake to understand it. We talk about 
fundamentalists in other countries, but it seems like fundamentalists 
kind of took over this Congress, because when you go after family 
planning, that is really kind of as American as apple pie.
  Mr. DOGGETT. If the gentlewoman will continue to yield further, 
indeed, the family planning program as described by our colleague, the 
gentleman from California, it actually is a program that has had 
support even of some of the people that have probably been members of 
the Bohemian Club. It has had broad bipartisan support from Republicans 
and Democrats until the extremists took control of the committee, is 
that not correct?

                              {time}  1800

  Mrs. SCHROEDER. The gentleman from Texas always has such an 
interesting mind.
  You know, I had never thought of that, but I will bet if you could 
poll the members of the Bohemian Club, you would find a very high 
percentage of them are significant donors to Planned Parenthood. 
Because I think that is the one thing I have always found very 
interesting on family planning, that most people understand how 
important it is and contribute a lot.
  But as much as they contribute, Federal funding has always been very, 
very essential, because there are so many women in their childbearing 
age, and they need this--we are talking visits every 6 months to a 
year. It is very essential. You cannot just say, well, they had their 
visits so they do not need to go back for 40 years. Wrong, believe me.
  So my guess is that there are an awful lot of the contributors there, 
and I wonder if they would be frolicking with the Speaker quite as much 
and skipping through the trees, doing whatever they do, if they knew 
that while he was away the appropriations zeroed this out.
  Mr. FARR. Will the gentlewoman yield for a moment?
  Let me just add on that. You realize that I am from California, and 
the Bohemian Club Grove is in Marin County, CA, and it has been there 
for over about 100 years, I think, of people. It is sort of the 
corporate heads of America go there, and the irony is that their own 
corporations, 70 percent of all the private health care plans in 
America, provide services which Congress denied to Federal employees.
  So there is a--I mean, this--if you are going to make government more 
like the private sector, you certainly do not want to begin by denying 
health care, medical services to women that the private sector, major 
corporations in America and those CEO's that are running around, as you 
say, in the Bohemian Club Grove are providing to their own employees.
  Mrs SCHROEDER. Well, I think that is a very interesting point, too.
  Is it not a shame--you know, the gentleman from Ohio often says, 
``Beam me up.'' Is not it a shame the three of us cannot be beamed up 
to the Bohemian Club and go around and run a poll saying to all the 
people there playing in the trees at camp, ``Did you know that we have 
just made Federal employees second-class citizens this week? Did you 
know we just zeroed out family planning? Did you know we also unraveled 
Roe versus Wade and, for the first time, this House has declared a 
medical procedure illegal, which is absolutely astounding?''
  And we could say, ``Did you know this week we had a committee 
prohibit medical schools from teaching, even teaching abortion 
procedures. That is pretty interesting. Did you know we prohibited in 
one of the committee 

[[Page H7450]]
Federal funding on human embryos, which is going to hamper 
contraceptive research, and also the search to look for curing birth 
defects and different diseases?''
  We could lay a whole bunch of things on these guys, and I honestly 
think they would be with us. They may be celebrating without knowing 
what has really been done.
  Mr. FARR. Did you know, following up on that, that the defense 
authorization bill prohibits private-funded abortions for our service 
men and women, and I say men because they are overseas with their 
families, from being performed in overseas military hospitals? Private 
services.
  So that means if you are in the military or you are a military 
dependent and you want to use your own money and you choose your own 
military hospitals, which we have there for our military active duty 
personnel, that you are denied. You have got to go out into the foreign 
market.
  At what risk do you go at that foreign market? We are subjecting 
people who are giving their lives to military service from just the 
basic benefits that their own relatives receive working for private 
corporations in America.
  We have gone--this antiwoman attitude in this Congress is, I think, 
beginning to show itself so strongly in how we are trying to set up 
women as a second-class citizenship in America.
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. You know, I am very pleased that both of you came to 
talk about this, because usually it is the women who are here railing 
about this, and maybe that is why we do not get through. But it is 
really great to have people here who do get it and who are starting to 
be as frightened as some of us, wondering what is coming next.
  I mean, we are getting ready to celebrate women having had the vote 
for 75 years. Maybe this is the
 year we really learn how to start using the vote if we see much more 
of this going backward.

