Senator Rosen Highlighted Her Efforts To Ensure Women Can Access Reproductive Care During Medical Emergencies
Watch Senator Rosen’s full remarks HERE.
WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Senator Jacky Rosen (D-NV) joined her Democratic women Senate colleagues in a press conference ahead of the two-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade. In her remarks, Senator Rosen highlighted the dangerous attempts by extremist politicians to place more restrictions on women and their health care. She also denounced anti-choice Republicans for pushing the Supreme Court to overturn a decades-old law that requires hospitals to provide life-saving care to all patients, including pregnant women.
Senator Rosen continues fighting back against efforts to restrict access to reproductive rights. She recently voted to protect women’s constitutional right to access birth control and helped introduce a bill to safeguard the ability to start or grow a family by establishing a legal right to access IVF and other assisted reproductive technology. Senator Rosen also helped introduce the Let Doctors Provide Reproductive Health Care Act to protect doctors and other health care professionals from being prosecuted for providing reproductive care to their patients. Additionally, she helped introduce the Women’s Health Protection Act to protect reproductive freedoms in federal law.
Below are Senator Rosen’s remarks as prepared for delivery:
As my colleagues have already made clear, overturning Roe v. Wade was just the beginning, just the beginning of anti-choice extremists’ attacks on women’s reproductive freedoms.
In the last two years, we’ve seen politicians, politicians pushing to enact more restrictions on women and their health care. You’ve heard my colleagues speak about it.
Even here in the Senate, a nationwide abortion ban was introduced by anti-choice Republicans that would’ve severely limited women’s reproductive freedom in all states, including a pro-choice state like mine, Nevada.
At the same time, we’ve seen states around the country enact extreme and highly restrictive abortion bans, some even without exceptions for rape or incest.
And even when they claim to have exceptions for the life of the mother, we know, we know that in practice, this is not the case.
The lack of clarity about what constitutes a medical emergency forces doctors today to consult lawyers before they are able to provide care for women whose lives depend on it.
In Texas, because of the state’s extreme abortion ban, a woman who was going through a miscarriage when she was four months pregnant had to wait twenty-four hours in a hospital, twenty-four hours in a hospital, she’s having a miscarriage.
She developed sepsis, before she could receive the life-saving care she desperately [needed]. Before they, the doctors, had to do their consultation.
And sadly it could get even worse. Right now, anti-choice extremists are attacking the fundamental right for a pregnant woman to receive proper medical care in an emergency.
Think about that. They want the Supreme Court to overturn EMTALA, a decades-old federal law that requires all hospitals, all hospitals to provide life-saving care to all patients.
It’s simple, you go to an emergency room, they have to treat your emergency. Including abortion care for women. Emergencies happen all the time. Women, women will get turned away at the emergency room door. In fact, they’re getting turned away now, as we speak.
And if the Supreme Court overturns this law, make no mistake, women will die.
This could be your wife, this could be your daughter, your sister, your mother, your friend. And you never know, you never know when this emergency could happen to somebody that you love.
EMTALA saves lives. Period.
And so this is just another attempt by anti-choice extremists to control women’s bodies.
Let me be clear: we, all of us here, and our Democratic colleagues won’t let them. We won’t let them.
Nevadans sent me here to the Senate to fight for them and their rights. And their states, they were sent to fight for the rights of women.
And as long as I’m here, as long as we are here, and the Senate Democrats remain in the majority, we will stand up for women’s reproductive freedoms and block any attempt to pass a restrictive abortion ban that will hurt women.
###
