[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 7]
[House]
[Page 9387]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




         THE WOMEN'S PREVENTATIVE HEALTH AWARENESS CAMPAIGN ACT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. Bera) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BERA of California. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to talk about core 
American values--values of liberty, values of freedom, values of 
individual rights.
  Today, a bill is going to come before this body that is a blatant 
attempt to take away those individual rights, those individual 
freedoms--freedoms that are core to who we are. This bill aims to take 
away individual decisions from America's mothers, America's sisters, 
and America's daughters. This bill is a travesty and a slap in the face 
of those core values of individual liberty and individual freedom, and 
this bill criminalizes doctors for doing our jobs.
  Now, I'm a doctor. Core to the oath that I took was to sit with my 
patients, answer their questions and empower them to make the decisions 
that best fit their faith circumstances, their individual 
circumstances, their family circumstances. That's core to the oath 
every doctor in the United States of America has taken. That's core to 
my job. The bill that's coming to the floor today takes those values 
and slaps them in the face. They put the government right in the middle 
of my exam room, but the government has no place between the doctor and 
the patient.
  What we should be debating is how we empower our patients, how we 
promote women's health, how we try to keep women healthy and help them 
plan their pregnancies, how we empower families. As a husband and as 
the father of a daughter, keeping women healthy is extremely important 
to me, and helping empower parents and families to plan those 
pregnancies is not only smart; it's good medicine.
  The legislation I am introducing later this week, the Women's 
Preventative Health Awareness Campaign Act, will direct the Department 
of Health and Human Services to educate women about the importance of 
the preventative wellness exam. This is a piece of legislation that 
will help address the issue of planning families, of planning when you 
want to be pregnant. It will help address the issues of undiagnosed 
heart disease. It will help us diagnose cancer, and it will save 
thousands of lives.
  I would urge my colleagues in this body on both sides of the aisle to 
join us in this bill. It's not only smart medicine; it will get to the 
core of empowering patients, of empowering women and of empowering 
families to make the decisions that best fit within the context of 
their lives.
  That's the oath that I took as a doctor; that's the promise that I 
make to all of my patients; and that's the oath that we take in this 
body--to protect those individual freedoms and the individual rights of 
all Americans and of all America's women.

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