[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 126 (Thursday, July 28, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3761-S3762]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                           Women's Healthcare

  Mr. President, I came down to the floor to talk about something that 
happened yesterday as well. That was an effort by Democrats to get a 
bill on the floor that would protect women's access to contraception, 
and Republicans, predictably, blocked that bill from receiving 
consideration. I want to talk about the broader picture of what is 
going on here today.
  J.D. Vance is a candidate for the U.S. Senate. He is a Republican 
star, maybe the party's highest profile candidate running for the 
Senate. Here is what he said about men who beat up their wives. He 
said: ``[O]ne of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution 
pulled on the American populace'' was convincing people in ``unhappy'' 
or ``violent'' marriages that getting divorced would ``make [them] 
happier.''
  Women should stop complaining, he suggests, about getting the crap 
beat out of them, stop trying to leave abusive husbands and just stick 
it out.
  Senator Hawley, a few months ago, gave a whole speech explaining how 
men have certain virtues critical to the maintenance of the American 
Republic like aggression and competitiveness and independence that 
women don't have in equal measure. He made a pretty unapologetic case 
for the superiority of men over women.
  Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is the biggest draw in the Republican 
Party right now--nobody gets a bigger crowd than she does. She says 
that women should just accept that they are the ``weaker sex.''

[[Page S3762]]

  A few weeks ago, on this floor, Republicans refused to allow a debate 
on a bill that simply said government can't tell women which States 
they can travel to in order to receive healthcare. And yesterday, 
Republicans blocked proceeding to a bill that simply says that men 
shouldn't be able to stop women from buying birth control.
  So put that all together. Do you see the pattern emerging here? Do 
you see what is going on? This is a pretty coordinated, industrial-
scale effort to bring women under control of the State, to take away 
decades of rights accumulation for women, and put them back where they 
were in the 1940s and the 1930s.
  This is a massive, coordinated effort by Republicans to put more 
women under government control: no more abortion services, no more 
divorces from your abusive spouses, no more driving your car wherever 
you want, no more birth control. Women are on their way back to 
becoming second-class citizens. That is what the cumulative agenda 
looks like here.
  And I don't think I am paranoid. I don't think I am overreading the 
tea leaves. I am just picking up the pieces that Republicans keep 
putting down day after day after day.
  I know Republicans will dispute this characterization, but if they 
do, we are going to continually give them the chance to prove us 
wrong--vote for a bill that says States can't ban birth control, vote 
for legislation that says States can't tell women where they can drive. 
What we are asking for is not an expansion of women's rights, just a 
protection to make sure that we don't take these big leaps backward.
  Other Republicans will say that these are imagined crises; that 
States really aren't going to ban birth control. But just pay attention 
to what is happening in State legislatures right now all over the 
country. States are trying to restrict women from accessing 
contraception because many Republicans will tell you that protecting 
life, in their view, involves banning the use of birth control.
  In Texas, the State already bans its family planning centers from 
distributing birth control. In Missouri, conservatives are trying to 
block healthcare providers who receive Federal funds from prescribing 
contraception. And the Supreme Court in the Dobbs decision basically 
briefed that it is likely to strike down the right to birth control 
sometime soon.
  So this isn't a fake crisis; this is real. And I am not making up 
this new wholesale Republican effort to try to drag women back 100 
years and to sideline them in a way that we thought was history. That 
is all real too. And we will give Republicans the chance, over and over 
again, to prove that wrong.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kansas.