[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 72 (Thursday, May 2, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Page S2581]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                           Women's Healthcare

  Madam President, finally, on women's healthcare, last month the Trump 
administration proposed instituting a radical title X gag rule, which 
would have regulated the kinds of conversations women could have with 
their doctors and risk cutting off family planning clinics from 
millions of dollars of Federal funding.
  The rule was set to go into effect on May 3, but courts around the 
country have granted preliminary injunctions to prevent it from taking 
effect, as they should.
  Those decisions are great news and should be celebrated as an 
affirmation of a woman's right to make her own medical choices and not 
to have some court, some judge, or some legislator tell a woman what to 
do with her medical choices.
  But they are also a reminder that President Trump and congressional 
Republicans continue to undermine the rights of women to make their own 
healthcare decisions. Since taking office, President Trump and 
Republicans across the country have launched an assault on women's 
reproductive freedoms and women's health. In Mississippi, in Georgia, 
and in Kentucky, Republican statehouses are forcing through radical 
proposals that would dramatically limit women's ability to make their 
own choices.
  Here in Washington, the Trump administration continues to seek the 
total destruction of our healthcare law. Just yesterday the 
administration issued a brief arguing that the entire Affordable Care 
Act is unconstitutional--an opinion that would gut protections for the 
133 million Americans with preexisting conditions and strip away 
healthcare from millions of American families.
  The House has sent us a bill that would protect people's abilities 
who have preexisting conditions to continue to get insurance, but the 
Senate is not acting, and that leads me to my last point.