During a press briefing on Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) spoke about provisions in the Republican budget that would target abortion access.
00:00Thank you, Senator Murray, who has been such a great leader on this issue, as well as Senator Baldwin.
00:07I'm proud to be joined by them and our guests from Planned Parenthood and the Guttmacher Institute.
00:15We're here today to decry the backdoor abortion ban that Republicans have put in to their reconciliation bill,
00:24to their appropriations reconciliation bill.
00:28We're going to fight it with everything we have.
00:31It is wildly unpopular with the American people.
00:35Just you look at every corner of America and Americans want to preserve a woman's right to choose.
00:44The Dobbs case reversed that.
00:46The Supreme Court, stacked by hard right ideologues, undid the decision.
00:54Undid abortion rights in the awful Dobbs case.
01:02Reversing Roe.
01:04Three years later, 21 states following through have significantly restricted the right to choose.
01:1114 have total abortion bans.
01:14But that's not good enough for our Republican colleagues.
01:17They want every state to have a ban.
01:22And what they do is they make abortion inaccessible to so many millions of women who want them.
01:31In states like Texas, maternal mortality is spiking.
01:37Since Dobbs, one in five people have to travel great distances across state lines and wait weeks just to get care.
01:46And just think about it.
01:48A woman, it's a difficult decision for women, many women.
01:53And then to make them travel and be alone and find a hotel room and then go to a clinic that they're not even familiar with under these traumatic circumstances, that alone is cruel enough.
02:07But these fanatics, these anti-choice fanatics, will stop at nothing.
02:12And when we hear these horrible statistics and what's happening, what's the reaction of Senate Republicans?
02:19They double down.
02:21They want to double their efforts on their crusade against women's health care and their right to choose.
02:28Right now as we speak, Republicans are trying to jam through one of the most extreme radical provisions deep in this big, ugly betrayal.
02:38Two nasty provisions.
02:39One was in the House.
02:42Now they've added another one to defund Planned Parenthood and eliminate coverage for comprehensive reproductive care from the marketplace, the ACA marketplace, adding tens of millions more women who will not have access to the right to choose.
03:00Under the Republican bill, 200 Planned Parenthood centers would close.
03:05More than 90 percent of these closures would be in states where abortion is legal.
03:09Where the voters of the state, the people of the state, have decided they want to keep the right to choose for women.
03:15So don't let Republicans try to tell you this is about states' rights.
03:19That's not what they're trying to do.
03:20This is a national bill.
03:22If they believed in state rights, they'd have no provisions.
03:25Neither of these provisions in the bill.
03:26In all, under these awful provisions, one in four abortion providers nationwide would be eliminated.
03:37One in four.
03:39And on ACA coverage, Republicans are trying to prevent tens of millions of Americans who get health coverage from their state marketplace from being able to access abortion.
03:49This is not alone what's bad in the bill.
03:53The Medicaid cuts are even worse.
03:55You couldn't think the House bill, you couldn't think the Senate could do worse than the House when it came to Medicaid, but they sure did.
04:03It means Republicans are looking to rip away health care from millions more Americans.
04:08The callousness doesn't stop there.
04:12They're also fighting to take Americans' rights away in terms of reproductive rights.
04:18So let's make no mistake about it.
04:20This is a backdoor abortion ban snuck into the bill by the Republican senators because they, unlike their constituencies, are vehemently anti-choice.
04:33Well, right now, Senate Democrats will fight these devastating and deadly measures with everything we got, everything, including the birdbath.
04:46One of these provisions might well be susceptible to the birdbath.
04:50We don't know, but we're certainly going to make the argument against both provisions.
04:54And they both might be susceptible, one a little more than the other.
04:58But the Senate Democrats, we stand together.
05:01We fight back against Republicans every step of the way.
05:05And because, as Abe Lincoln said, public sentiment does everything, and public sentiment is completely on our side, we will win this fight.