  Mr. DOGGETT. Will the gentlewoman yield?
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. I would be delighted to.
  Mr. DOGGETT. So we have seen our military forces being treated as 
second-class citizens. They are discriminated against even in the case 
of rape of a servicewoman or the spouse of a serviceman. These services 
are not available.
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. Absolutely. Even if you are overseas.
  Mr. DOGGET. This week the members of our Federal work force all 
across the country, whether it is a park ranger or a nurse in a VA 
hospital or a security person right here at the Capitol, a young woman 
doing that very important work, again, if there is rape or incest, 
there is discrimination. No longer will they be able to have health 
care services available to other Americans.
  And then, in addition to that, we have even got these extremists 
coming in and saying they will dictate accreditation standards for 
medical schools, they will say what kind of research we can and cannot 
have.
  With all of this interference in the lives of young American women, 
where you say do not consult with your spouse, do not consult with your 
minister or rabbi, do not consult with your family, go take it up with 
your Congressman and interfere in those private decisions, do you think 
that instead of hearing so much in the news about angry men, we ought 
to be hearing something about angry young women who should be angered 
and upset that extremists would do this to them and interfere in their 
very most personal decisions?
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. That is precisely my point. I think if they just had 
any idea what is happening, they would be very angry.
  And my fear is about a year from now, when this starts to really have 
an impact, they are going to come running through our doors screaming, 
``Why didn't anyone tell us?''
  I feel rather like Paul Revere riding through saying the British are 
coming. Only we are saying the fundamentalists have won. You know, we 
are in real trouble here.
  I also have to say that, for every woman, there are some very serious 
thoughts here about who in the world would think about being an OB-GYN.
  If you were a young man 30 years old and you are thinking about a 
specialty in medical school, would you be an OB-GYN with the Congress 
here telling you what kind of procedures you can have, what kind of 
research you can do, what you can and cannot learn in medical school, 
what you can and cannot say to your patients and also cutting funding 
right and left?
  And, furthermore, if you ever did it and you ever even treated one 
woman because you were concerned about her condition, you could never 
be Surgeon General, like Dr. Foster.
  Mr. DOGGETT. When you get put on one of these wanted posters which 
have now spread to the political realm, but one group is putting up 
wanted posters for physicians performing legal procedures and another 
group is putting up wanted posters for Members of Congress who have the 
audacity to support that basic constitutional right.
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. You do wonder who is running the show.
  I am one of the people on the wanted poster for politicians, so I now 
know how the doctors who are on those wanted posters feel. And if you 
were a young
 person planning your future, I do not think you would go sign up to be 
an OB-GYN, such as your daughter or I think your daughter--

  Mr. DOGGETT. She will be getting into medical school this next month. 
I know that will be one of the areas that she studies in her practice, 
but I have to say, as a father, I cannot help but have concern that if 
she chooses to go into that area of specialty she may actually risk her 
life, as so many physicians are doing today, as so many people at these 
Planned Parenthood and other community planning agencies risk their 
lives to simply provide basic health care services that our young 
American women need.
  Mr. DOGGETT. What is so surprising about all this is this is the year 
of the conservative attitude in the House of Representatives and 
Congress, an the whole attitude here is get government off your back. 
But, indeed, these policies get government so far involved in the most 
personal issues in one's life. Because in order to monitor and prohibit 
you have got to police it.
  I cannot imagine what kind of trickle-down enforcement procedures are 
going to be there. And the message it says, let me just read you from a 
Sara Lowenthal, who lives in Santa Cruz, a community that I represent. 
She wrote this to me. She says, ``As an HIV educator who works directly 
with at-risk teens, the attack on title X scares me. One of the most 
direct, effective and influential ways that local teens can get 
information about HIV is through Planned Parenthood. The elimination of 
title X is not just a rightist attack on reproductive rights. It is a 
deconstruction of an educational block that protects Santa Cruz teens 
from HIV. I am deeply disheartened by the actions of the radical 
right.''
  She is an educator at the local level, and these educators are hard 
to get, because they do not get paid a lot. They volunteer a lot of 
their time. And I think that message is not just a message about what 
specialty to go in. It is also a negative message about what kind of an 
educator to become.
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. It is truly amazing that as we are saying get 
government out of regulation, get government out of all these areas, we 
are moving right into the classroom, into the doctor's office, into 
people's bedrooms, into all of these different areas, and we are going 
to totally regulate this area vis-a-vis women, and, as I say, long 
term, since almost all women get their primary care from OB-GYN's.
  If we do not have any good OB-GYN's, we are all in trouble in the 
future if we do not have good doctors watching after our health care.
  There are some other instances that are kind of did-you-knows this 
week. I mean, we all saw Kiri Jewell, that beautiful young 14-year-old, 
talking about the problems that she had had--I mean, I get chills even 
thinking about it. But her father having to go to court and do all of 
this because at 10 she is raped by David Koresh.
  Well, did you know there are Members in this body who are saying, 
``That is really a side show, that is really irrelevant, that really 
did not matter''?
  I mean, has the NRA so totally taken this place over we cannot hear a 
young woman's voice saying, ``Let me tell you what happened to me in 
Waco'' and how she had been taught to teach--to do suicide by David 
Koresh? They do not hear.

