In speech on Senate floor, Cantwell calls out redundant and offensive anti-choice bill: “It’s Deliberately Misleading”

It is already illegal to kill a child who is born alive in this country; in 2002, Sen. Cantwell joined her colleagues in passing legislation to ensure that all living infants have full legal protections.

“The so called Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Act … is legislation in search of a problem. It's deliberately misleading and offensive to pregnant people and to their health care providers,” said Sen. Cantwell. “It is incredibly heartbreaking, these scenarios where a baby is born with a fatal diagnosis, that the baby's parents must want to spend those precious moments holding and saying goodbye to their child, but under these extreme ideas, doctors would have to perform aggressive medical care that would only prolong a family's suffering.

“We need to honor that these are medical decisions left to the woman and her physician and to her family, and we trust that doctors and nurses know how to carry this out… And so I will be voting against this legislation, and I urge my colleagues to do so.”

Strict abortion bans enacted after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 have created confusion around the treatment medical professionals can provide, even when a pregnant patient’s life or health is in danger. Providers fear they could be sued or prosecuted for providing abortion care, or even miscarriage treatment. 

In July, Sen. Cantwell, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and 14 women Democratic senators released a new report, Two Years Post-Dobbs: The Nationwide Impacts of Abortion Bans. The report, based on interviews and discussions with more than 80 health care providers and advocates on the front lines, detailed how the Dobbs decision is harming women’s health care in states across the U.S.  Among other troubling findings, the report detailed how abortion bans endanger women facing medical emergencies.  For example, the co-chair of the Idaho Physician Well-Being Action Collaborative said, “We’ve been flying out about a patient a week to Utah or Oregon or Washington, because the fetus is nonviable, or the life of the mother is at risk.”  The report also noted the conclusions of a STAT News analysis of abortions in Texas, which found that the number of women needing abortions in Texas is at least 400 per year for life emergencies and 2,400 per year for physical health risks – but that just 34 legal abortions were recorded in Texas during a six-month period in 2023. New research published last September found that the rate of maternal mortality cases in Texas increased by 56% from 2019 to 2022 – compared to 11% nationwide during that time period. Texas’s abortion ban went into effect in September 2021.

Sen. Cantwell continues to fight hard to defend reproductive freedom in Washington state and nationwide. A full timeline of her actions since a draft of the Dobbs decision was leaked in spring 2022, making clear the Supreme Court’s intent to overturn the longstanding reproductive care precedent established by Roe v. Wade, is available HERE.

Video of Sen. Cantwell’s speech on the Senate floor is available HERE; audio is HERE; and a transcript of her remarks is HERE.