[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 44 (Wednesday, March 27, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H2879-H2880]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         WOMEN'S HEALTH ISSUES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from Colorado [Mrs. Schroeder] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. Madam Speaker, I take the floor first of all to say, 
in this month of women's history, how pleased I am that the President 
has made more history for women today. I thought the newspaper article 
was very, very exciting to talk about how the President has nominated 
the first woman to the rank of 3-star general. She is in the Marines, 
Maj. General Carol Mutter, and her wonderful motto is ``perseverance 
pays.'' We salute her, and we thank the President for moving her 
forward, and I think all of our foremothers would be proud.
  But we heard many other Congresswomen take the floor today and talk 
about the Women's Health Equity Act. The one thing that Congresswomen 
have the right to make a victory lap about is the progress that we have 
made on women's health in this body.
  If the Congresswomen had not been here, believe me, it would not have 
happened, because when we first got into this they were even doing 
breast cancer studies on men. They had no women in any studies, no 
women in the aging studies, no women in any studies. Basically the 
Federal Government's message to women was, we may as well go see a 
veterinarian, because what our own doctors got from Federal studies was 
really very little. They had to take studies done on men and then try 
and see if it distilled and was applicable to women.
  We got all of that changed. After prior vetoes and everything else, 
we finally not only got it passed, but a President who would sign it 
and a lot of it on board. But we are still just beginning. 
Unfortunately, in this body they tend only to see women's health as 
circling around reproductive issues and breast cancer. Those are both 
very important key issues, but there are any number of health issues 
that affect women that we have just begun to tap.
  Starting in 1990, we put together different bills that all of us had 
dealing with different issues on women's health and we put them in one 
bill called the Women's Health Equity Act. Then we all cosponsored it 
together and pushed as much of it as we could.
  This year there are 36 bills in there, and it deals with an awful lot 
of the things still on the table that we have not dealt with, 
everything from eating disorders, which affect women much more severely 
than men, all the way through to female genital mutilation, which this 
body has still refused to deal with, even though our European countries 
and other countries have, and there are all sorts of international 
bodies crying out, saying this is a human rights violation and that we

[[Page H2880]]

should make it a felony for people to move to this country as 
immigrants and bring those cultural things with them.

  I do not want to see female genital mutilation in this country and I 
hope every American agrees, and I cannot understand why this body will 
not move on it. But to still think we have got 36 bills of that wide a 
range that we have reintroduced, that are out there, that we are still 
going to keep trying to move before we are anywhere close to having 
parity with where men have been in all the health care issues.
  Our point has always been, this is Federal money we are talking 
about, Federal money that goes to research and Federal money that goes 
to services, and they always collected the same tax dollars for women 
they did for men. No one ever said to women, ``We'll leave you out of 
the research and we won't give you any services, but don't worry, we'll 
charge you lesser taxes.'' Maybe we would negotiate if they did that, 
but they never did. They charged us the same and then proceeded to 
leave us out of the research and cut us our of the services.
  What we are trying to do is reclaim this, and the goal of the 
Congresswomen has been to try and know as much about women's health as 
we now know about men's health by the end of this century, so that we 
start on an equal health footing when we begin the next century. That 
is getting tougher and tougher to do, because over and over again the 
extremists in this body have turned around many of the gains that we 
are making. They turn them around daily. Today we will probably see 
another turnaround as we watch the first criminalization of a medical 
procedure that has ever happened in this body.
  When we see these things happening to women's health, watch out. Yes, 
we should take a victory lap for what we have gained in information on 
osteoporosis, on breast cancer, on many of the things that we have 
gotten passed, gotten funded, and gotten out there, and the fact that 
we have gotten women into these research models so we will know much 
more when those different programs are done and those research projects 
are finished. But we are not there yet. We are not there yet. It is 
very easy to deny us getting to that goal of equal information by the 
year 2000, and it is also very easy for them to push back all the 
progress we have made, So cheer, but be alert.

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