[[Page H7451]]

  We had many couples come here wanting to talk about the abortion 
procedure outlawed by the Committee on the Judiciary, and only one 
person got to testify. Nobody listened to their voices. It is like they 
are road kill. We have an agenda. We are rolling right
 over you. And these were all people who had gone through very, very 
difficult trying times and thought that they had a right to petition 
their government.

  Mr. DOGGETT. If any of these young women came today to the Congress 
where all of us were working, this House in session past midnight last 
night--I know our crime task force got together before 8 this morning. 
If any of those young women or young men came here to this Congress, 
would they have found Speaker Gingrich here today?
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. No. He is in California playing in the trees.
  Mr. DOGGETT. What is going on out there? I missed the first part of 
your remarks.
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. I must say, I was really surprised when I read in the 
New York Times, and I have seen it in several other newspapers now so I 
assume it is true, that the Speaker today arrived at the Bohemian 
Club's 2-week camp-out.
  And, you know, I guess neither one of you were here when we used to 
have incidents about that. If you remember, there were women trying to 
get hired by the Bohemian Club at one time, and they said, no, they 
would never--they did not care what the Federal law said, they would 
never hire women because it would inhibit the members in their 2-week 
frolic.
  I am not quite sure what they all do, but, apparently, it is quite a 
frolic.
  Mr. DOGGETT. Is he gone for 2 weeks?
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. I think he is probably coming back next week, but I 
do not really know. I guess it started last week, so he got out there 
today.
  But while we are here, he is playing, and we are doing some very 
serious things. And I just--I find these kind of--I guess it is a group 
of great, powerful men that love to go to the woods, and I guess they 
dress up like druids and do different things. I am not quite sure. But 
it is some privately owned redwoods, and that is where he is.
  Mr. DOGGETT. Is this part of the book tour or what.
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. I do not think they sell books there. I have never 
seen anything about them buying--I do not think they read books there 
either. I think they do something different.
  But I understand he is coming back through Iowa and then will come 
here. So maybe he is selling books in Iowa.
  Mr. FARR. I think that the issue here, or the symbol, is that this 
has been a week in which the Gingrich-led Congress, the conservative 
aspects of it, have taken away rights that protect women, taken away 
the rights to buy health care policies that provide services for 
medical abortions.
  They have zeroed out family planning money. They have affected the 
defense authorization bill that prohibits private funded abortions from 
being performed in overseas military hospitals.

