[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 23]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page 31318]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




           PROTECT REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS IN HEALTH CARE REFORM

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                           HON. DIANA DeGETTE

                              of colorado

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, December 9, 2009

  Ms. DeGETTE. Madam Speaker, we came to work this year to deliver 
affordable, high-quality health care to all Americans. Instead of 
offering the possibility of health care to all Americans, some want to 
deny essential health care--reproductive health care--to women.
  For politicians to intrude on a woman or couple's most personal and 
painful decisions is cynical and wrong. Nobody in America has the right 
to use government to impose their religious beliefs on someone else. 
Yet the Stupak-Pitts amendment would do just that.
  The Stupak-Pitts amendment adopted by this House does not--does not--
preserve the status quo on abortion. The Stupak-Pitts amendment tells 
millions of middle-class Americans that they cannot use their own money 
to purchase private health insurance to cover legal medical procedures. 
This is an unprecedented and dramatic departure from current law.
  Not long ago, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed that 
reproductive rights ``center on a woman's autonomy to determine her 
life's course.'' Trading away those rights for limited access to health 
care is a devil's bargain that we will not make.
  I urge my colleagues to act--to support women's access to a full 
range of reproductive health services, and to bring health care to all 
Americans.

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