                              {time}  1815

  They have cut back, major cutbacks in the international planning 
funds, and then to cap that off by going off to an all-male retreat, I 
think, is really symbolic of this sort of take away from women or 
discounting women or trying to put women as secondary citizens. It is 
symbolic of what is going on, and I think the women of this country 
ought to wake up and become involved.
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. I certainly hope they do. I join the gentleman from 
California for being actually very saddened. It is actually like they 
are tap dancing on women's rights that have been burned this week in 
different legislation that have come out. I certainly am saddened by 
that, and I certainly hope that women in this country do wake up and 
start saying to people wait a minute, wait a minute, we pay the same 
taxes as everyone else, which we do. They do not say, ``Women, hey, we 
are going to give a 50-percent discount because we do not think you are 
quite up to handling things, and we are going to micromanage your lives 
because we do not think you are up to handling things,'' and so forth.
  I think women have come a long way in this country. They really have 
believed progress was preordained. I think most American women would be 
totally shocked to know this has all been done, especially family 
planning. We go back to where we started, family planning, research, we 
worked so hard to make progress that was made on trying to catch up on 
women's health, and, boom, 1 week it all blows up.
  Mr. FARR. I as a father, you as a mother, can understand what we try 
to do as parents is ensure or give hope to our kids that there will be 
a better, sounder, safer, saner world which they can grow up in. I only 
have one child. It is a daughter. I guess that makes me a feminist 
because I really want to see the world in which women have equal 
opportunity.
  I am very proud to tell her that just this week I met with the 
highest-ranking woman in the Navy, and she is coming out to be the 
commandant or provost of the naval postgraduate school and, I think, 
someday will be chief of naval operations, and I hope so. She is a very 
talented woman, and to be able to show symbols of where women in 
society have become equal to men so that she, as she grows up, and with 
her colleagues, that women can see that they can do everything that any 
male can do. We have certainly seen that in winning Olympic Gold 
Medals, and we will see that in Atlanta when the Olympics come, and 
certainly in every profession, Sally Ride being the first woman into 
space and so on.
  But I come here as a new Member of Congress, a relatively new Member, 
and I am just shocked because California is a pretty big State, and 
serving in the State legislature, I thought I had seen conservative 
politicians. But I have to tell you I never heard on the floor of the 
State legislature in California the kind of rhetoric I heard here this 
week. That led me to be so shocked that I wanted to come and join with 
you and share with you my concerns as a father and as a representative 
of one congressional district in the United States that I think that 
the Congress, under the new leadership, is doing a great disservice to 
women. It is setting up and saying, if you are a woman and you want to 
go into Federal employment, do not go there.
  We pointed out in our dialog today, if you go into the private 
sector, you can receive benefits that you will not be able to receive 
in the public sector,
 not even an equal playing field for health care delivery services that 
we know we have a lot of teenage pregnancies, we know we have HIV 
issues to deal with. You deal best with that with education. That is 
what the title X moneys are all about. Then they have taken away those 
things.

  We have told people if you are going to go overseas, you cannot even 
use your private money in an American-sponsored military hospital to 
get these services.
  What kind of message are we trying to send as a country as to how we 
respect women if we are going to discount, disregard, and really put 
them in jeopardy?
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. The gentleman makes a very good point. Let me ask a 
question of you as a father.
  Do you think your daughter needs special congressional oversight, 
much more so than the young men that you have probably met that are her 
friends, do you really think that she needs this additional guidance 
and her doctors need additional guidance and her teachers need 
additional guidance? Is there something about women that I am blinded 
to that I do not see?
  Mr. FARR. Absolutely not. I think you see it very clearly. I can see 
clearly now, and what I can see clearly now is that the new majority 
here wants to make women second-class citizens. I am appalled by that, 
my daughter is appalled by that, my wife is appalled by that, my father 
is appalled by it. I think all of our family is looking at this and 
saying what is going on in Washington, DC?
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. It has been a very tough week. Then we hear the 
family-friendly stuff. People are not home enough. People are telling 
me they are keeping pictures of themselves by the door, ``If this man 
comes to the door, let him in, it is your father,'' because they are 
afraid they will think it is a stranger. Nobody can ever get home. They 
are working hard. What we are doing is blowing everything up. This is 

[[Page H7452]]
kind of slash-and-burn week for women's rights, I will tell you, and 
everything has been slashed and burned that I am aware of.
  I just hope it starts to get better. I really thank the gentleman 
from California for joining me in this. His daughter should be very 
proud.
  As I say, as a mother of a son and a daughter, I do not think one 
needs more congressional guidance than the other. They are equal in my 
eyes. I think they ought to be equal in the eyes of the Congress.
  Mr. FARR. I absolutely agree. I hope what we do need guidance for is 
America, wake up. Women in this country, wake up, come to Washington. 
We need to hear your voices. We need to hear your concerns. We need to 
change attitudes here in Washington that are taking away the rights you 
have as citizens of this country by denying you services which all 
other people in our society are entitled to.
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. The gentleman is absolutely correct.
  I think this is the 200th day of this Congress in which we have been 
in session 300 hours longer than we were at the same time last year, 
and we have done more damage to women and children, the elderly. It is 
really not a proud record.

                          ____________________